This impeccable adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Booker Prize-winning novel stars Anthony Hopkins as the emotionally repressed butler and Emma Thompson as the housekeeper he possibly loves. Framed in flashbacks, the story is an English twist on Jean Renoir's classic La Règle du Jeu, a broad view of a narrow class of aristocrats on the verge of self-destruction. Co-starring James Fox as a fascistic English lord and Christopher Reeve as an American diplomat (the past and present owners of Darlington Hall), it is as much a study in power and politics as it is Hopkins's blinkered view of the world from behind the gleaming silver salvers. The 1930s and 40s settings are immaculately staged, and, unlike James Ivory's earlier dramatisations of EM Forster, this picture has real backbone: Ivory's direction is alive to every nuance and chink of the sherry glasses.

A rule-bound head butler's world of manners and decorum in the household he maintains is tested by the arrival of a housekeeper who falls in love with him in post-WWI Britain. The possibility of romance and his master's cultivation of ties with the Nazi cause challenge his carefully maintained veneer of servitude.