Rent Parade's End (2013)

The real thing - Parade's End review by NR

Most costume dramas get the clothes and cars/carriages pretty well right but almost everything else wrong. (Call it Downton Abbey Syndrome). They ignore the crucial point that in the past people not only dressed differently but in certain ways walked, talked, thought and even felt differently, being governed by different moral and social imperatives. Here Benedict Cumberbatch, in perhaps his finest role to date, plays Tietjens, an utterly honourable and honest man with deeply old-fashioned convictions, caught up in a tangle in which he comes to seem the exact opposite. Tietjens exhibits less stiff upper lip than highly starched forehead. Cumberbatch's brilliant performance is matched by Rebeca Hall's as Sylvia, his glamorously promiscuous wife wife who, despite everything, is a devout Catholic. Completing the triangle is Valentine Wallop, marvellously played by Adelaide Clemens, a militant suffragette whom Tietjens really loves although almost everything conceivable thwarts their love until the very end. Other parts are played equally convincingly - and yes, the cars and clothes are okay too. Tom Stoppard has adapted Ford Maddox Ford's great tetralogy with typical flair and brilliance. Watch it as an antidote to the pap normally on offer.