Director James Ivory's vivid evocation of the sights, sounds and feel of India in the Twenties and the Eighties is every bit as assured as the more expensive visits to the sub-continent in `The Jewel in the Crown' and `A Passage to India'. And, in many ways, it's even better, more involving and moving, and less like a tourist guide to the country. A luminous Julie Christie rejoices in one of her best latter-day chances as Anne, a historical researcher who inherits letters written by her great-aunt Olivia (Great Scacchi) from the India of the 1920s, and becomes obsessed with their revelation of an exotic past. One from the gilded top drawer of the Merchant-Ivory films.

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