Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Well not Vanessa Redgrave and Eileen Atkins, the star and adaptor of this splendid version of one of the Bloomsbury belle's finest works, a poignant portrait of the real lives of literary lions Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Vanessa is ideally cast and doesn't miss a single trick as Clarissa Dalloway, a well-heeled, middle-aged Londoner recalling her youth, past love, lost opportunity and a safe marriage as she prepares for a grand party in 1923. Can she shake herself out of her melancholy and crippling nostalgia and get her groove back? In the banquet of gourmet acting, John Standing matches Vanessa's brio as her understanding politican husband Richard who's turned reliability into an art form. Only the heavily handled scenes involving Rupert Graves as a suicidal shell-shocked soldier mar the excellence of this fine British movie.

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