These days the thought of another Merchant-Ivory costume drama prompts a reaction along the lines of - nice frocks and pretty scenery but can't they move a bit faster?

A Room With A View, Howards End and all the others are well crafted, intelligent dramas, but we've overdosed on them.

So - surprise, surprise - when this adaptation of a Henry James novel by M-I regular Ruth Prawer Jhabvala proves really rather engrossing.

Even the presence of heavyweight US stars Uma Thurman and Nick Nolte doesn't upset the delicate balance and send this bowl crashing to the ground.

Thurman, in particular, is as good as she's ever been as scheming Charlotte Stant, whose marriage to American tycoon Adam Verver (Nolte, nicely understating his case) is at the root of all the problems. She marries him - for money rather than love - after her lover, hard-up Italian Prince Amerigo (Northam) marries Verver's daughter (Kate Beckinsale).

With nothing to do but count her hubby's money and mope about in posh frocks in a series of old houses stuffed with works of art, Charlotte is soon entwined in the arms of her former lover.

Anjelica Huston is the house guest who likes to gossip and plant suspicions among the family but the purchase of the titular bowl is the thing that eventually causes their affair to be revealed.

It's all very wordy and lacking, for understandable reasons, even a car chase to liven things up. The result could add up to a big bore, especially as director James Ivory refused to move things along at anything other than a funereal pace. But, aided by his more than competent cast, the whole thing does retain the interest as you await the tangled web of relationships to unravel with what can only be tragic consequences.