The Deep Blue Sea (12A)

Starring: Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale

Terence Davies is a true romantic.

In Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, he portrayed a brutal working-class childhood with extraordinary tenderness. In adapting, Terence Rattigan's play about a woman (Rachel Weisz) who leaves her husband, judge Sir William (Simon Russell Beale), for a dashing RAF pilot (Tom Hiddeleston), he is entering a world a long way removed from the Liverpool tenements of his earlier films. The Davies touch is still obvious in the wonderfully elegant camerawork, the glowing close-ups of Weisz (made up to look as glamorous as any 1940s movie star) and even some of his trademark folksy pub singalongs. The film is highly stylised and yet still captures the primal feelings of the characters: the woman's erotic longing and defiance, as well as her sense of suicidal shame.