How Robert Graves’ own love life made I, Claudius look tame: MATTHEW BOND reviews The Laureate

The laureate

Judgement: ***

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol3

Judgement: **

Return to Seoul

Judgement: **

Call me superficial, but normally I like the kind of historical film where even the minor characters turn out to be famous. You know, the kind of movie where someone might casually say, “Ah, Lord Byron, have you met Shelley and his wife Mary?”

The laureate is just that kind of photo. At its emotional core is Robert Graves, the celebrated World War I poet who would later write I, Claudius. Here we see that he was close enough to his fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon to call him ‘Sass’, while his inner circle included both TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and poet TS Eliot.

One of them – TE or TS, I’m not sure which – makes an awkward pass at his beautiful new American lodger, Laura Riding. She refuses, which is probably for the best, as the aspiring writer and poet is already wreaking havoc in the Oxford cottage where Graves, still suffering from bouts of shell shock, and his wife, the painter and pioneering feminist, Nancy Nicholson, have invited her to stay. Once Laura has cast a covetous eye on the handsome Graves – here played by Tom Hughes – she also starts flirting with Nancy (Laura Haddock). Before you can say “love triangle,” they all head to London for more decadence and debauchery. Well, that’s Hammersmith for you.

It’s a compelling story and neatly told by writer-director William Nunez. But it never reaches the hoped-for heights. Dianna Agron feels substandard as Riding, while The Laureate feels, uh, not particularly sexy for a sex-centric movie. But it’s worth it for Haddock alone, who’s so good as Nancy you almost want a movie about her.

Aided by its sense of humour, cheesy pop music and Chris Pratt’s pivotal role as Peter Quill – aka Star-Lord – Guardians Of The Galaxy has become one of the most popular franchises in the Marvel stable. But now it’s coming to an end, with showrunner James Gunn marking his departure to the rival DC universe (the one featuring Batman and Wonder Woman) with the release of the final movie in this trilogy.

I must say I was impressed, put off by the lengthy running time, a screenplay that self-twins to allow for the return of a character who died in Avengers: Endgame, and by a main storyline that spends too long with it exploring the dark world of vivisection. You need a lot of good jokes to balance that stuff and Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol 3 doesn’t have enough. Strictly for the believers.

In Return To Seoul, a young Frenchwoman arrives in the South Korean capital and is soon persuaded to try to track down the birth parents who gave her up for adoption more than two decades earlier. The cheerful Freddie (played rather brilliantly by Park Ji-min) is a complicated character – sometimes wildly extroverted, sometimes quiet and gruff – and what unfolds is an emotionally complicated story that will irk rather than captivate mainstream audiences.