Both critics and paying customers go to movies armed with an invisible set of questions. The critic clutches his list more consciously, knowing he will need it when trysting with his laptop. But the customer too knows what he wants answered. That is not just “how” was a film made well or badly – but, more deeply, “why”. What need did the makers have to make it? What need does the world have to see it?

Brideshead Revisited succeeds in the “how” but collapses with the “why”. The pictures and people are pretty. Here is Castle Howard as Brideshead, here are Oxford and Venice. Matthew Goode, the classy charmer from Woody Allen’s Match Point, gives Charles Ryder a sly, vigilant grace – the atheistic interloper in the lives of a rich Catholic dynasty – while Ben Whishaw is by turns wistful, flamboyant and sexy-sulky, everything we want from Sebastian Flyte.