THE HAPPY PRINCE

Rupert Everett shows commanding range as writer, director and star of this thoughtful Oscar Wilde biopic. Rather than repeat Wilde’s oftdramatised rise and fall, however, Everett focuses on the writer’s final years in European exile, battling penury and prejudice while inexorably drawn back to the affair that ruined him. Naturally, there’s waspish wit to spare, but this is mostly a melancholy, moving tragedy. Everett’s direction has a suitably faded, fin de siècle grandeur and his performance bursts with wounded romance. Simon Kinnear