After months of feverish expectation, the latest effects-laden blockbuster is invariably released to a chorus of disapproval from the critics and a cacophony of disappointment from comic-book aficionados, who quaintly keep hoping that, despite its pretty abysmal record in the field, Hollywood will be more faithful to the graphic text next time around. Half a century ago, the period picture used to generate the same frenzy of anticipation and dismay, as the studios sought to entice people away from their new television sets with widescreen epics packed with colourful characters and dark deeds. 

Despite never being the most cinematic of sub-genres, the historical drama remains a screen staple. But, with so few over-25s going to the movies, its natural constituency has become the small screen. Yet, as this crop of costumers suggests, spectacle still counts for more than accuracy and orotundity for more than intimacy. 

Saul Dibb's The Duchess, for example, dispenses with much of the socio-political intrigue that Amanda Foreman outlined in her meticulous biography, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In its place is a tabloid treatise on the similarities between Diana, Princess of Wales and her great-great-great-great-aunt, Georgiana Spencer Cavendish. The period trappings couldn't be more exquisite or the performances more accomplished. But this is chocolate box heritage of the most anodyne variety, which owes more to the Gainsborough bodice-rippers of the 1940s than 18th-century actuality.

Married in 1774 to the 5th Duke of Devonshire, 16 year-old Georgiana bears her husband two daughters and tolerates his mistresses (including her closest confidante, Lady Elizabeth Foster) before seeking solace in a suppressed passion for childhood chum, Lord Charles Grey. Raped and repudiated at home, she throws herself into campaigning for Charles James Fox's liberal causes and becoming a celebrated socialite. But the emphasis is always more on wigs than Whigs, as Dibb discards details that might tax multiplex viewers and indulges in corseted melodramatics that are rendered all the more novelettish by Rachel Portman's manipulative score.

In the title role, Keira Knightley holds her own in power struggles against overbearing mother Charlotte Rampling and chauvinist spouse, Ralph Fiennes. But, while Georgiana is suitably coquettish rather than coy, her penchant for gambling and carousing are downplayed in favour of her proto-feminism and there's a Winsletian modernity to her aristocratic mien. Consequently, Dibb ends up being more respectful of Gyula Pados's photography, Michael O'Connor's costumes and the efforts of Michael Carlin's design team than he is of historical fact and audience intelligence. 

Tinkering with texts to make them accessible to contemporary spectators is nothing new, however. In The Fan (1949), Otto Preminger bowdlerised Oscar Wilde's play, Lady Windermere's Fan, by appending an auction house preamble and staging the core action as an extended flashback. Moreover, the coterie of screenwriters that included Dorothy Parker drastically abridged the storyline to maintain focus on a jealous wife's imprudent dalliance with a rakish nobleman on suspecting her husband's infidelity with an alluring newcomer to their chic circle. 

Stripped of Wilde's epigrammatic wit, the convoluted scenario occasionally makes for doleful viewing. Jeanne Crain is too lightweight to convince as the conservative, but waspish heroine, while Richard Greene is something of a stuffed shirt as her enticed spouse. However, Madeleine Carroll (in her last screen role) and the reliably fruity George Sanders are much more effective as Mrs Erlynne and Lord Darlington, while Joseph LaShelle's photography is elegantly fluent. Thus, while Preminger could dismiss this as his worst film, it's far from the desecration that many critics bemoan. 

If The Fan suffers by comparison with Ernst Lubitsch's masterly 1925 silent take on Wilde's mischievous assault on social hypocrisy, Julian Jarrold's Brideshead Revisited, positively wilts in the shadow of Charles Sturridge's sublime 1981 tele-adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's most Catholic novel. Admittedly, John Mortimer had 11 hours to chronicle Charles Ryder's encounter with the Flyte family. But in reducing the material to 133 minutes, Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock lose both the soul and the spirit of a book that looked back in nostalgic despair on the passing of an entire class, let alone a golden age. Furthermore, Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw can't hold a candle to Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.

Thanks to Jess Hall's camerawork, Oxford looks glorious in Alice Normington's recreation of its 1920s heyday, when bright young things roared around its streets and quadrangles with a decadent insouciance that was inevitably born out of being spared the horrors of the trenches. Castle Howard also returns to do sterling service as the country pile where the middle-class Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte's unfaithful father (Michael Gambon), embittered mother (Emma Thompson) and conflicted siblings, Julia (Hayley Atwell), Bridey (Ed Stoppard) and Cordelia (Felicity Jones). But the complexity of the social, sexual and religious politics is lost in the bid to make everything seem tasteful and intelligible. For once, the BBC interpretation lacks the sophistication and acumen of its ITV counterpart. 

Although Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent reworking of Easy Virtue is available on DVD, few will have seen his uncharacteristically melodramatic variation on Noël Coward's account of an American adventuress's impact upon a gauchely gentrified British clan. Consequently, Stephan Elliott's Ealing version can be judged largely on its own merits, the majority of which reside in what remain of the 24 year-old playwright's clipped bon mots and some knowing performances. 

Kristin Scott Thomas is particularly amusing, as the snooty mother who undisguisedly disapproves when son and heir Ben Barnes brings Jessica Biel home after marrying her on an impulse at the end of a Monte Carlo road race. Colin Firth also contributes some lecherous Baron Harduppery, as her detached husband, while Kimberley Nixon and Katharine Parkinson register as her ghastlily shrill daughters. But Biel and Barnes are less successful, despite the former's laudable bid to combine transatlantic spunk with classless elegance. Moreover, the mixture of Jazz Age standards with anachronistic hits like `Sex Bomb' is calamitous. 

Just as Elliott frequently allows his cast to camp it up, Bharat Nalluri initially gives Frances McDormand and Amy Adams the latitude to revel in the diegetic theatricality of Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day, which was also filmed at Ealing Studios. But whereas Easy Virtue insists on straining for laughs throughout, this charming adaptation of Winifred Watson's 1938 novel abandons the crowd-pleasing farce and deftly turns into a morality play, whose themes of tawdry celebrity, instant gratification and being true to oneself have an affecting contemporary resonance.  

Suitably desperate for work to accept a post for which she is eminently unsuited, McDormand's frumpy Londoner becomes social secretary to Adams's skittish actress and soon finds herself shepherding the American's various beaux: brutish club owner Mark Strong, playboy producer Tom Payne and piano-playing ex-con, Lee Pace. However, she also alights upon a kindred spirit of her own in fashion designer Ciaran Hinds, whose engagement to salon owner Shirley Henderson is fraying at the seams. 

As scripted by David Magee and Simon Beaufoy, this is both a shrewd social critique of Britain on the eve of the Second World War and a nostalgic throwback to the kind of woman's picture that was once a Hollywood speciality. Indeed, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to see Bette Davis and Doris Day exhibiting the same spinsterish sagacity and flighty perplexity that McDormand and Adams respectively bring to the roles of Guinevere Pettigrew and Delysia Lafosse. Sarah Greenwood's production design is equally acute, with the starlet's Art Deco apartment, the Savoy Hotel ballroom and the upmarket nightclub consolidating the veracious, but understated sense of time and place. 

A little restraint probably wouldn't have gone amiss in Australia, either. But there's no point in castigating Baz Luhrmann for being excessive or derivative, as he has produced precisely the kind of clichéd and caricature-strewn national epic that he set out to make. This could easily be mistaken for a parody were the intention to fashion an Aussie Gone With the Wind not so blatantly apparent in the am-dram demeanour of Nicole Kidman's aristocrat and Hugh Jackman's ocker, in the sundowning love of the untameable land and in the heartfelt guilt at the mistreatment of the Aborigines. 

For much of the opening segment, the action set on the ranch of Faraway Downs outside Darwin in 1939 is as corny and crass as in Kidman's Oirish romp with Tom Cruise, Far and Away (1992). No sooner has she arrived than she slips out of her twin set and pearls and into an open-neck blouse and jodhpurs in order to remedy the mess left by her cheating husband. Indeed, so effectively does she take control that all and sundry begin calling her `Mrs Boss', as she earns the respect of everyone from rival cattle baron Bryan Brown and bibulous book-keeper Jack Thompson to crooked station manager David Wenham and mixed-race moppet, Brandon Walters. But then the Japanese declare war on the Old Country and a new kind of heroism is called for if Faraway Downs is to survive. 

Scribes of the calibre of Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan are credited among the writers, but Luhrmann and Pirates of the Caribbean alumnus Stuart Beattie clearly held sway, as this feels throughout like a multi-million-dollar penny dreadful. The dialogue is often risible, the plotline lurches violently between genres and there's absolutely no spark between the leads. Yet this self-indulgent melodrama isn't the irredeemable mess the bandwagon jumpers claimed on its theatrical release. It's certainly not as cumbersomely banal as Pearl Harbor and is much less well-intentionedly patronising than Rabbit-Proof Fence. Moreover, Mandy Walker's photography is stunning. 

Finally, we reach the autumn of 1949 for another homage to cinema, Ira Sachs's Married Life. Based on John Bingham's pulp novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, this is also more imitative than inventive. But it's also a finely wrought pastiche of the film noir style that evolved in postwar Hollywood, right down to the stylish chiaroscuro, the world-weary voiceover and the intricate narrative that sees a respectable man being lured away from the path of bourgeois propriety by overwhelming emotion. 

However, meek New York businessman Chris Cooper's sudden decision to murder wife Patricia Clarkson to spare her the pain of divorce rings as hollow as her furtive affair with David Wenham and caddish best friend Pierce Brosnan's sudden renunciation of his staunch bachelordom to romance Cooper's demure, widowed mistress, Rachel McAdams. The visuals couldn't be more precise. But the flaws in character psychology are exacerbated by the stiffness of the performances and the premeditation of Sachs's direction.