If there is one movie you are going to see during this year's Film Festival, make it Pandemonium.

This is a gloriously rich costume drama, daring and ambitious, and ideal for the big screen. It has amazing visuals, magnificent sets and costumes done in a way that only the British can. It is a film about two Romantic poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (Linus Roache), and William Wordsworth, (John Hannah), and their stormy friendship.

The tale of the writers takes them from their idealistic and politically radical youth to becoming recognised establishment writers.

It also charts Coleridge's addiction to opium with special film techniques used to show time lapses and how it fuelled trippy flights, feeding the imagination of one of England's finest poets.

In the opening scene, Coleridge stumbles into a room filled with his contemporaries and staggers into a waiter carrying goblets of red wine. Watch out for it -- the whole film is worth watching just for the visual beauty of this moment. The film has no end of potential for becoming pretentious and boring, but is given a lightness and humour by the two female characters, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, (Emily Woof), and Coleridge's long-suffering wife Sara (Academy award nominee Smantha Morton). They constantly bring the lofty ideals crashing back down to earth.

At one point when Wordsworth is having a bout of writer's block and spouts "I wondered lonely as a cow''. Dorothy retorts "maybe cloud would be better''.

Coleridge and his wife Sara leave London in search of a rural utopia in which to write.

They are joined in their idyll by Wordsworth and his sister, who acts as muse to both the men. She also adds a sexual tension between the men.

They set about creating "a new kind of poetry''. The opium-fuelled result for Coleridge is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the haunting story of the curse of the albatross. The two men during long walks in the Quantock Hills of Somerset plot out the shape of the Lyrical Ballads.

Coleridge creates Xanadu with its "caverns measureless to men'' in a key laudanum frenzy and blur of inspiration.

But Wordsworth is unable to write with the same zest as Coleridge, and as Coleridge's drug use takes its toll, and produces more and more amazing flights of fancy, Wordsworth, blinded by jealousy, at his friend's genius, abandons and betrays him. And as Coleridge spirals further downward in his addiction, in the film, Wordsworth convinces him to burn his fantastical epic poem Kubla Khan.

Wordsworth is portrayed as a villain, traitor of a friendship and even a spy -- and the stiff role is carried off by Hannah sublimely. Roache's performance of the drug infused genius is brilliant. Woolf is exceptionally good as Dorothy.

The result is a brave and gripping controversial account of the lives and friendship of the two men and is a fitting finale to the Film Festival.

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