Everywhere you look at the moment, there's a film featuring Ralph Fiennes. First there was Onegin, then The End of the Affair and, now, this week, there are two more - Sunshine and The Miracle Worker, writes David Parkinson.

Sunshine has already won seven Genies (the Canadian equivalent to the Oscars) and a European Film Award for Master Fiennes. This sprawling period drama is a majestic summation of the stylistic and thematic concerns that have preoccupied director Istvan Szabo for the past 25 years. As in any epic with a 150-year sweep, there are bound to be longueurs and underdeveloped threads. But Szabo is such a sensitive humaniser of history, that it's impossible to avoid being borne along on this tide of events. Having profited from sales of its herbal tonic, the Sonnenschein family has severed its rural roots to settle in 1860s Budapest. But its Jewish heritage will also be sacrificed as successive generations bid for greater socio-political acceptance. Ignatz (Fiennes), a lawyer and loyal imperialist, defies his father to marry his adoptive sister, Valerie (Jennifer Ehle), while their son, Adam (Fiennes again) changes the family name to Sors and embraces Christianity in order to fence in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Finally, having seen his father die in Auschwitz, Ivan (guess who) becomes a Communist apparatchik, whose career is derailed by a combination of adultery and the 1956 Uprising. Even though it's possible to approach this impeccably staged melodrama without any knowledge of 20th-century Hungarian history, its richness can only be fully appreciated in comparison with Szabo's earlier masterpieces, Mephisto, Colonel Redl and Hanussen. Just as Klaus Maria Brandauer played a triumverate of fatally flawed individuals, so here does Ralph Fiennes, with each character's patriarchal zeal and susceptibility to lust, passion and power resulting in his downfall.

For all the complex intrigues, ardent couplings and divergent political creeds, the message of the film is surprisingly simple - to thine own self be true, because the state will always betray you, whether you compromise with, resist or acquiesce in its tenets. In these post-nationalist days of European integration, it's a lesson worth remembering.

Produced by S4C in Wales, in collaboration with the Russian animation unit responsible for last year's television version of The Canterbury Tales, The Miracle Worker arrives here a week too late for Easter. But, even in Holy Week, this accomplished, but unremarkable retelling of the New Testament story would have struggled to find a sizeable audience. Adopting a curious style of enunciation that is so restrained it almost deprives the words of their significance, Fiennes voices Christ during a public ministry that seems to revolve more around intimate friendships than spreading the Good News. Clearly the focus on Jairus's daughter is intended to involve younger viewers. But, even so, they are unlikely to be won over by the prettily painted claymation figures, while those seeking divine revelation or historical insight will be disappointed by the determinedly anodyne political rectitude.

*A version of this review appeared in The Oxford Times, April 28, 2000