‘Angels and Insects’

British novelist A.S. Byatt is fascinated by the Victorians, by their combination of outward reserve and secret sensuality, by the pull they felt between traditional ways of belief and the new Darwinian science. While not an across-the-board success, this 1995 release from a Byatt story is an intriguing film with much to recommend it. Directed by Philip Haas, “Angels” is physically remarkable and well-acted, especially by the always impressive Kristin Scott Thomas. After 10 years of working as a naturalist in the jungles of the Amazon, William Adamson (Mark Rylance, pictured) was shipwrecked coming home, surviving 15 days on a raft but losing all his possessions and almost all the specimens he’d collected in the process. Hearing of his difficulty, the wealthy Rev. Harald Alabaster (Jeremy Kemp), an amateur naturalist himself, invites Adamson to stay indefinitely as a guest on his large estate. Although Adamson has more in common with Scott Thomas’s Matty, a poor but brilliant relation, he is smitten with Patsy Kensit’s (pictured) doll-like Eugenia Alabaster (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.).