Carrington

CARRINGTON Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce (1995, PolyGram, R, priced for rental) While waiting for Sense and Sensibility to arrive in video stores, you can get your Emma Thompson fix with this restrained biography of the British painter Dora Carrington (Thompson), who had a number of curious relationships with men, none more strange — or loving — than the one with homosexual writer Lytton Strachey (Infiniti pitchman Pryce). Carrington's restraint sometimes borders on discomfiting detachment, just as Thompson's deliberate acting verges on the pompous. But the caring respect given the iconoclastic subject balances the occasional posturing, and the movie is finally as oddly affecting as the intimacies it portrays. B