Wuthering Heights opens on 11/11/11

Wuthering Heights opens today in UK cinemas and thus many sites are reviewing it. The reviewers' opinions seem largely based on their expectations of a costume drama or not.

Positive reviews

The Telegraph gives it 5 stars:

Considering her cast’s near-comprehensive lack of experience, Arnold has coaxed terrific performances from all of them, although she has form for this: some of the stars of her previous films, Red Road and Fish Tank, were screen newcomers, too. The two youngsters are disturbingly naturalistic – they barely seem to be acting at all – and Howson’s untutored bluntess is a real asset, particularly when it comes to lines like: “F--- you all, you c---s.” (Arnold’s screenplay, co-written with Olivia Hetreed, does deviate from the book a bit.) Scodelario, meanwhile, crackles with flirtatious petulance.
But no performance is allowed to dominate: they merely feed into the film’s extraordinary vision. This Wuthering Heights has a Shinto-like reverence for the Yorkshire earth and every thing that creepeth upon it. Arnold’s camera frames the scenery beautifully in her preferred, boxy screen ratio, but it also pries down into the muck and undergrowth at the hidden creatures to be found there: scuttling, rainbow-gleaming beetles and vivid yellow moths that look as if they’ve fluttered in from another galaxy.
The wildlife close-ups, the sensitivity to the weather and seasons, the twin obsessions of sex and death: all of this put me in mind of the brutal, lyrical work of the Japanese director Shohei Imamura, particularly his 1983 saga of life in a remote mountain village, The Ballad of Narayama.
I loved it – although I suspect Brontë fans who think the most admirable take on her novel to date is the musical version starring Cliff Richard in a self-adhesive beard will choke on the film like it’s a misshapen mint humbug. (Robbie Collin)

The Guardian gives it 4 out of 5 stars:

From the start, the film sweeps away the period choreography of the conventional literary adaptation, sweeps it away so thoroughly that for the first few minutes I thought that this Wuthering Heights must be set a hundred years after a nuclear strike. This version brings the story back to a kind of social-realist year zero. It dispenses with the "flashback" overture, plunging more or less straight into the action, but – like the 1939 William Wyler version with Laurence Olivier – it restricts itself to the "first generation" half of the book.
The real, unpretty toughness of the Yorkshire moor has perhaps never been represented more matter-of-factly, nor the hardscrabble existence of those who might have really lived in that farmhouse in the 19th century. This world is elemental, almost primeval, and the gap between human and beast is narrowed. Heathcliff is reimagined, not as the vaguely exotic dark-skinned Gypsy, but as simply black, and confronted with overt and brutal racism from those of his new family who resent the outsider, and are determined to treat him like any farm animal. [...]
In the most extraordinary way, Arnold achieves a kind of pre-literary reality effect. Her film is not presented as another layer of interpretation, superimposed on a classic's frills and those of all the other remembered versions, but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book, something on which the book might have been based, a raw semi-articulate series of events, later polished and refined as a literary gemstone. That is an illusion, of course, but a convincing and thrilling one.
Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status. Cathy and Heathcliff are both outsiders: the woman dependent for her future on a marriage proposal, the man on a benefactor's charity. And it is a love story between children; it is as children that their love is happiest and most uncompromised and, probably, most clearly doomed. [...]
The film gave me something I never expect to get from any classic literary adaptation: the shock of the new. (Peter Bradshaw)

Metro:

Previous adaptations have stripped away Brontë’s bookends or lopped off the later generations but this spare and sensual tale of doomed young love is perhaps the first version to be told almost exclusively from Heathcliff’s point of view.
Arnold recasts Brontë’s runaway gipsy as a stowaway slave, throwing the cruel treatment by his adopted brother and young Catherine into sharp racial contrast.
Heathcliff’s subsequent return as a proud, harsh man is also cast in a new light, as a direct – and less important – by-product of the upbringing that is Arnold’s main focus.
Purists may scoff but it’s a radical reading, played with raw feeling by two sets of largely unknown actors (only Kaya Scodelario, as the older Cathy, has any experience to speak of).
The main star though, is nature. Arnold allows no score save for the wind and much of the dialogue is washed away by rain.
Indeed, while the woolly narrative may escape people who are unfamiliar with the story, Arnold’s triumph is to restore the moors to the bleakly beautiful untamed state that fascinated Brontë so long ago. (Colin Kennedy)

The Independent gives it 4 stars out of 5:

Some viewers may baulk at such liberties, yet there is something irresistible in Arnold's commitment to the practice of showing rather than telling. Her sense of place, no less than in the lowering Glasgow estate of Red Road and the Essex badlands of Fish Tank, is magnificently particular. Where the film does become problematic is the final third, when Heathcliff makes a dramatic return to the neighbourhood he abandoned some years before, and finds Cathy married off to a drippy local gent named Linton. The leads are now played by James Howson (making his acting debut) and Kaya Scodelario, who both require a good deal more help than the script (by Arnold and Olivia Hetreed) provides. In their earlier guises the couple had a natural exuberance to carry them through the shyness and inarticulacy of youth: there is so much less need for talk when you feel spiritually at one with your beloved. The passage of years, however, requires a more verbal communication, at least for the sake of the audience. Denied this outlet, the leads resort to brooding looks that don't summon the massive tremors of passion supposedly roiling within them. James Howson, with the good looks of a young Jimi Hendrix, is simply too opaque. He hasn't enough about him to suggest that those long silences carry a great deal of meaning.
Rather than gather in intensity this Wuthering Heights seems to withdraw from its two leads; its introversion becomes morose and fogged-in. The cruelty of Heathcliff's treatment of Isabella Linton (Nichola Burley) looks to be the result of mere caprice rather than the animal pain he feels over Cathy's loss. And his weird relationship with Hindley's son (Michael Hareton) adds up to nothing more than a shared viciousness towards animals (I wonder how the puppy-hanging scenes will play with US audiences). In comparison with the bright comet trail Arnold has blazed in her first two features, this feels rather subdued. And yet it answers to something in the novel, both for its keen-eyed absorption in the elements, and its matter-of-fact awareness of human fragility. (Anthony Quinn)

The Preston Citizen:

Acclaimed British director Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank) breathes new life into Emily Brontë’s classic, remaining faithful to the gritty and bleak source novel as young lovers battle against the prejudices of the era to find their way back to one another.

Mostly positive

The Irish Times gives it 4 stars out of 5:

Forget the wispy, melodic strains of wee Kate Bush. The proper accompaniment to this Wuthering Heights would, perhaps, be the sound of a knobbly stick being hammered against a weather- beaten sheep’s skull. Its unrelenting bleakness occasionally nudges us towards the parodic rusticity of Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. (Lord alone knows what nastiness lurks in this lot’s woodshed.) The acting is inconsistent. But no previous version of the book has been so successful in jettisoning the literary baggage and encouraging the story to find its cinematic legs. [...]
So pared down is the story that those unfamiliar with the novel may have trouble working out who is barking at whom and why. Indeed, the film is so determinedly stark that it takes on the quality of folk cinema. You could never tell that this Wuthering Heights is set in a country that was building one of the world’s mightiest empires. One half expects to see the locals worshipping pigs’ heads on sticks.
That’s how it should be. For too long, the most fiercely horrific of English romances has been treated as either a flouncy bodice ripper or a hippie-dippie tale of free love.
Much of the credit for reintroducing the pagan menace must go the way of Richie [sic! It's actually Robbie] Ryan. The Irish cinematographer, whose camerawork was honoured at the Venice Film Festival, finds endlessly sinister ways of making striking images from natural decay and bare interiors. A baby is born bloodily in a field. The light from a chandelier casts spectra about a room. Wuthering Heights is never pretty, but it’s always beautiful.
Some critics have found the romance a little less tumultuous than we have come to expect. Perhaps. But Arnold reminds us that, for much of the story, we are dealing with children. They sulk. They mutter. It was ever thus. (Donald Clarke)

RTÉ gives it 3 out of 5 stars:

Arnold strives for the primal and elemental as if this is altogether a good thing: I'm not too sure - after all there are only so many moths flinging themselves at windows that you can take before you shout out 'David Lean'! Her version strips the 1847 novel bare to its bones. In fact, Arnold strips it so naked that she opts to leave half the story off the screen - as the film ends curiously with a distraught Heathcliff wandering off into the moors. There's ne'er a whisper of young Cathy or Heathcliff's son or all the vengefulness and greed that follows. But then Arnold is not alone in paring Wuthering Heights to the story of two inseparable souls torn apart by love. That is not necessarily a fault - less can sometimes give you more - but for all its rare and elemental imagery and action, we are still mired in a rough romanticism as flawed as its pastoral Mills and Boon counterpoint. [...]
Nevertheless, this is a noble and ambitious attempt to reclaim the true heart of Brontë's revolutionary, passionate and sometimes savage novel. Perhaps Arnold's problem is not that she should have try harder but in fact that she probably tried too hard. (Donal O'Donoghue)

Front Row Reviews gives it 3 1/ stars out of 5:

Despite a somewhat weak cast, Wuthering Heights is a largely successful attempt at updating a classic for a contemporary audience in a manner which is never patronising. It takes the universal themes of the novel and addresses them in a thoroughly modern way, though anyone hoping to use it to cheat on English literature essays may want to double check some of the dialogue, since Emily Brontë may not have been quite so foul-mouthed. (Edwin Davies)

Daily Express gives it 3 out of 5 stars:

Arrestingly shot in natural light, with no soundtrack, the moors have never seemed more alien or bleak and this does stay with you but at over two hours long it’s rather hard work. (Henry Fitzherbert)

The Islington Tribune gives it 4 out of 5 stars.

And  What Is Emo,

Lukewarm

Hey U Guys gives it 3 out of 5 stars:

Lacking in script, as if to focus our attention completely on what is being shown in the 4:3 window, there is an organic and interactive feel to the cinematography by Venice Film Festival-winner, DoP Robbie Ryan, where the images speak far louder than any words ever could: You actually feel as if you are subjected to nature’s whim, submerged in the cruel environment, along with the actors like an ambiguous third-party eye, feeling the wind and cold whipping around you and the rain pummelling your being. Even getting out of the cold and into the gloomy interiors of Wuthering Heights feels like being projected back in time to that era, and what it might have been like with only firelight to see the long nights out. Arnold’s vision is a stark, breathtaking and purely physical one, full of lurking danger and untold cruelty that has to be experienced to be believed.
This interactive adventure is almost timeless in feel, but it does mask some of the film’s wooden acting – there are no characters in this film that quite capture the struggle or determination of, say, Fish Tank’s feisty lead Mia (played by then newcomer Katie Jarvis). Each participant in this period drama feels as though they are on a fatalistic, narcissistic journey, making them difficult to relate to, and with not enough satisfactory chemistry between the older Heathcliff and Cathy to really warrant so much self-angst and suffering, we are left watching a bunch of characters seemingly getting their emotions off their chests. The only character who truly wins any empathy through the cruel actions of others is Isabella (Nichola Burley), Linton’s lovelorn sister, who falls hard for and marries Heathcliff, but receives no real love in return.
Although not art-house as such, it is as though Arnold’s primary concern – which feels as cold and calculating as her extraordinary offering – is with the film-making process here, and not with her talent who are as much part of the frame as the wildlife we see. Nature is her only true star in this. (Lisa Giles-Keddie) 

And Close-up Films.


Mostly negative

Sky Movies :

In defiance of all previous interpretations, Arnold has created a couple who barely even seem to like each other very much, let alone love each other. Theirs is an entirely selfish sort of love, if indeed we can even call it that, built on a mutual hostility directed at all others around them.
There is something undeniably admirable about the decision to show Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance as being unfathomable to anyone but them, as the little girl from a remote part of Yorkshire attempts to befriend the street-urchin her father has brought home. It makes more sense somehow to show their passion for each other, and for the Yorkshire countryside, as being as vicious as the moors themselves.
It's an exceptionally beautiful film, the hand-held camera capturing perfectly the instability of both people and their environs, gales whistling across the screen, light saturating the canvass like an over-exposed photo. One particularly lovely and yet, disturbing scene, where the two children coat each other in mud, reveals a playful fondness tinged with violence and burgeoning sexual awakening.
And yet there is something Arnold misplaces in her quest to translate this complex infatuation. The film is devoid of any kind of tenderness, respect or joy. [...]
Like some of the ultra-modern script, the anachronism jars. Cathy too is a fierce, rather horrid little creature – would Edgar Linton really fall for her, invite her to be mistress of his home, with her rural ways and unpolished northern vowels?
This is definitely a film to watch – but only as part of a discourse on what love is. Despite a very committed vision and understatedly solid actors, somehow this never quite feel like what Emily Brontë intended.
One final point: Arnold is unflinching when it comes to animal cruelty. If you are fond of doggies, bunnies, lambs or ponies, this is not the film for you. (Francesca Steele)

The Financial Times gives it 2 stars out of 5:

Andrea Arnold’s film certainly captures the landscape. Robbie Ryan won the Best Cinematography prize at the Venice Film Festival for his Turnerish tableaux of mist-draped valleys, alternating with handheld sequences in which we are hauled about in mud, dragged through wet heather, buffeted by storms, exulted by glimpses of spring days ripe to the point of a voluptuous rotting. (I loved the two separated shots of a windfallen apple, its Edenic lure turning rough, putrid, Heathcliffean in a precocious sun.) Even squeezed into the film’s square frame, Arnold’s trademark, like snaps from an early box camera, Ryan’s images are often overpowering.
Then, alas, we get the actors. When I first saw the film I took a charitable view: they deliver the plain, colloquial dialogue plainly and colloquially. No period trimmings, a fair few f-words. The two actresses playing Catherine, Shannon Beer (younger) and Kaya Scodelario (older), capture some of her spiky spirit.
But Heathcliff, though daringly cast for an extreme reading of Brontë’s “dark, gypsy” looks (this Heathcliff is an Afro-stray picked up as a youngster in an English port), is played with too little daring by the two actors. The older, James Howson, woodenly pouts and mopes before his last moments of wooden weeping and raging. We feel robbed of catharsis. A screen Heathcliff, teased and tormented by his faithless childhood sweetheart, should be at least the troubled, tumultuous anti-hero Olivier gave us in the Hollywood film. At most he should be the brutal, driven agent of vengeance Brontë gives us in the original novel.
Writer-director Arnold, who crafted those pithy tranches of Brit realism Red Road and Fish Tank, has every right to perform a “literectomy”: filleting a novel of the unfilmable, going for the feral through the photogenic. But in this movie there is too much photogenic, too little feral and, sadly, no Heathcliff worthy of the name. (Nigel Andrews)

The London Evening Standard gives it 2 out of 5 stars:

In that way, it has to be allowed that it has real force. It is a resolved work of art, pursuing its own vision - a response to Emily Brontë's novel rather than a rendition of it, just like Kate Bush's yodelling, or the 40 illustrations for Les Hauts de Hurlevent made by the young Balthus.
This Wuthering Heights, sponsored by the UK Film Council, may well please the juries. It isn't going to give you a good night out, though. Believe me. Writhing in your seat never lies. (David Sexton)

Wharf gives it 3 out of 5 stars:

She presents, with savage realism, slavering, salivating Nature as it slowly erodes stones and souls - every wheeling lapwing, fright-eyed rabbit, growling dog, muddy puddle and rasping horse.
The wind (carrying with it rain, snow, despair) howls across the screen and into the auditorium.
Trouble is, so busy is the camera making a Great Film with its mosaic fragments, sly glimpses and unannounced taciturn epiphanies that somewhere along the way the love story has been relegated to a minor intrusion. [...]
Everything is dripping and breeding and urgent. Except the film, which never suggests anything other than a stifled crush between the protagonists. [...]
This is a mood piece, a collage. The camera is a key character, untutored in its gawping, fascinated with every fleck of phlegm and chomping jaw, transfixed in its sensual wonder of the intractable forces of season and time.
Within this powerful setting, little lives become inconsequential. That, sadly, is the opposite of the story. (Giles Broadbent)

And The Squeee,


Negative

The Daily Mail gives it 1 star out of 5:

The third big British film of the week is the least enjoyable, but will no doubt be the most favourably reviewed.
Currently a favourite with trendier critics than me, director Andrea Arnold made her reputation with present-day, kitchen-sink realism in the form of Red Road and Fish Tank.
I can sympathise with her desire to rescue Wuthering Heights from bourgeois prettification. Her film rightly lacks the neatness and attention to propriety of Jane Austen, and it’s on the other side of the showbiz universe from Downton Abbey.
However, Arnold’s vision is too fashionably miserabilist and fatally modernist, a would-be sophisticated but actually naive attempt to turn Emily Brontë’s fascinating, emotionally involving romantic melodrama into the most alienating kind of brutalism.
Much of it resembles a sado-masochist’s idea of a nature documentary, with humans reduced to bestial, brutal, amoral caricatures.
Every moment of cruelty — whether to humans or animals — is played to the maximum, while the love aspect is pared to a minimum.
Arnold’s other big idea is just as unfortunate: that Heathcliff is not only dark-skinned, but black. This makes the story about race rather than class, which again is far from Brontë’s intentions. Arnold’s pursuit of her vision of what the text ought to be but isn’t — savage and minimalist — means she strips away virtually all the dialogue, replacing it with her own. This is an even worse idea, as her writing is unsubtle and straight off a modern housing estate. [...]
Along with believability, period accuracy and faithfulness to the novel, Arnold sacrifices clarity. The performances are poor and opaque, so it’s hard to know what, or whether, anyone is thinking.
There is a distinct lack of chemistry between the young Cathy and Heathcliff (Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave), and their older counterparts (Kaya Scodelario and James Howson) don’t look even slightly like them and fail to communicate much beyond discomfort at being in costume.
Without that burning passion — which in the novel comes across as a meeting of twin souls — the central point of the story doesn’t exist. (Chris Tookey)

The Morning Star:

Shot on location on the Yorkshire moors the film features a cast of locals as farming folk along with professional actors as their upper-class counterparts.
In doing so Arnold has tried to create a contemporary relevance, not least in the use of language.
When the brother Hindley (Lee Shaw) is told of Heathcliff's existence, he replies in modern vernacular: "He's not my brother, he's a nigger."
I half expected The Hollies to break into song, but apart from a final soppy song and a few musical interludes, the focus is on naturalism, with the Earnshaws barely mumbling and the upper class clipping their vowels.
Thus, after the great grounding in the reality of 19th-century rural poverty the second part of the film, rather like the original novel, looks increasingly detached and it never explains how Heathcliff made his fortune.
Bloody frustrating.
Arnold surely could have simply transposed the story to today. (Jeff Sawtell)

The Scottish Daily Record:

It is not a costume drama in any real sense.
Blusters of bleak northern wind stand in for dialogue and, frankly, sheer boredom substitutes for Bronte's look into the riddles of the human heart.

The Norwich Evening News gives it 2 stars:

This is a proper bloody Yorkshire version of Heathcliff and Cathy.
The wild and windy moors are also rain-drenched and mist-shrouded. The cast are unknowns or first timers. Animal cruelty and mud-splattered earthiness are accentuated. [...]
It’s beautifully rendered vision, like Ken Loach meets Terence Malick. The characters appear almost embedded in that Yorkshire soil. But it is also a pinched and limited view. Over the century and a half since it was published, Emily Brontë’s book has been chipped down into a romantic melodrama.
This tries to redress this but I don’t really see this being any more “true” than say the Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s take.
One of the pleasures of the book is its convoluted structure, the twisted family tree, the various layers built around the central tale with the story being told second and third hand by its unreliable narrators.
Arnold’s version is not unique in abandoning all of this. But her version is turned into a simple rush of present tense – a worm’s eye view of events with more hand-held shaky cam than a Blair Witch Project. [...]
Arnold has tried to transfer all the brutal poetry of the language into brutal visual poetry of the landscape but it leaves the characters so small and dull, you can’t see why anyone would get worked up about them or their stories. Only Scodelario as the adult Cathy has the screen presence to suggest a really powerful character worthy of attention.
It’s dark and unique, but it isn’t any kind of Wuthering Heights. (Michael Joyce)

The Pontefract and Castleford Express:

At the crux of Brontë’s novel was straight up class prejudice – Heathcliff was an outsider because he was poor and an orphan.
In Arnold’s adaptation, Hindley’s hatred towards Heathcliff is explained away with scenes of blatant and unrepeatable racism, which in my book was a pointless change in plot.
Brontë’s novel has survived quite well over the years without ripping out one of its most pertinent features.

The Yorkshire Post gives it one star:

Andrea Arnold’s attempt to fashion a 19th-century social realist rendition of Wuthering Heights – with a no-name cast of amateurs who can’t act nor lend weight to Emily Brontë’s words – is a disaster.
From the off this is an ill-judged and frankly pointless entry in the Brontë canon. Even the contentious casting of a black Heathcliff (played by Solomon Glave and James Howson), the free use of racial slurs and both the f- and c-words make this a strange, minimalist and largely unstructured film. Experimental? Possibly. Bold and innovative? No.
There is a Emperor’s New Clothes atmosphere around Arnold’s failure to grasp the weight of Brontë’s book. [...]
Some films can be described as honourable failures. There is nothing honourable about Wuthering Heights; it is merely a failure, and one to be quickly forgotten. (Tony Earnshaw)

Female First lists (some of) the actresses who have played Cathy while The Press Association has talked to Kaya Scodelario:

"I wouldn't call it a dream role, because I've never really read the story or seen any other adaptations so I didn't know much about it," she said.
"It was a very intimidating role because there was a lot of pressure obviously - a lot of people know her so she's very iconic - but it turned into a dream role because it has opened a lot of doors for me," she admitted.
Kaya said the role has made her feel more confident.
"It has taught me a lot about myself, how I shouldn't think that a certain project isn't right for me, I should be a lot more open and believe in myself a bit more that I can do these sorts of things," she continued.

The Independent takes a look at the state of Brontëmania and discusses 'Why the three sisters are bigger than ever':

After a period in which versions of Austen hogged our screens, the Brontës have fought back. Released today, Andrea Arnold's savagely uncompromising Wuthering Heights joins a line of adaptations of Emily's only surviving novel that began in 1920 (a lost work by AV Bramble) and went on to include renderings from directors as varied as William Wyler – with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon still the ranking Heathcliff and Cathy Earnshaw to many fans – and Yoshishige Yoshida, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette. Earlier this year, Cary Fukunaga's Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska as the uncowed governess and Michael Fassbender the sulphurous Mr Rochester, offered a rather smoother ride through another much-adapted book, albeit one that shares with Arnold – and the Brontës – a rapt attention to every squall and storm that blows across the ever-changing skies above the Yorkshire moors.
Yet the Brontë season will not end with Andrea Arnold and her black Heathcliff – a piece of casting that picks up on a long critical debate not only about the origins of the "dark-skinned gipsy" found wandering the streets of Liverpool, but about the colonial dimensions of both books. (In 1966, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea imagined the Jamaican life of Bertha Mason, the first, attic-bound Mrs Rochester.) [...]
These days, we nurture our own kind of piety and sentimentality; and the Brontës can still ferret it out and rub it till it bleeds. Feminist pioneers they may be, but their unrepentantly seductive disturbers of the peace – Heathcliff, Rochester, Arthur in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – never quite forfeit their creators' sympathy or their heroines' love. In our more genteel days, the aspirational leading ladies of respectable literary novels shun the Byronic bad boy and confess "Reader, I married him" about the likes of Jane Eyre's unctuous cleric, St John Rivers.
In Arnold's film, I watched the little dog twitching and whimpering on a noose and thought that the director had added a grotesque flourish of her own. I had misremembered – or repressed – the book. Go back to Chapter XII of Wuthering Heights: the narrator, the housekeeper Nelly Dean, notices "Miss Isabella's springer Fanny, suspended by a handkerchief, and nearly at its last gasp". The thwarted and persecuted Heathcliff, who in vengeful spite marries Isabella Linton, gloatingly recalls how she saw him "hang up her little dog", part of the programme of abuses that the victim-turned-villain inflicts on the "abject thing" he wed. To read such passages, even as Cathy dies of love for this feral outsider and promises to embrace him from beyond the grave, is to enter a thicket of desire, obsession, cruelty and self-obliterating need. It makes De Sade look like a periwigged poseur. [...]
Teachers and critics patronisingly praise the Brontës for their "transgressive" freedom from prevailing beliefs about class, gender and – if you buy the "black Heathcliff" interpretation – race. True, anyone who returns to Jane Eyre's great speech of self-affirmation to Rochester will find not one word has lost its fire: "Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart!" Such landmark moments tower over the future.
But the true test of a classic work surely lies in its ability to challenge and even discomfort later readers, rather than endorse the prejudices of their time. Lucasta Miller notes shrewdly that Wuthering Heights was the first book to teach her that great literature "was as much about questions as answers". The questions the Yorkshire sisters posed can still sear our souls.
At the end of Wuthering Heights, we hear how Heathcliff and Cathy's unquiet spirits stalk the moors. On an evening "threatening thunder", Nelly meets a little boy "with a sheep and two lambs". He is "crying terribly". "'There's Heathcliff and a woman yonder, by t'nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darnut pass 'em'." We haven't passed them yet. (Boyd Tonkin)

It goes on to quote from Margaret Drabble, Michèle Roberts, Sarah Hall, Stevie Davies and Kate Mosse think of the Brontës.

The Copenhagen Post reviews one of the other reasons why Brontëmania is on, Jane Eyre 2011, albeit not very enthusiastically (to put it mildly).

It is well executed in terms of everything cinematic. The cast was well chosen, the visuals are very 19th century thanks to the use of impressive natural lighting, and the story is a classic. What could go wrong? And yet, that’s all it is. It looks good on paper, but somehow doesn’t deliver. The people who made this film played it safe. They rounded off all of the edges, which had made the story interesting, and fit it into a neat little box for your pleasure. And it simply screams Oscar bait. [...]
If you’re familiar with the story of the book, the film is disappointing. It seems like the skeleton of the story without some of the harsher details. In the novel, the headmaster is revealed to be a hypocrite. He teaches the students poverty, yet lives a life of wealth and takes money from the school for himself.
This social criticism on the hypocrisy of Victorianism is removed from the film, taking out meaning from the original story and creating a less harsh environment. Mr Rochester (Fassbender), Jane’s love interest, is presented as a much nicer person, presumably because the audience should like him. The film touches and dances around the edge of issues of social injustice, but never actually delves that deeply into these issues.
Because of this lack of important detail, the film not only lacks meaning, but also really drags. I kept waiting and waiting for the next scene to arrive. The original novel is a thriller and even the trailer promised suspense and tension. It delivered very little of either. On a few occasions it built up suspense, but the pay-off was disappointing. Even the climax of the film is a let down. Sadly, this film is just another beautiful bore. (Elizabeth Dellapenna)

Oh No They Didn't posts a few pictures of Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender 'reunited' at the Shame LA premiere.

The New Statesman is saddened by the fact that novelists seem to be remembered for one novel only:

All too often, posterity remembers some authors, no matter how multifaceted their genius, for only one or two books. Who, aside from scholars of Victorian fiction, now reads anything by Thackeray other than Vanity Fair? Jane Eyre has largely driven out Charlotte Brontë's great depiction of loneliness, Villette. (Michael Dirda)

On the blogosphere Könyvekkel suttogó writes in Hungarian about Becoming Jane Eyre by Sheila Kohler.