Amazing Film

Some Sundance reviews of Wuthering Heights 2011 (Picture: Agatha A. Nitecka):

I saw a new version of "Wuthering Heights" by director Andrea Arnold ("Red Road" (still my favorite of hers), "Fish Tank").  It's a beautiful, stark and cruel film, very true to the Emily Brontë novel in combining the rawness of nature with the fickleness of human passion.  Arnold chooses to cast Heathcliff as black-skinned, not merely swarthy, and she uses very contemporary cinematography and editing.  She also gets remarkable performances out of her child stars, Shannon Beer and Solomon Glave, who fill the roles of young Catherine and Heathcliff with fire and grit.  Not to every taste, but very good. (Shawn Levy in The Oregonian)

By positioning Heathcliff as a racial minority in the narrative, Brontë creates a much more complicated story about obsession, bestiality, and revenge than previous adaptations and teenage girls obsessed with the literary character would lead you to believe. Arnold channels the original tone of the novel as she depicts a love story with unsatisfying, unsettling results. (...)
This hopeless, dirty, consumptive world is what makes the book so interesting, and what this adaptation capitalizes on. Arnold has moved away from the hopelessly romantic towards the merely hopeless and in doing so has finally made a version of Wuthering Heights with some depth. There is more to glean from this contemplatively paced (be warned: another way of saying very slow) film than one viewing affords. I look forward to watching and rewatching this film as both a companion piece to an incredible novel, and as a separate work of art, worthy of being considered for its own merits. (Whitney Borup in Film Threat)

"Wuthering Heights" is pretty. "Wuthering Heights" is a really long movie and it feels even longer. There should be a term for this, like the wind chill or heat index: "'Wuthering Heights' has a running time of 128 minutes, but the length index is going to make it feel more like 140 for all you folks out there."  (Mike Ryan in Moviefone)

Arnold is a feisty director with a singular vision, and Wuthering Heights is definitely a singular take on Emily Brontë's story. Purists, be warned; this is not the high gothic romance we read in high school. (...)
The movie is long and slow and makes the viewer work to meet it halfway. One could argue that Heathcliff could spend less time peering in Catherine's windows and letting the rain soak him to the bone as he sulks on the moors, but the experience verges on the meditative.
Although it takes place in the eighteenth century, the handheld camera work and quick cut editing gives it a more modern feeling. It is grim and muddy and sometimes utterly mundane, but also beautiful and even sensuous at times.  (Jenni Miller in Movies.com)

Everything from Arnold’s casting to her grip on visceral emotion captured through the lens of the camera is to be noted when watching her films. “Wuthering Heights” brings us to a fresh reinvention of the ages-old story of 18th century orphan and his love for a farmer’s daughter. The retelling of “Wuthering Heights” is surely another gem in the upcoming roster at Sundance 2012. (Pouya Asadi in Sound Colour Vibration)

The film has little dialogue, especially in the first half as we watch the young lover's relationship develop, and it has no music soundtrack. Arnold relied on the stark beauty and wildness of the film's location––the western end of Swaledale in North Yorkshire––along with its magnification of natural sounds (the wind on the moors, fingers scraping against bark, etc.), provided by French sound designer Nicholas Becker, to give Bronte's novel the texture and emotion usually provided through a film's script and soundtrack. Dare I say that Arnold has perhaps surpassed the classic story given to us by Brontë through this visual masterpiece.
I do, however, have one gripe: the actors. Making their film debut in Wuthering Heights, the young Heathcliff and Catherine played by Glave and Beer respectively are case perfectly for their roles as adolescent lovers. Beer has an untamed look about her that is exactly as I pictured Catherine to be, and though he says little, Arnold's choice in Glave as Heathcliff (and interpreting Heathcliff's outcast persona as an issue of race) was genius. At the halfway mark, when the characters grow up and the cast is swapped for James Howson (Heathcliff) and Kaya Scodelario (Catherine), and the script becomes more talky, I was a little disappointed by the execution. The last half of the plot is the most tumultuous, full of tragedy, heartbreak, drama, but Scodelario's acting doesn't live up to the novel's characterization of Catherine's insanity. Fist-time actor Howson recites his lines in an almost robotic tone, and though his obsession with Catherine should also be maddening, I felt nothing as he struggled with his emotions.
All in all, this was an amazing film that is worth seeing if only to appreciate the beauty of the Yorkshire countryside and experience a fresh interpretation of a Victorian classic. Even with the story-line liberties taken by Arnold and the so-so acting in the last half, Wuthering Heights is sure to exceed expectations.  (Esther Merono in SLUG Magazine)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch talks about Margot Livesey's The Flight of Gemma Hardy:

Margot Livesey, who grew up in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught at a private school for boys, is no stranger to fiction, and her seventh novel, "The Flight of Gemma Hardy," reverberates with some of Livesey's experiences. Gemma, orphaned young, is sent to a boarding school where she is both servant and student. As a young adult, she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands in a story that pays homage to Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre."

And The Boston Globe reviews it:

Born in Yorkshire in 1816, dead by age 38, Charlotte Brontë left behind a seemingly timeless, improbable oeuvre that longer-lived authors can only envy: two books of poetry and more than a dozen novels, best known among them, written under the pseudonym “Currer Bell,’’ “Jane Eyre.’’ It was clearly admiration, not envy, that moved Scottish-born author Margot Livesey to write an homage to the proto-classic, proto-feminist tale of a female protagonist who suffers but never seeks rescue. (...)
“ ‘The Flight of Gemma Hardy’ is, in my mind, neither my autobiography nor a retelling of Jane Eyre,’’ Livesey has written. “Rather I am writing back to Charlotte Brontë, recasting Jane’s journey to fit my own courageous heroine and the possibilities of her time and place.’’(...)
No spoiler alert required: Neither the stunning plot twists that Livesey supplies, nor her satisfying surprise ending, will be revealed here. What is revealed in “The Flight of Gemma Hardy’’ is an exceptionally well-plotted, well-crafted, innovatively interpreted modern twist on a timeless classic, one that’s sure to delight the multitudes of Brontë fans, and the multitudes of fans that Livesey deserves.  (Meredith Maran)

As The Denver Post:

"The Flight of Gemma Hardy" is not so much a reboot of "Jane Eyre" as it is an homage. Margot Livesey sets her version in the middle of the 20th century, after the end of World War II and before the social turbulence of the late 1960s. (...)
"Jane Eyre" is, simplistically, a coming-of-age story and a social criticism set in a Gothic landscape. Livesey owns the soul of the story. Gemma's prickly pride and her "appealing" defiance make it hard to begin, let alone maintain, relationships. She can only come to maturity through a journey that is as introspective as it is challenging; she must experience her own faults before she can have empathy for those of others. (Robin Vidimos)

Girls With Books also posts a review.

HitFix's Guy Lodge publishes his dream Oscar ballot in the crafts fields including several for Jane Eyre 2011:

Best Cinematography: Adriano Goldman, "Jane Eyre"
Blauvelt's yellowed, dust-veiled Oregon Trail vistas in "Meek's Cutoff" make ingenious use of the Academy ratio to imprison its lost characters in their limitless landscape. The film shares with "Jane Eyre" a keen artist's eye for the fleeting, witchy opportunities afforded by natural light, an unaffected sensibility video artist and photographer Har'el takes to more rapturous extremes in her self-shot doc "Bombay Beach."
Best Costume Design: Michael O'Connor, "Jane Eyre"
O'Connor's more Oscar-friendly costuming of "Jane Eyre" weaves unusually precise details of character, class and age into its mile-wide crinoline skirts.
Best Makeup: "Jane Eyre"
[T]he subtext-packed range and wit of the hairstyling in "Jane Eyre".

Best Original Score: Dario Marianelli, "Jane Eyre"
Over in the traditionalist's corner, Marianelli's typically swoony but appropriately reserved work on "Jane Eyre" was a career high[.]

DVD Verdict reviews Jane Campion's The Piano Blu-Ray:

At its best, The Piano plays like the lost masterwork of one of the Brontë sisters. I suppose it can be described as a romance, but it would be more accurate to describe it as Romantic.  (Clark Douglas)

La Crosse Tribune presents yet another production of The Mystery of Irma Vep at La Croix Black Box Theatre in the Fine Arts Center at Viterbo University:

“If you’re interested to see how the plots of movies like ‘Gaslight,’ ‘Rebecca,’ and ‘Dracula’ combined with the romance of novels such as ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jayne Eyre,’(sic)  this is the show for you,” said production manager Sadie Ward. (Geri Parlin)

AgnosLibertine, Writer's Wavelength and Thursday's Book Orgy post about Wuthering Heights;  Dish on Hiatus has visited Haworth and Les Soeurs Brontë (in French) publishes a nice post of Brontë winter scenes.