"The film is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea"

Today, we have basically Australian reviews of Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights:

Positive:
About.com:

Arnold’s realization of Wuthering Heights is a visual delight. Most of that comes from Robbie Ryan, who also shot Fish Tank, and his spacious yet foreboding treatment of the moors and how the upper-class Lintons live. Arnold is adept at capturing the awkwardness of a budding relationship. She’s mastered how to convey the helplessness that makes a tale like Wuthering Heights so hopeful, despite the heartbreaking inevitable end. (John Lichman)

Mediascape (UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media Studies)

Wuthering Heights is probably the best adaptation you’ll see all year. I’m not saying that because it follows every facet of Brontë’s novel to a T; if that’s what you expect out of an adaptation, you’re probably better off waiting for a three-part film of a 300-page novel (oh wait, that’s The Hobbit.). Rather, it’s a fully cinematic evocation, one that runs so deep you’re likely to forget it was a book in the first place. Eschewing all literary pretenses so tantamount to most films adapted from esteemed novels—for instance, voiceover narration and static, lush cinematography—this Wuthering Heights is muted, subjective, and painful. (James Gilmore)

There’s something nearly juvenile about the story’s streamlining, but by grounding its first half in the burgeoning passions of youth and keeping the characters so young, it works. Maybe the mythic-ness is why the story gets by without having enough emotion. They were too young to articulate their feelings, but once they’re grown up all it takes is one look. There’s a moment, I think during Heathcliff’s first trip to the Linton house, when he arrives and Catherine looks up and sees him and is unable to control the smile that spreads across her face. There. That’s the movie. (J.M. Olejarz)

Mostly Positive:

Sydney Morning Herald:

English director Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is an incompletely wonderful film: the first half feels like an uncomfortable revelation, an enveloping, risky, deeply atmospheric new vision of a classic. It's a vividly intense perception of the work she is adapting, a powerful evocation of the lives and conditions of its characters.
For her distilled version of Emily Brontë's novel, Arnold shoots in the almost-square ratio of 4:3 (as she did in her previous film, Fish Tank) and keeps the camera close, intrusive, sometimes jarringly mobile. She gives us the bleakest, most visceral sense of place: the Yorkshire Moors are almost immersively present. (...)
The first phase of the film is a long way from the traditional period drama; the second edges much closer to it. Catherine is drawn into the ambit of the Linton family and into a very different social milieu. In this location, Heathcliff is positioned as even more of an outsider, and she seems no longer to identify with him. He leaves, then returns years later, a new, well-heeled man, with a plan to reclaim what he regards as his. This phase of the film, however, lacks the blunt and tactile clarity of the first part. What was remarkable begins to slip away and becomes merely competent. (Philippa Hawker)

Negative:
We wonder if this reviewer has really read the novel ("high-toned gothic architecture and most of its lurid, high-flown dialogue"...erm?):

The Australian:

It's true the book and film share a title, that several characters in the film have the same names as those in the novel, that Catherine loves Heathcliff (and vice versa), and that most of the story unfolds in a bleak farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors.
But there the resemblance ends. Andrea Arnold's film not only strips away the novel's high-toned gothic architecture and most of its lurid, high-flown dialogue, it strips away most of the story. Brontë's tale of love and revenge has become simply a love story - a harrowing and moving one in its way, but a thin substitute for the original. (...)
Everything is so drained of colour that it might have been made in black-and-white. It is notable that Arnold chose to shoot in the almost square, so-called Academy format that was universal in the days before wide screens and is now virtually obsolete. I have no idea why. And there are at least two gratuitous scenes of animal cruelty I found repulsive. It's true that the novel includes a brief reference to Hareton hanging a litter of puppies, but nothing would justify what we see in the film. I was relieved when it was over. (Evan Williams)

The Australian Financial Review:

Wrap up warmly for this plunge into the wilds of old Yorkshire. Andrea Arnold’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is so bleak, wet, cold and gloomy it chills one to the bone. After about 15 minutes I felt like calling for gloves and a muffler. Ten minutes later I could feel my feet sinking into the mud. Throughout the film I kept wishing I had a torch to see what was going on in the pitch-dark house, pitch-dark stable, or dead of night on the moors.
This film is so long on atmosphere it almost forgets about details such as plot, dialogue or characterisation. Actors grunt, swear and snarl at each other in dialect, but mostly settle for exchanging looks of hatred or longing. Every encounter is framed by shots of rolling, treeless hills; stormy skies; rustling grass and spiky bushes. We observe insects, birds and dogs with a level of intensity that puts David Attenborough to shame. The wind is constantly gusting into the FX mike, accompanied by the steady patter of rain. (...)
The casting has the unfortunate effect of turning Heathcliff’s strangeness into a simple question of race. Hindley, for instance, constantly refers to him as a “nigger”. His pathetic hatred for the young Heathcliff is transformed into racism, when it needs to be a much more complex affair. On the other hand, the attraction between Heathcliff and Cathy now has a hint of social taboo and titillation. Yet it should be Heathcliff’s personality rather than his skin colour that stamps him as perennial outsider.
The young Cathy is played by another newcomer, Shannon Beer; the elder by Kaya Scodelario, who has that half-starved but sexy look Keira Knightley has perfected. Scodelario is the only character who demonstrates a little acting ability. (John McDonald)

The Wall Street Journal and HitFix interviews Andrea Arnold:

“I certainly pushed some new interpretations, so the film is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea,” says Arnold. “But audiences seem to be appreciating and responding to the fact that I was brave in my approach.” (...)
“I wasn’t trying to do anything reactionary; I just tried to make the film my own way,” says Arnold of her new approaches to the novel. She recalls always being “a bit fascinated” by the character of Heathcliff, and how he turns out the way he does, despite coming from an abusive childhood.
“I suppose one question I address in all my films, is ‘Are we born this way or are made?’ says Arnold. “I immediately thought that about Heathcliff, and I hung on, wanting to tell his story.” (Michelle Kung in WSJ)

Arnold broke her own resolution, however, with another creative decision that his caused disagreement among critics: the use of a mournful ballad by folky chart-toppers Mumford & Sons, specially composed for the film, over the final shots and closing credits. “It's controversial, that!” she says, slightly gleefully. “But here's the thing: for me, when the credits come up, it's like the world you've created is over, and now you have to look at a bunch of names. Most people are leaving the cinema anyway: they don't care who the grip was. So I tend to eel the credits are like another land, and you can do what you like there. I could put music there. So I thought I'd give the audience song as a present: they've sat through this, and it's been difficult.”  (Guy Lodge in HitFix)

Dcist and The Herald Sun also talk about the adaptation. Shooting the Script and The Rain Falls Down on Portlandtown also reviews the film.

The Saturday Review section of The Times has asked readers about books that changed their lives:

Mary Simpson. Berkshire
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
From the opening sentence I was hooked. This book made escape possible. I had not had an unhappy childhood but I'd known hunger, cold and the yearning to be an attractive child. Like the heroine, I kicked against my pre-ordained life as lower middle-class female. Through education, I had a successful career and complete happiness with an older man who had also been tricked into a loveless marriage.

The Telegraph (India) interviews Eve Sinclair, author of Jane Eyre Laid Bare:

So, why did you think of giving an erotic twist to this classic?
Because it’s always been on my mind! I read the text originally in school and I re-read it when I was in university, and I wrote [papers] about the very simmering sexuality and erotic undertones between Jane Eyre and Rochester. In our course, we would joke about what it really meant when Rochester was standing in his nightclothes, saying ‘Jane, don’t leave me this way!’ (...)
And you were sure readers would accept an erotic Jane Eyre and not be offended by it?
Well, if they are offended by it... see, if you look at modern culture, you have lots of mashups from different types of cultures, in film, in music particularly, and that was very much my intention when I did this. The classic will always remain the classic. And if we can have Jane Austen’s characters having their faces ripped off by the undead, I think that’s slightly more shocking than Jane Eyre having sex (chuckles).
I’ve tried to write about the sex as sensitively as possible. Also, I’ve kept the original story structure, though I’ve only used the part where Jane goes to Thornfield Hall. But I wanted to keep the story structure and the character of Jane Eyre as they were in the original. (Samhita Chakraborty )

We are unable to decipher the encoded humour in this quote from a Cincinnati Enquirer sports column:

So thanks, Doc. Whether you’re spray tanning today, getting a pedicure, or at your “Lovers of All Things Emily Brontë” book club meeting, my appreciation cup overfloweth. Hope all is well in Lovelyland. (Alex Blumer)

The Guardian talks with the writer Kate Mosse:

Mosse calls Wuthering Heights "the greatest landscape novel of all time" and names Emily Brontë alongside Algernon Blackwood and Agatha Christie as important influences. She spent a lot of time outside when she was young, tramping through woods and marshes, and clearly enjoys the frisson of superstition. (Susanna Rustin)

The Guardian remembers the good old days where Gordon Brown was our Heathcliff and David Cameron a sort of Willoughby:

The point is, class made Cameron popular in his early days. Being posh cast him as a Jane Austen beau in contrast to Gordon Brown's Emily Brontë antihero. This picture of three posh boys who can josh with one another without swearing or getting their shirts dirty is a warning to Labour and its allies not to be too confident about playing the class card. It might backfire. (Jonathan Jones)

New Scientist presents the recently published book Orwell's Cough:

In Orwell's Cough, Ross revisits his case for a syphilitic Shakespeare, and attempts posthumous diagnoses of other literary greats - from W. B. Yeats's battle with brucellosis to Emily Brontë's tuberculosis and Asperger's syndrome. (Tiffany O'Callaghan)

If would be nice if someone added that the Asperger's thing is nothing but sheer speculation.

CBS Minnesota lists the best zombie movies:

I Walk with a Zombie (1943)
Elegance, grace, romance, exoticism. These are not qualities shared by any of the other films on this list and, as such, this is probably not going to win many fans among those tearing their faces off with makeup while getting blotto along the West Bank. But if you want to see one of the most ethereal horror movies ever made, check out Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s downright poetic unofficial adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. (Come to think of it, this movie all but invalidates the entire series of zombified Jane Austen books everyone’s reading these days.) (Eric Henderson)

Reading Wuthering Heights in Rwanda? It's possible according to The New Times (Rwanda):

My taste in books at the time was so eclectic that to this day I look back to that period of my life with nostalgia.
It was as if I was travelling the whole world by way of books. I imagined life in England from Canterbury to Dickensian London and those cold winters on the Yorkshire moors all captured in Charles Dickens' "Great expectations" and Emily Brontë's "Wuthering heights"  respectively. (Eddie Mugarura Balaba) 

Newsat (Austria) reviews John Irving's In One Person:

Die Literatur, vor allem auch Bühnenwerke, sind Irvings Mittel zum Zweck, um seinen roten Faden zu spinnen. Und so wird Bill von den Brontë-Schwestern über Fielding, Hardy, Dickens und Flaubert hin zu James Baldwin geführt, von Shakespeare über Ibsen hin zu Tennessee Williams und immer wieder Shakespeare. (Translation)

The Lancashire Telegraph announces a show by Frisky and Mannish, one of their highlights being the duet between Kate Nash and Kate Bush on Wuthering Heights;  More than Kisses, letters mingle souls loves Anne Brontë; Biblioteczka Kohanej (in Polish) posts about Jane Eyre; The Bookaholic interviews Marta Acosta and gives away her book Dark Companion.