It’s the full Bronte! BRIAN VINER reviews Emily
Emily (15, 130 mins)
Verdict: Intelligent and beguiling
Rating: ****
Halloween Ends (18, 111 mins)
Verdict: October killing fest
Rating: ****
Emily Bronte was only 30 years old when she died in December 1848, apparently after catching a cold, which led to tuberculosis, at the funeral just two months earlier of her brother, Branwell.
She wrote only one novel, making the output of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, look downright prodigious. But that novel was Wuthering Heights. And this beguiling film imagines how her short life might have inspired her to write it.
It is mostly speculation, verging, at times, on mischief. We know little about Emily compared with most other cherished literary figures, but writer-director Frances O’Connor has rather brilliantly converted that dearth of knowledge from a drawback into an opportunity. O’Connor is best-known as an actress, indeed she played Fanny Price in the highly regarded 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park, which cleverly incorporated aspects of Jane Austen’s own story.
She shakes up that equation in Emily, injecting elements of Wuthering Heights into Bronte’s life. The result, while it might greatly affront scholars, is a film brimming with warmth, heart and intelligence. Remarkably, it is O’Connor’s directorial debut.
We know little about Emily compared with most other cherished literary figures, but writer-director Frances O’Connor has rather brilliantly converted that dearth of knowledge from a drawback into an opportunity
She leans heavily, however, on the abundant talent of her lead actress, Emma Mackey, whose Emily is enigmatic, waspish, romantic, troubled, fragile, fierce and smart, all at the same time. It is a performance sure to garner awards nominations. Maybe even an Academy Award nomination.
The film starts at the story’s end, with Emily dying and older sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling), whose Jane Eyre had been published the year before, aghast at the content of Wuthering Heights but astounded by its literary merit. She simply doesn’t know how on earth Emily managed to write it. O’Connor duly whisks us back in time to find out.
The Bronte household, though joylessly run by the Reverend Patrick Bronte (Adrian Dunbar), is a place of lively intellectual curiosity. But within it, Emily is a loner, a brooder, considered by people in the village, Charlotte unkindly tells her, to be ‘the strange one’. She especially misses her dead mother, and there is a startling scene in which, during a parlour game, she spooks her siblings by appearing to channel their mother’s spirit.
Classic film on TV
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
Alexander Mackendrick’s glorious Ealing comedy, with Alec Guinness on top form as an eccentric scientist who invents a synthetic fabric that never wears out, greatly to the chagrin of textile barons. An enduring joy.
Saturday, BBC2, 1pm
The sibling she is closest to is Branwell (splendidly played by Fionn Whitehead), an alcoholic and opium addict, whose free spirit she admires. But it is another man who truly bewitches her. This is the handsome new curate William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who in real life was a protege of Reverend Bronte and a lodger in the family home. Yet there is no evidence that Emily had a crush on him, still less that the pair had a raging love affair.
At first, that seems unlikely even on screen. There’s another marvellous scene in which Weightman preaches for the first time, and the effect on the young women in the congregation reminded me of another recent movie, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. Of the sisters, it is Charlotte who appears to have fallen for the curate. Emily mistrusts him. But soon he is teaching her French (making the most of Mackey’s bilingualism) and a romantic spark ignites into a full-blown conflagration.
Their affair unfolds in a tumbledown cottage on the wild and rain-lashed moors, an overt nod to Wuthering Heights and an opportunity for cinematographer Nanu Segal that she does not squander. It’s a handsome-looking film, with lots of hand-held camera work that somehow fits the narrative, and a beautifully acted one.
But neither would be enough without a superb script, which partly through a sprinkling of anachronisms (I don’t suppose any of the Brontes ever said ‘give it some welly’), makes the story feel modern. That can undermine a period drama (see, or rather don’t, the ghastly Netflix version of Persuasion), but here it gives the film buoyancy and relevance. Emily is really worth seeing.
So, if slasher movies are your thing, is Halloween Ends. It’s the third in the trilogy that began with Halloween (2018), which in turn is part of the franchise that dates back to the original Halloween (1978).
The Bronte household, though joylessly run by the Reverend Patrick Bronte (Adrian Dunbar), is a place of lively intellectual curiosity
Are you keeping up? Jamie Lee Curtis certainly is, returning four years after the events of Halloween Kills (2021) as Laurie Strode, whose granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) starts dating a decent young mechanic called Corey (Rohan Campbell).
He is still in trauma, after wrongfully serving a jail sentence for the aggravated manslaughter of a child he was babysitting. For Allyson, his vulnerability is part of the attraction. But in Haddonfield, Illinois, the menacing evil of serial killer Michael Myers is never far away. Why everyone in town hasn’t relocated somewhere safer, like a tent in the fast lane of an interstate highway, I really don’t know.
Anyway, regular director David Gordon Green slowly cranks up the dread with style and even occasional shards of wit. It is more of a psychological thriller than the previous films, and all the better for it.
All Is Vanity is a strange film, a conspicuously low-budget exercise with a compensatingly ambitious premise that doesn’t really work, or at least works only as something that students on a film-studies course might have come up with as a collective project.
It starts fairly promisingly, with a photographer (Sid Phoenix) making small talk with a new intern (Yaseen Aroussi), sent to be his assistant on a fashion shoot in a cool London apartment.
The depiction of the arrogant photographer, patronising and even slightly bullying the apprentice setting up his props, feels entirely authentic.
I know that from many of the assignments I did as a young journalist, working with leading photographers of the time. Some of them were exactly like that.
It starts fairly promisingly, with a photographer (Sid Phoenix) making small talk with a new intern (Yaseen Aroussi), sent to be his assistant on a fashion shoot in a cool London apartment
But gradually it begins to dawn that writer-director Marcos Mereles has something else in mind, a hall-of-mirrors mystery in which nothing is as it seems, including our own perspective.
Suddenly, the cast start talking to the director, and then directly to us, the audience. Meanwhile, one of the characters has gone missing. But is it the character, or is it the actress playing her?
Well before the end, which thankfully comes after only 72 minutes, I’d stopped caring. All Is Vanity begins to feel terribly arch and self-conscious.
But I suppose it would be boring if all films were structured similarly. This at least tries to push at some boundaries
Rock on, reptile – lovable Lyle is top of the crocs
This is a page to confound all those who complain that our cinemas are always full of the same old dross: the week’s major new releases — aromantic period drama, a slasher movie and a children’s film — are all extremely fine examples of their very different genres.
Lyle, Lyle Crocodile (****) is terrific family fun. Javier Bardem demonstrates his wondrous versatility by adding a hapless song-and-dance man to his portfolio of chilling assassins and hot-blooded lovers, splendidly playing failed entertainer Hector P. Valenti, who desperately needs a new act to conquer a TV show called Show Us What You Got . . . America’s Got Talent in all but name.
Then, in an exotic New York pet shop, he spies a singing baby crocodile (nicely rendered by computer animation). He calls his new pet Lyle, and prepares for fame and fortune.
Then, in an exotic New York pet shop, he spies a singing baby crocodile (nicely rendered by computer animation)
Unfortunately, Lyle suffers from stage fright and won’t sing for an audience. Foiled, Hector leaves his Manhattan brownstone to hit the road, and the rapidly growing Lyle (left) is adopted by a new resident, a boy called Josh Primm(Winslow Fegley), whose anxiety, asthma and obsessive-compulsive issues gradually recede through his devoted friendship with Lyle.
Inspired by a 1965 book, and directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon (who made the 2007 comedy Blades Of Glory), it’s very appealingly done.
My only issue is with the rather boring ballads that Lyle sings (voiced by Shawn Mendes), but why did they have to wait until the end credits for Crocodile Rock?
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