This is probably my favourite adaptation so far.

Andrea Arnold's version was classed as at best revisionist and alternate and at worst - by Daily Fail types - PC, in that it cast a black Heathcliff. However it is perhaps the most faithful to the ambience of the book, creating through excellent cinematography via natural light, a harsh wilderness that is almost tangible to the viewer. Indeed, I felt a chill in my bones as if damp from the sodden Moors throughout!

The film has no score either which only further adds to the bleakness. The soundtrack here is the howling winds, the torrential downpour and the bleatings of animals, both human and wildlife, in torment.

Arnold has an unusual…

Andrea Arnold’s preoccupations with violent obsession and British class conflict have a lot in common with literature's infamous romance between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Brontë’s oft-adapted and enduring (un)classical novel is audaciously re-imagined in Arnold’s hands to become entirely her own and fully consistent with her minimal and raw style. Her cinematography has always used academy ratio, this time forcing a radical reorientation of classic literary adaptation from the nostalgic and pastoral to the contemporary and proximate. Nothing is ornate about this coarse version of Wuthering Heights as it strips away the superficial trimmings of makeup, big costume and art direction, and completely does away with score, the very things that can inadvertently mummify adaptations of classic texts. Instead, the…

It seems like every so often cinema has to make a series film adaptations based on classic literature. It’s like an unwritten rule. First came Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre then Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing, plus Mike Newell’s upcoming Great Expectations, but we are here to talk about Andrea Arnold’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel from 1847, Wuthering Heights.

Andrea Arnold happens to be one of, in my opinion, the most promising directors working in cinema. She has won a litany of awards for her previous efforts including 2006′s Red Road and 2009′s Fish Tank. Both films were filled with a certain amount of despair all while maintaining a sense of beauty against a gritty urban landscape. So…

Andrea Arnold tells us from the start that this isn't going to be what we're used to when it comes to costume dramas. The first act is closer to Abel Gance than William Wyler: the world we see is Heathcliff's, and Arnold manages to shoot something as mundane (cinematically speaking) as a horse in a way the viewer isn't quite used to seeing a horse, giving it a sense of scale that's both beautiful and monstrous.

The realistic, often brutal way Arnold portrays life in this windy, foggy valley feels more appropriate to the violent, bitter story Wuthering Heights is than earlier adaptations. It's not simply tragic; it's life-rending. The world is a unforgiving place full of selfish people blinded…

Some films are poetic. Others are poem-ish.

This one? Ish.

It felt like a movie made by a Poetry 101 student who had just seen Days of Heaven and been given a camera.

Arnold gets that animals and nature can represent the wild side of human nature, and that religion and societal manners can represent repression. She shows us a bird in a cage to suggest entrapment and the desire for freedom.

But after 20 minutes, it seemed to me that Andrea Arnold didn't really have any interesting ideas. All she had was a sense of her young Catherine's awakening sexual desire, and Heathcliff's already full-strength appetites. She reduces this story to one of sexuality and the "earthiness" of desire.…

I was reading an article at the weekend about how classic books seldom make classic films. Wuthering Heights is a case in point. There has never been a decent adaptation of the novel - the Olivier version was lauded but it only tells half the story, and subsequent adaptations have also been incredibly flawed.

I was looking forward to this as I enjoyed Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank so was hoping she'd bring something fresh to the story. What she brings is beautifully shot but incredibly dull. There is very little dialogue, and what there is is quite un-Brontean: 'Fuck off you cunts!' indeed! I'm not a prude when it comes to bad language but this seemed like it was trying…