Wuthering Heights (2011)

Arnold drastically pares back dialogue and exposition, telling the classic tale of passion and revenge with probing, harshly sensual camera work and a minimum of sentimentality.

In reality it's a bit of a slog.

Arnold has been successful in reimagining the story's archetypal emotions in the story, bringing it closer to its passionate elements.

Arnold ... has put her stamp on Emily Brontë's 19th-century novel Wuthering Heights, but it's a smudged and imperfect stamp, to be sure.

Essentially a misunderstanding of (or an inability to convey) the breathing soul of this material.

Lyrical and minimalist - if you don't care for such qualities, you may just find it slow ...

You could look at this as Arnold doing her job well -- after all, her source material isn't exactly a party -- but it's so bleak that it ends up being a little too hard to watch.

Arnold's coup turns the old story around, from a wicked love-lost tragedy into a crisis of a society suffering the guilt and ghosts of slavery.

Intense and imagistic, sensual and rather salacious, this is a wild, fascinatingly bleak adaptation that seizes on the book's more lurid motifs.

Wuthering Heights is stunningly shot and beautifully acted. It puts you inside the minds of Cathy and Heathcliff in a way no other adaptation has done before.

Cuts beneath the romantic accretion of decades of movie and TV adaptations to penetrate the dark heathen heart of Emily Bronte's 1847 novel.

Most of what's here is interesting enough to be valuable on its own right without quite managing to be "good".