Brontë’s hills are alive ...with sex and seances
Emily Cert: 15, 2hrs 10mins
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
Cert: PG, 1hr 46mins
Halloween Ends Cert: 18, 1hr 51mins
The makers of Emily, a fine new biopic of the writer Emily Brontë, are probably hoping you’ll come out of their film and rush off to read, or reread, her only novel, Wuthering Heights. Me, I came out quietly singing the Kate Bush song of the same name to myself and wondering if I could remember that extraordinary dance.
Never mind the moors, there’s certainly something wily and windswept about the Emily Brontë portrayed here by the Franco-British actress Emma Mackey, best known for TV’s Sex Education. This Emily is stubborn, reclusive and doesn’t like meeting new people… although she might just make an exception when a handsome new curate, Mr Weightman (Oliver JacksonCohen), arrives in Haworth.
It needs to be stressed that what actress and now film-maker Frances O’Connor has made here is a fictionalised biopic. It takes the few facts that are reliably known about Emily and then embroiders them with fiction.
What O’Connor is offering is a suggestion of the sort of short life Emily Brontë might have experienced to write a novel as strong, cruel and passionate as Wuthering Heights. At one memorable moment, a family parlour game almost becomes a seance, as
Emily’s dark side emerges. At others, she and brother Branwell do a lot of peeking through windows, just as Cathy’s ghost would at the start of the novel.
But, most controversially, this is an Emily Brontë who discovers sexual passion. Some will say she must have done to write Wuthering Heights, while others will argue that she could just as easily have imagined it.
Either way, the end result is a dark, stylish and authentic-feeling film that adds to our understanding of all three Brontë sisters, has distant echoes of The Piano and seems certain to be among the contenders when British film award season moves properly into gear. Mackey and O’Connor have much to be proud of.
American children’s book Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile gets a live-action makeover for a new feature-film version, although obviously Lyle – a singing crocodile who lives in a New York attic and suffers from stage fright – remains a computergenerated visual effect.
And maybe that’s why the film never quite takes magical flight, despite some undeniable attractions. Javier Bardem is unexpectedly terrific as the veteran magician who thinks he might finally find fame when he stumbles across a singing crocodile.
There’s an undeniable charm as the story picks up some years later with Lyle befriending a lonely little boy whose family have just moved to New York, but overall it feels thin. However, it will certainly fill a chilly half-term afternoon.
It may not have been to everyone’s taste but there’s no doubt that Jamie Lee Curtis delivered one of the iconic performances of her career when she appeared in the original Halloween back in 1978. You know, the one that costarred Donald Pleasence and first introduced us to the insane slasher-killer Michael Myers. She graced the 1981 sequel and two films marking their 20th anniversary, but then didn’t return to the endless, blood-splattered franchise until 2018, beginning a trilogy that I hope brings the excessively sanguinous series to a close. The first was surprisingly good, the second terrible and the third, Halloween Ends, is… well, decent enough if you like this sort of thing. Suddenly there is a new killer in the thoroughly body-strewn town of Haddonfield, Illinois, but has Myers, ‘the personification of evil’ as Laurie (Curtis) describes him in the book she never quite finishes writing, simply passed on his skills to a new disciple? Or is he lurking in the dark Halloween shadows, waiting to return?
Neither the answer nor the body count will surprise you.