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From Jane Campion, Academy Award winner of The Piano, comes a sweeping love story that will carry you back through time to experience the passion and romance between acclaimed poet, John Keats and his beloved muse. London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23 year old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of high fashion. This unlikely pair began at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she was unimpressed not only by his poetry but also by literature in general.
Add Jane Campion's rich, sensuous, quietly thrilling
Bright Star to the very short list of admirable films about writers. In this case the writer is John Keat! s (Ben Whishaw), the Romantic poet who died at age 25 believing himself a failure. The movie, set during his last several years, focuses on his playful friendship with and evolving love for Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the independent-minded young woman who lived next door in Hampstead Village and was, in her own fashion, an artistic spirit. Completing an ineffably fraught constellation--not exactly a romantic triangle--is Keats's host Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), who loves, esteems, and regards Keats with both pride and envy, and engages in an unstated rivalry for Fanny. All three performances are superb, with Whishaw adding to his gallery of artist figures (the olfactorily obsessed murderer in
Perfume, one of the Bob Dylans in
I'm Not There), and Cornish and Schneider taking top acting honors for 2009. As in Campion's
The Piano, others are party to the central story, and they have identities, personalities, and claims to intelligence and ! understanding that we appreciate without having it announced i! n dialog ue. Kerry Fox (redheaded wild girl of Campion's
An Angel at My Table nearly two decades ago) evokes Fanny's mother with a few brushstrokes, and Fanny's young sister and brother are watchful presences and de facto co-conspirators in the courtship. In addition,
Bright Star is the rare period movie to convey--without being insistent--what it was like to be alive in another era, the nature of houses and rooms and how people occupied them, the way windows linked spaces and enlarged people's lives and experiences, how fires warmed as the milky English sunlight did not. And always there is an aliveness to place and weather, the creak of boardwalk underfoot and the wind rustling the reeds as lovers walk through a wetland. Poetry grows from such things; at least, Jane Campion's does.
--Richard T. JamesonEmily Blunt and Rupert Friend star in the lavish historical drama,
THE YOUNG VICTORIA. Resolved to establish her authority over those who rule in her stead! , a young and inexperienced Queen Victoria (Blunt) draws strength from the love of Albert (Friend), the handsome prince who’s stolen her heart. Based on the courtship and early reign of England’s longest-serving monarch,
THE YOUNG VICTORIA is a majestic tale of romance, intrigue and power.
Stills from The Young Victoria (Click for larger image) Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend star in the lavish historical drama,
THE YOUNG VICTORIA. Resolved to establish her authori! ty over those who rule in her stead, a young and inexperienced Queen Victoria (Blunt) draws strength from the love of Albert (Friend), the handsome prince who’s stolen her heart. Based on the courtship and early reign of England’s longest-serving monarch,
THE YOUNG VICTORIA is a majestic tale of romance, intrigue and power.
Stills from The Young Victoria (Click for larger image) 
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