A misguided 'Wuthering Heights'

    In the 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë painted a Gothic picture drenched with complex characters, class conflict, calculated cruelty, obsessive love, and haunting landscapes.

   Now, we have director Emerald Fennell’s version, which uses the novel as a springboard for a story that includes domination and submission and masturbation as a famed literary duo — Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) and Cathy (Margot Robbie) — again play out their disastrous connection.

   More sensual than sensible, this Wuthering Heights includes a moment in which Heathcliff licks the wallpaper in Cathy's bedroom. How could he resist? The wallpaper had been designed to mirror Cathy's lustrous skin, including even her veins.

  Apart from the novel, my favorite Wuthering Heights adaptation remains director William Wyler’s 1939 version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Devotees of the novel complained that Wyler had softened Bronte's story of insanely possessive love. It was a fair criticism. The novel never was an exaltation of romantic love, as has sometimes been proclaimed.

   In the 2026 version, Fennell performs open-heart surgery on the story in an attempt to reveal the gooey ooze of its innards and palpitating passions. 

   I admired the audaciousness of Fennell’s previous work (Promising Young Woman and Saltburn) but found her Wuthering Heights to be a sometimes silly attempt at giving a 19th-century novel some contemporary spin. 

   Moreover, the movie’s preoccupation with production design and costume prove distracting. The costumes, particularly Cathy's ridiculously ornate dresses and jewelry are presented as emblems of ostentation, snarky, overstated jokes. The same goes for the preposterous decor of the upscale manse where Linton (Shazad Latif), a landed aristocrat, cloisters Cathy. 

   When Linton becomes Cathy's husband, the marriage provides the main reason for Heathcliff -- Cathy's poor unrefined soul mate -- to vanish from the West Yorkshire moors for five years. He returns as a wealthy man who purchases Wuthering Heights, the place where he and Cathy grew up,  a downscale slide from Linton's carefully manicured Thrushcross Grange estate.

   I’m not going to rehash the story here, but Fennell, who also wrote the screenplay, presents it in outline form, establishing a bond between Robbie’s Cathy and Elordi’s Heathcliff early on and carrying it through to what’s presented as a tragic conclusion for two people who are treated as symbols of an enduring link that can't be broken.

  Many characters from the book have been excised. Among those that remain: Hong Chau plays Nelly Dean, Cathy’s devoted and perhaps cunning companion; i.e., a servant. Martin Clunes portrays Cathy’s father, a debauched, alcoholic gambler, a gaseous human belch of a man.

  Then there’s Isabella (Alison Oliver), Linton’s bird-brained ward, who — in this version — consents to being abused and demeaned by Heathcliff as part of his vengeful manipulations. Who knew? Isabella’s into degradation. Heathcliff's marriage to her is an undisguised act of revenge.

   The movie begins when Cathy and Heathcliff (Charlotte Mellington and Owen Cooper) are children who witness a public hanging, an event that establishes Cathy as a grinning, untamed child who seems to enjoy the brutal moment.

    Soon after the hanging, Cathy's father rescues Heathcliff from the streets and decides to raise him. Cooper, who delivered an amazing performance in the series Adolescence, suggests depths that the screenplay never plumbs when the adult Heathcliff arrives. I half-wished the movie had remained in Cathy and Heathcliff's childhoods.

   As for the main actors, Robbie turns Cathy into a woman of bratty insistence. I wasn’t sure what Elordi was doing as Heathcliff. At times, he seemed to be posing for a Hunks of the Moors calendar.  His Yorkshire accent proves variable. 

   In the novel, Heathcliff is described as dark of complexion, and some have argued that Heathcliff should have been played by an actor of color. Heathcliff's skin tones aren't all that define him, though. Rejection and mistreatment have bent him toward obsession and longing. 

   Fennell has taken a classic story and tried to burnish it with a variety of outre flourishes that play like italicized statements. The riches of Thrushcross Range contrast obviously with Wuthering Heights, the decaying house in which Cathy and Heathcliff were raised, and which here looks as if it might double as a set for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake.

   So, no, this is not your grandmother's Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy eventually consummate their relationship to the accompaniment of much heaving breath. Cathy and Heathcliff are often caught standing in downpours; they're awash in nature or maybe they don't have enough sense to get out of the rain. 

    But such melodramatic touches, Anthony Willis' brooding aggressive score and the use of tunes by Charli xcx suggest that Brontë’s work needed boosting, perhaps due to 19th century period constraints. If so, it's a misguided choice: Bronte's resonant themes should have been enough to provide some insight into our wealth-gap dominated moment.

   Fennell has put the movie's official title in quotations, a signal that her interpretation will be, to put it mildly, "liberal."  Purists may see this 2026 version more as vandalization than interpretation, but it's probably too much to say that Fennell has made a Wuthering Heights in name only. Still, it’s close enough to let the idea roll around in your mind before moving on.

A triptych from Yorgos Lanthimos

     I had an oddly mixed response to Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness, the director's follow-up to the well-received Poor Things, which won a best-actress Oscar for Emma Stone.  

 Was I confounded? At times. Did I find the movie revelatory? Not really. Did I wonder whether Lanthimos has become a prisoner of his own stylized weirdness? That, too.

    Yet Lanthimos held my attention, even as I made peace with the fact that this over-extended movie (two hours and 45 minutes) wasn’t accomplishing much more than providing a showcase for the strange flights of imagination that characterize Lanthimos's work.

     Among them: severed fingers, intentional car crashes, nudity sans eroticism, a pool full of water derived from tears, and a frantic sexual foursome. 

     Lanthimos divides his movie into three distinct stories in which the same actors play different roles. A recurring character named RMF crops up in each of the segments.  

      Reunited with regulars Stone and Willem Dafoe, Lanthimos maintains tension with a signature blend of discordant sound design, unsettling music, and images that tease the surreal, the bizarre presented as if it were normal.

   The cast, which also includes Jesse Plemons in a featured role, fully embraces Lanthimos’s approach. Safe to say that actors who appear in Lanthimos films have a taste for stretching the borders of realism.

  So what the hell is the movie about? In the first segment, a controlling boss (Dafoe) tries to coerce a servile employee (Plemons) into crashing a car into another car, an act of obedience that could result in the death of the other driver. 

   In the second film, Plemons plays a police officer whose marine researcher wife (Stone) is rescued after being stranded at sea. She returns but seems to be a facsimile of her “real” self, a synthetic doppleganger who is asked by her suspicious husband to cut off different body parts to prove how far she'll go to prove her love.

   Film three finds Stone playing a woman who leaves her husband and daughter to join a cult run by a leader (Dafoe) who expels her after deeming her impure. 

   None of these brief descriptions do justice to the three segments, which are full of intricacies and digressions and which make room for performances by Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamaoudou Athie, and Yorgos Stefanakos. 

    I’m not a Lanthimos devotee, although I greatly admire The Favourite and Poor Things. Still, I’d say that Kinds of Kindness qualifies as a lesser work that suggests themes — abuse of power, submission to power, and insanity made commonplace — without exploring them deeply. The movie can be perplexing, funny in a deadpan way, and even off-putting. 

   Less lavish than Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels  like a sketchbook in which the director tests various ideas.  If you see the movie, you’ll notice that Lanthimos's close-ups have a cruel intensity, unless, of course, you’ve always wanted to examine every pore and blemish on Plemon’s face, to cite just one example.

   I felt no ill will toward Kinds of Kindness. Scorn might have been better than a giggle and a shrug accompanied by little desire to unpack the movie's mysteries any further. I'll offer this, though:

   At one point, Lanthimos makes use of the Eurythmics hit, Sweet Dreams. The song's lyrics, also featured in the movie’s trailer, provides a strong suggestion about what drives the movie’s characters:

   “Some of them want to use you 

   Some of them want to be used by you

   Some of them want to abuse

   Some of them want to be abused”

   As I said, not Lanthimos’s best work, but the director kept me watching with the mixture of attention and curiosity his work always demands.

Art, yes, but what about the hot water?

 

  Director Kelly Reichardt specializes in slow-moving movies that encourage viewers to linger. Put another way, you don't just watch Reichardt's movies (First Cow, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff), you live in and with them. 

  Employing minimal editing, no manipulative music, or startling plot twists, Reichardt allows viewers to inhabit the worlds she creates.

  In Showing up, Reichardt introduces us to a ceramicist (Michelle Williams) who makes miniature female figures, often in contorted poses that invite interpretation. 

  Williams's Lizzy might be the mopiest figure to appear in a movie this year. She’s alternately depressed or annoyed about being part of a dysfunctional artistic family while dealing with the pressures of preparing for a show.

  Separated from Mom, Dad (Judd Hirsch) makes functional pottery. Mom (Maryann Plunkett) runs the art school where Lizzy works, and Lizzy’s mentally ill brother (John Magaro) is tolerated by a family that considers him a genius.

   The family members all live in close proximity to one another.

   Reichardt effectively takes us inside this loose-knit community. But her approach raises an inevitable question: What’s to be gained from being there? 

  Sans emotional peaks, Showing Up can feel as mopey as Lizzy, a non-celebration of art-making in which a commendable lack of manipulation sometimes results in a kind of aesthetic inertia.

    While bringing Lizzy's family dynamics to light, the movie makes room for another artist, a sculptor played by Hong Chau, recently seen in The Menu and The Whale.

     Chau’s Jo also happens to be Lizzy’s landlord. Jo drags her feet about fixing Lizzy's broken hot-water heater, creating a source of constant aggravation for Lizzy. Jo’s also busy getting ready for her own art opening.

      As a retired potter, Hirsch's Bill can't resist ingratiating himself with a gallery owner who attends Lizzy’s opening at the behest of its reigning artist in residence (Heather Lawless).

     Amid the flow of daily life, a metaphor seems to arise. Early on, Lizzy’s cat maims a pigeon that has flown into Lizzy's home. Lizzy removes the bird from the house. It's later recovered by Jo, who assumes responsibility for the bird -- sort of.

    Jo often leaves the recuperating pigeon with Lizzy who carries it around in a cardboard box, another burden. The point? Artists suffer the same small torments as the rest of us while simultaneously trying to persevere in their work. 

    Wounds. Healing. Recovery. These, I suppose, are the metaphoric implications suggested by the bird.

      No one talks much about art or anything else for that matter. A sense of the ordinary pervades almost every scene and Reichardt dwells on Lizzy's statuettes as if they were creations of art historical importance. They were made for the film by ceramicist Cynthia Lahti. 

     We get to know Lizzy at a specific moment in her life, an achievement to be sure. But for me, Showing Up is hampered by an unrelenting insularity that can make its characters seem limited and even uninteresting.

    A narrow-gauge effort can be piercing. Sometimes, though, it's just narrow.

      

‘Whale’: Misery that doesn’t love company

  

A vast expanse of artificial flesh encases Brendan Fraser in The Whale, enabling the 54-year-old actor to play Charlie, a man who has compulsively eaten his way to a monumental 600 pounds. 

 Not surprisingly, Charlie is self-conscious about his weight: He teaches on-line writing courses at a local college but doesn't allow his students to see him. He keeps the camera on his computer off.

  Charlie's immobilizing bloat began when his gay lover committed suicide, a double tragedy because Charlie had left his wife (Samantha Morton) and daughter (Sadie Sink) to pursue what he expected to be the love of his life.

  Living alone in a cluttered apartment in a small town in Idaho, Charlie is visited by Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse, friend, and the sister of Charlie’s dead lover.

  Liz starts the dramatic clock ticking: If Charlie doesn't head to a hospital, his death from congestive heart failure is imminent, Liz tells him.

  Intent on self-destruction, Charlie refuses to budge. He relies on Liz to bring him hefty sub-sandwiches and has large pizzas delivered to his door. He leaves cash and tips in the mailbox so that the delivery kid doesn't see him.

   Much has been made of Fraser's performance. Many think he has put himself on an Oscar track. Some of this has to do with Fraser's previous work in movies such as Encino Man, George of the Jungle, and several Mummy movies, not exactly Oscar bait.

    Oscar nomination or not, Fraser deserves credit for creating a character who could have been little more than a gimmick. Flashes of humor peek through Charlie's bulk, assuring us that he retains his humanity. Maybe he's just a decent guy who lost control of himself.

    But two hours of watching Charlie wallow in self-recrimination isn't enough to fill a movie and that's where the trouble starts.

     As the supporting cast arrives, Aronofsky cranks up the unpleasantness.

     Charlie's visitors aren't exactly fully developed characters; they're illustrations of Charlie's problems: An estranged former wife (Morton); an aggrieved teenage daughter (Sink) who spews venom; and a missionary (Ty Simpkins) who believes faith and fervor can save Charlie.

     Put another way, The Whale is one sour movie, full of harsh encounters that can feel as repellent as Charlie's compulsive eating, which includes buckets of fried chicken and as many candy bars as his mouth can hold.

     The movie's title, by the way, doesn't refer to Charlie. When he's agitated, Charlie recites a passage from a cherished essay on Moby-Dick, repeating it as if it were a prayer. 

    Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and The Wrestler) peers into the waning days of an emotionally wounded man whose life has been sadly diminished. 

    Fair enough, but The Whale sometimes feels more like an intrusion than a movie, invaded privacy wearing the mask of drama.

    Toward the end, Aronofsky tries to give Charlie, and presumably, the audience, a redemptive lift. It's too late.

    Put another way: I think I was supposed to root for Charlie to be saved; I just wanted him to be left alone.

‘The Menu’: a tasty satire about foodies

     The Menu takes aim at restaurant obsessives, folks who'll pay a fortune to be served fashionably minuscule portions.

   Price tags, however, are anything but small. The well-heeled or wannabes willingly open their wallets. In return, they're rewarded with super creative dishes prepared under the guidance of executive chefs who have attained celebrity status.

      In The Menu, director Mark Mylod employs a strong cast -- led by Ralph Fiennes and Anya Taylor-Joy -- for a darkly hued comedy with an amply stocked side dish of horror. Food snobs beware, Mylod's coming for you. 

     For most of its one-hour and 46-minute run-time, The Menu serves its observations with a sharp satirical edge.

       The movie owes much of its success to Fiennes, who plays Chef Julian Slowik, the culinary genius who presides over a restaurant so exclusive it's located on an island where all the food that's served is locally harvested. Diners arrive by boat.

     When he introduces a new course to the assembled diners, Slowik claps his hands loudly and the kitchen staff -- visible to the diners -- snaps to attention.  Slowik has turned his staff into a paramilitary food force. 

      The only response to any question Slowik might ask: "Yes, chef."

       The diners are a select group. John Leguizamo appears as an actor whose career has hit the downside. He arrives with his assistant (Aimee Carrero), a young woman who's ready to seek greener employment pastures.

        Judith Light and Reed Birney play a couple celebrating their anniversary, although they don't seem especially happy about it. 

        Taylor-Joy appears as the date of a young man (Nicholas Hoult) who thinks he knows a great deal about food. Hoult portrays the diner who hopes to impress the chef with his vast food acumen. He's eager to genuflect at Slowik's culinary altar.

        Diners also include a powerful career-making food critic (Janet McTeer) and the editor (Paul Adlestein) who publishes her work. 

       A table of young tech execs (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro, and Mark St. Cyr)  tosses around credit cards with the kind of abandon that lets everyone know they believe in their own sense of entitlement.

      A memorably scary Hong Chau portrays the stern maitre d of the restaurant Hawthorne. She greets guests, gives them a quick tour of the island, and otherwise informs them of the rules by which they must abide if they're to get the most out of their dining experience.

      The meals are amusing. A lone scallop served on a rock drawn from the sea, for example. Or how about a bread course distinguished by the absence of bread? The guests (only 12 are allowed) pay $1250 per person for the evening.

      Aside from Taylor-Joy's outspoken character, most of the guests are pretentious jerks. The screenplay by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy leads these exemplars of privilege to their well-deserved, often violent comeuppances.

       Fiennes makes an imposing dictatorial chef, who regards himself as an artist. Slowik instructs patrons that they must taste, not eat. People aren't eating meals, they’re sampling food conceptions, many mimicking the ambitions of “molecular”  gastronomy.

       A study in austere modernism, restaurant Hawthorne isn't just a place to eat, it's the physical embodiment of rarified consumer aspiration, which is pretty much what the movie’s about — not exactly a theme on which to feast but sufficient for some tasty grazing. 

                

Tiny people produce small payoff

After a clever start, the pleasures of Downsizing begin to shrink.

Let's get the movie's premise out of the way. Downsizing, director Alexander Payne's latest semi-satirical effort, imagines a world in which it's possible to shrink people to a height of five inches. Why would anyone submit to such diminishment? Because those who shrink can buy their way into the good life with very little money. Small people help society, too. They can consume all they want without devouring obscene amounts of the world's dwindling resources.

The first hour of director Alexander Payne's Downsizing has been made with cleverness and nicely executed effects, but what starts as an imaginative and amusing look at the ways in which a scientific "advance" can be commercialized eventually degenerates into a morality lesson for the main character who must be schooled in the ways of life and love.

Payne begins in bravura fashion when we meet Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen (Rolf Lassgard), the inventor of downsizing. I won't spoil the reveals of these early scenes, but they give Payne an opportunity to play with scale in ways that surprise and amuse. Lassgard's Asbjornsen is a true believer: He thinks downsizing can solve the world's ecological problems.

The story then shifts its focus, introducing us to Matt Damon's Paul, a disaffected occupational therapist whose ambitions have been thwarted. Paul's wife Audrey (Kristin Wiig) wants to move into a better house, but Paul can't afford to pay for Audrey's dreams. As a result, Paul and Audrey are stuck living the drab life in the Omaha house Paul inherited from his late mother.

The idea of "downsizing" begins to take on more appeal for Paul and Audrey when they meet a downsized couple (Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) at a school reunion. Sudeikis' Dave sings the praises of Leisureland. The residents of Leisureland may be small but their happiness is expansive, in part because they've left all their financial worries behind.

Once Paul and Audrey decide to downsize, the movie hints at a conflict that threatens to lift the story out of the thematically limited sphere of middle-class self-satisfaction that Payne so easily skewers.

At a bar after their pre-downsizing party, a drunk sneers at Paul and Audrey. Why should small people receive the same social benefits as large people? After all, small people contribute so much less to the economy. Aren't they ciphers?

Despite the tongue lashing, Paul and Audrey proceed to the downsizing station: Scenes at the reduction center are well executed and funny in a dry way: Payne treats this amazing process in a matter-of-fact fashion.

But Payne, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Taylor, has more in mind than a looming clash between resentful big folks and happy little people. He enlarges the movie by raising the stakes to say something even bigger and, in so doing, allows the movie to deflate.

The movie takes a turn away from itself with the introduction of some new characters: Christoph Waltz) portrays Dusan, an escapee from Eastern Europe, who seems savvy about life in Leisureland. Waltz's Dusan and his pal Joris (Udo Kier) are party animals who devote themselves to sensual pleasure and shady entrepreneurial efforts. Dusan's credo: Tomorrow be damned. Party on.

After one of Dusan's epic parties -- at which Paul samples his first hallucinatory drugs -- Paul meets one of the Vietnamese women (Hong Chau) who arrives with a crew to clean up the previous evening's mess.

Hong's Ngoc Lan Tran was transported from Vietnam to Leisureland against her will, something to do with her role as a staunch dissident. A shabby prosthetic device has replaced the leg Lan Tran lost during her ordeal. For a hot minute, Lan Tran was a political celebrity in Leisureland. Now, she runs a cleaning crew.

It's just here that the movie loses steam. Lan Tran introduces Paul (and us) to the Third World aspects of Leisureland, impoverished people who are even further removed from life's luxuries than Paul. Leisureland, we learn, has slums and some of its residents die for a lack of medical care.

Much is made of Paul's last name. He's Paul Safranek. No one seems to be able to say Safranek without mangling it, a running bit that suggests Paul's inability to establish himself in the world. Paul ultimately affirms his identity through exposure to those less fortunate than himself, folks who seem to be either Latino or Asian.

Speaking in a clipped style, Hong Chau becomes a jarring voice in the midst of Leisureland's soothing prosperity. Hong's expressiveness and determination in the face of her character's limited language skills can't quite overcome the stereotypical nature of the character she's playing.

As the movie progresses, Payne tries to deal with environmental catastrophe and the kind of love that's expressed by caring for others, turning the self-serving delusions of Leisureland on their head.

I guess that Payne wanted to transcend satire and find something human, but in the attempt, the movie loses touch with its resourcefulness. It becomes ... well ... downsized.