What a beautiful movie!

That was an excellent one.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Decent movie, but very bland. Boasts another one of those epic, passionate, let-the-heavens-fall unions between soulmates where it turns out that the soulmates do not like or trust each other. Strangely enough this fact doesn't register with the makers of the movie, who continue to treat a shallow and uneven affair as if it were a match made in heaven. (But then, the Victorians needed very little : they were happy with a roof over their head, two square meals a day and a steady supply of deathless poetry.) "Possession" doesn't contain much in the way of surprises : I guessed the big reveal somewhere halfway during the movie, and I'm no sleuth when it comes to anticipating plot twists. It's all very neat and staid and orderly, which is somewhat ironic for a story devoted to the blazing rapture of passion. We're talking topiary garden here, as opposed to the verdant opulence of a paradise filled with forbidden fruit.Not an unpleasant movie, but to be avoided by people suffering from histriobisrepetitapseudoportentouspapyrantiquiphobia (a morbid fear of characters gazing at old letters and saying, repeatedly, that this stuff is, like, really relevant and valuable).

It is extremely difficult to condense such a lengthy and complex novel into the time available in a film (it's a great shame the BBC have not created a TV series in order to do the story justice). Clearly difficult decisions have to be made about what to include, what to leave out and how much "backstory" to explain. However if I had not read the book I would probably not have understood some important elements of the story. It is also difficult to understand, or excuse, some of the changes made regarding characters. It's obvious why Roland is American rather than British, i.e. to appeal to US viewers, but why is the excellent American female character Lenora completely missing? which means also missing out the story line of Lenora and Blackadder following Maud and Roland to France. Sadly several other really interesting female characters are missing including Val (Roland's unhappy girlfriend), Beatrice Nest (the middle aged academic who guards Ellen Ash's diaries and warns Roland of Croppers planned crime) and Sabine (Christabel's French niece who's diaries tell can important chunk of the story of Ash and Christabel). Despite some good efforts on the part of the actors involved the portrayals of characters that are included are all rather superficial. This makes it difficult for the viewer to feel any empathy or to be moved by their fate e.g. when Blanche commits suicide we don't really care because we don't really know who she is. Similarly the plot is so briefly sketched it doesn't engage the audience well e.g. as we only just about realise that Christabel is pregnant we don't particularly wonder what happened to the child. Some of the photography and scenery is beautiful but very obvious. Not including the great storm of 1987 in the graveyard scene as A S Byatt did is inexplicable! Its as if the director was determined to remove anything interesting or dramatic.

Let me start out by saying that I absolutely love the book. However, I tried to watch the movie unbiased, since even a failed adaptation might be quite enjoyable as a movie in its own right.Sadly, it wasn't.The movie had some (okay, maybe two or three) great scenes. Jeremy Northam (as Randolph Henry Ash) and especially Jennifer Ehle (as Christabel LaMotte) manage to convey intriguing characters, even with very limited time and dialogue. Too bad, though, that a movie revolving around two poets should contain so little poetry - Ash and LaMotte supposedly recognise each other as kindred minds and succumb to the power of each other's words, but what we actually see is just another pretty couple falling rather randomly in love. But whereas Northam and Ehle could still be quite believable as poets, Paltrow and Eckhart fail utterly as scholars. They do not say a single intelligent or scholarly thing. The only academic zeal they display is the occasional petty theft. They do not show any appreciation of their research subjects - Eckhart's character in particular seems too stupid to even copy-and-paste an undergraduate paper together, let alone to be the type of guy who would devote his life to the analysis of Victorian poetry. And I'm not even talking about the utter ridiculousness of Paltrow, with her perfectly plucked eyebrows and carefully applied layers of makeup, talking about her 'feminist sisters'. ...oh, Aaron Eckhart and his infuriating grin and pasted-on 'brashness' - how I wanted to punch him in the face. But I digress.Now and then, fragments of subplot can be discerned among the endless demonstrations of Paltrow and Eckhart's painful lack of chemistry. Mortimer Cropper occasionally pops up, but it is hard to tell why, since none of his brief appearances influences the main storyline in any way. (Apart from one of the final scenes of course, which I will not spoil, but here, too, he somehow conveniently disappears when it's time for Paltrow and Eckhart to steal the show again. They must have killed him off-screen, or something.) Also, a solicitor is introduced, but his function remains a mystery. The presence of these unnecessary elements is even more painful in the face of the absence of some much more obviously valuable ones - like Val, or Leonora. They could even have introduced an actual Roland, rather than two versions of Fergus Wolff! They could have used the time devoted to the useless solicitor by including some actual poetry!But, well, who needs poetry when we can have two pretty people kissing their way towards a cardboard happy ending?

After watching the movie, I now want to read the book. I am a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow. She reminds me of Catherine. This is a great romantic movie that has great flashbacks between 21st century and 19th century England. Great plot. I think the main character played as an American worked - somewhat out of his depth when playing against the the Maud Bailey character - but it seemed natural that they were attracted to each other. Just as Jonathan is attracted to Catherine, and yearns to be close to her, so Roland's and Maud's desires surface and cannot be denied. The story unfolds with elements of mystery that keep you wondering. And, what makes this move for me is that, at the end, all the main characters in the story have "happy endings"... this is what I feel makes for a great romantic movie. If only it was so in real life.