recommended

one of my absolute favorites!

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Yes I know the Emily Bronte novel deals with a dark subject of a man driven to virtual madness by boyhood mistreatment and his perceived betrayal by a woman whom he loved but for me this film was a terrible interpretation. It was woodenly acted and given the wonderful language of the novel the script here was a joke. Disturbingly there was gratuitous killing of animals seen on film and this is simply unacceptable. Technically the film was very often annoyingly jerky (imagine the film from a hand-held camera on horseback) and essentially all night time scenes far too dark to see. Yes the reality of the era was that in poor stone farm houses it would have been very dark and dingy but with modern digital cameras such 'natural light' scenes can be enhanced so that the audience can see -as was well shown in the recent excellent BBC Wolf Hall series. I was excited at the thought of a major role in a classic of English literature going to a non-white actor and that was the one good thing I can say but everything else was dreadful. Don't bother is my advice.

Being a hardcore fan of Emily Bronte's original novel, I have seen the majority of the available film and television versions of Wuthering Heights. Not one does the book justice, but most are entertaining or even works of art in their own right. The only downright "bad" version I had seen up until yesterday had been the ungodly 2003 MTV adaptation, which features a whiny rock star Heathcliff and a Catherine with the personality of sandpaper. However, this recent adaptation looked excellent from the trailers, mixed reviews aside. While I was slightly disappointed to discover that Andrea Arnold's 2011 version only included the first half of the book, I had some hope because of the casting of Heathcliff (who was NOT white in the book) and the way I had heard she captured the bleakness of the Yorkshire setting.But God, was this awful! One of the most pretentious, meandering films I have ever seen, a true chore to get through. The majority of the film is nothing but shots of dead animals and the moors; while the setting is extremely important, I think Arnold put way too much emphasis on it in expense to the characters, though maybe that decision was fueled by the fact that most of the actors are wooden, with the exception of young Heathcliff and Catherine. There is no passion in a one of them, not ideal when adapting a story about obsessive passion. Maybe the repetitive nature of the film is supposed to echo the cyclic structure of the novel, but in a less entertaining or insightful manner? There's also a great deal of shock value in the film, likely put in there to emulate the way the original book was shocking to its 19th century readership. But most of it gets so silly: why are Hindley and Frances consummating their marriage out in the grass? Do we really need this many f-bombs in the script? Hey, why don't we kill another ram in loving detail? Or have Heathcliff practically make love to Catherine's corpse? Because shock value equals raw grittiness! Making the camera shake makes it "realistic"! This is Art! Okay, I'll be a little bit nicer from now on. There are some positive aspects: As mentioned, the scenery and child actors are lovely. There are a great deal of shots of Heathcliff observing the other characters and the like, emphasizing his status as an outsider. The general lack of background music was nice, but none of these elements can save this ship from crashing.This film is obviously attempting to bring WH into the realm of cinematic realism, but is that really the way to go with what is essentially a Gothic ghost story? That Arnold and her collaborators stripped out all of the supernatural aspects, such as the iconic moment of Catherine's ghost at the window, is telling of how much they had hoped to set this adaptation apart. And considering that the filmmakers' idea of "naturalism" is just stiff acting and shaking the camera as though the cameraman had consumed too much caffeine for his own good, it's not at all a worthy attempt. This is a film which is ineffective as art or drama; definitely not something I would willingly watch again.

I really liked this version. I love the book, and I like many of the interpretations people have made throughout the years, but this Heathcliff made the most sense to me. He wasn't just a brooding, selfish man, he had a real reason for his anger and hatred for his treating Kathy so coldly. Yes, he had his reason of course in the earlier ones, but it never felt fully plausible. This I could see. Having witnessed racism, judgment for no reason other than the color of one's skin, it made more sense that the people who treated him so horribly did. The other versions just didn't seem real, Heathcliff was just an angry, handsome white man (yes he was a Romany, but non of the actors who played him, that I saw, were) who people happened to be mean to. Here, though it isn't right, it was more true to form people treating him in such a way. I could believe it, and I could sympathize more with him.

What a waste of my time! I adored the book and this movie made me hate the story! Why couldn't they stick to the book and not turn it into some twisted and morbid time consumer. They put useless disgusting things in it that weren't even in the book! I turned it off halfway through, what a disgrace. And why was Heathcliff black? I'm not racist, but that was not in the book! All those disgusting bloody things in it too weren't right. At no point does Catherine lick Heathcliffs blood, what the hell was with that? And not to mention that Catherine was chubby. I can't believe this movie could've gotten so many high reviews. There must be some very twisted people out there to think this was complementing Emily Bröntes great story!