Gothic Romance

Written and directed by Jane Campion
Featuring Abbie Cornish, Ben Winshaw, Paul Schneider, Kerry Fox

Jane Campion, we’ve missed you so. Her weird Australian/British/New Zealand movies that always have long boring stretches before some ungodly and violent act usually involving blood are so poignant. In the Cut, her last film, featured a full-frontal Meg Ryan and a decapitated Jennifer Jason Leigh. Campion’s Bright Star, a gothic romance about romantic poet John Keats and his relatively sexless but emotional affair with an 18-year-old girl-next-door named Fanny Brawne, isn’t as good as The Piano (no one’s fingers get cut off – but you can’t have everything) and is too long for the modern moron to appreciate. Still, you get languid death and depressing poems, which isn’t half bad...