Wuthering Heights: Press reviews

'a daring raid behind the lines of heritage English Lit. Director Andrea Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan strip the story ruthlessly down to its bare essentials: pain, anger and love.'

'It answers to something in the novel, both for its keen-eyed absorption in the elements, and its matter-of-fact awareness of human fragility.'

'Arnold's film looks astounding and there are clever choices in every scene.'

'Forget Kate Bush's flailing gothic fancies – Arnold's lit-pic embraces the novel's rough-hewn core and emotional cataclysms head on.'

'Shot in a boxy format with a drab, harsh palette that suits the weather and the mood of emotional and material deprivation.'

'Goes too far towards edgy in its quest to avoid the usual literary clichés.'

'A gutsy if not entirely successful interpretation of Brontë's tome.'

At Venice: 'Andrea Arnold's raw and affecting adaptation of Wuthering Heights will bring a new audience to Brontë's moorland classic.'

'In this movie there is too much photogenic, too little feral and, sadly, no Heathcliff worthy of the name.'

At Venice: 'A beautiful rough beast of a movie'

At Venice: 'Arnold has lost some of the magic of the text, which makes it far more difficult to have any emotional connection with the characters.'

'The novel and the 1939 film introduce Heathcliff as a fascinating, insoluble enigma. In Arnold's movie he's merely a puzzle, a tornado of resentment whirling destructively across the bleak and intimidating landscape. But the film is by no means negligible.'

'It isn't going to give you a good night out.'

'All of the book's poetry is gone; it isn't even a memory.'

'The withering depths.'