My review of the new film of Wuthering Heights is up now at PopMatters:

From the second that it was announced Andrea Arnold was adapting Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, might have guessed that hers would be no ordinary costume drama. Arnold’s previous features, the bracing Red Road (2006) and unforgettable Fish Tank (2009), both mined a seam of bleak UK council estate angst via raw performances. The new film is similarly tough.

Arnold has not “modernized” the original text or packed it with appeals to the tween set, a la Alfonso Cuaron’s Great Expectations or Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet. Instead, she deploys her signature dramatic style, casting some unknown and scintillating actors, such that the film has a sandpaperish honesty that is true to Bronte’s messy source novel…

Wuthering Heights is playing now in limited release and should be expanding to several cities over the next few weeks.

You can see the trailer here, buckle up: