Pride & Prejudice (2005)
After early supporting roles as Queen Amidala’s decoy in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) and second fiddle to Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Keira Knightley proved a more than capable leading lady as Elizabeth Bennet. Director Joe Wright was obviously impressed with her work and subsequently cast her as the lead in Atonement (2007) and Anna Karenina (2012).
Thanks to his role as President Snow, Donald Sutherland has more cultural caché in the twilight of his career than any point since MASH (1970). Sadly, he’s pedestrian as Mr. Bennet and doesn’t bring anything to the role.
Brenda Blethlyn was fantastic in Secrets & Lies (1996), but you wouldn’t know it from her nondescript work as matriarch Mrs. Bennet.
Fortunately, Dame Judi Dench always elevates the material, and her performance as the manipulative Lady Catherine de Bourgh is the highlight of the film.
Joe Wright, whose work focuses on adaptations of celebrated novels about women, does a decent job adapting Jane Austen’s novel, but her work runs together and I can’t get excited for yet another movie about women seeking a husband to protect them.
Stranger by the Lake (2013)
I wish I could forget this vile film about homosexuals who meet for illicit encounters by a lake in the woods.
Stoker (2013)
India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) enjoys a typical adolescence until her father dies on her eighteenth birthday and her mysterious uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up at his funeral.
Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), India’s mother, is too detached and disinterested in her husband’s death and the sexual attraction between her and Charlie is heavy-handed.
Mia Wasikowska is a blank slate and never allows us to get into India’s head, making the central character frustratingly inscrutable.
Jacki Weaver is underused as Aunt Gwendolyn, who unsuccessfully tries to warn the family of Uncle Charlie’s checkered past.
Park Chan-Wook’s Oldboy (2003) is a fantastic, stylish film, but his English language debut leaves a lot to be desired.
Screenwriter Wentworth Miller (best known as Michael Scofield) claimed he only used Shadow of a Doubt (1943) as a starting point, but the two films share so much in common, this movie is better understood as a poorly executed remake of Hitchcock’s classic film.