Hideous Kinky
1997
Story about two sisters who moved with her mother to Morocco.
Titanic
1997
Heart-breaking epic tale about love between first-class passenger Rose DeWitt Bukater and poor artist Jack Dawson taking place on the board of Titanic.
Hamlet
1996
Adaptation of famous William Shakespeare's play placed into the 19th century.
Father died and left mansion to his son. Story about three daughters (Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret), two of them are all sense and the last is all sensibility.
A Kid on King's Arthur Court
1995
Young knight is pulled on Arthur´s court. He has to overcome the villian and rescue the Princess Catherine who has fallen in love with him.
Heavenly Creatures
1994
Based on the true story of Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, two close friends who share a love of fantasy and literature, who conspire to kill Pauline's mother when she tries to end the girls' intense and obsessive relationship.
Jude delivers terrific tragedy
No reader of Thomas Hardy's Jude The Obscure would ever mistake it for a comedy, so embrace Jude the movie as the desperately bleak yet hauntingly beautiful experience it is.
If melancholy is just too daunting, don't go. But if you're a risk-taker, then Jude, a chronicle of doomed love, pride and prejudice in Victorian England, boasts remarkable attributes.
Consider the breathtaking level of performance from the entire ensemble, from stars to one-line support players.
English actors Christopher Eccleston (the befuddled accountant in Shallow Grave) and Kate Winslet (Oscar nominee for Sense And Sensibility) play the star-crossed lovers Jude Fawley and Sue Bridehead. They engage the roles with such single-mindedness, focus and passion that watching them in private moments feels like an intrusion into reality.
In the story -- as faithfully adapted from Hardy as any movie could be by screenwriter Hossein Amini -- Jude is a rural bumpkin with dreams of achieving enlightenment and a new class status through education at Christminster.
But his lustful nature and a marriage to a pig farmer's daughter (Rachel Griffiths) sidetrack his plan and set up a grisly pig-slaughtering scene. Once that liaison ends, and badly, Jude heads to Christminster to work as a stonemason and eke out moments of solace in his private studies.
When Jude meets his cousin Sue (Winslet), his situation becomes complicated to extremes. Our brooding hero is smitten with this worldly and witty urchin and she with him. But this being a Thomas Hardy romantic tragedy and not a Hollywood happy movie, their relationship exacts a terrible price.
Sublimely directed by Michael Winterbottom (Butterfly Kiss), Jude explores issues of societal hypocrisy and prejudice in situations that would not resonate the same way today.
For example, Jude and Sue are ostracized for living together out of wedlock, a mortal sin in the 1800s, if hardly worth noticing here in the 1990s. Yet Hardy's non-moralizing 1895 novel was considered an outrage at the time.
One of the strengths of the film is Winterbottom's ability to plunk us squarely down in the milieu of the day and make us understand and believe the circumstances in which the characters live. Both Eccleston and Winslet, as well as Griffiths (the party girl Rhonda in Muriel's Wedding) and Liam Cunningham (as the scholar who inspires Jude but whom Sue Bridehead unwisely marries), possess that uncanny ability to strip away their modernity and transport us back a century.
With its bitter leaves, Jude may not be everyone's cup of tea, yet it nourishes the soul.
Toronto Sun
By Bruce Kirkland
