Emily

First. The things I liked: the music the costumes the fact that it was filmed in Haworth and roundabouts it's beautifully shot.

However, it veered so far away from anything known about about Emily's character or known facts about the Brontes as to be hilarious!

Snogging your employer's wife in church in Victorian Yorkshire? I don't think so!

Some events and even names lifted straight from Wuthering Heights and presented as real life.

The extremely reserved Emily transformed into a raving hysterical nutter with attachment issues.

Emily and Wuthering Heightskerp inspiring film makers, but anything that does do either justice remains sadly elusive.

Emily is a real shame as it is a film that had some great promise but failed to engage me.

This is largely because I felt like I was never actually let behind the curtain, and was kept at a frustrating distance from the characters. I never got under the skin of Emily, or any of the Bronte's really, and left the film with far more questions than answers. For a biopic, even a highly embellished one, this is unforgivable.

Given what the film was trying to achieve and the angle it took, I was surprised by how little emotion was stirred in me. I wanted to feel more watching this film but just never felt like I was part of it.

This lack of connection and emotion wasn't helped by the fact that the colour palette (whilst appropriate) was very bleak, the runtime was quite unforgiving, and the acting was rarely noteworthy.

Unfortunately all this adds up to create an unremarkable film about a remarkable woman. Which in itself is an impressive feat I suppose.

Over-long, plotless and pointless with a highly improbable, corny drawn out story line. If I had been on my own I would have left an hour and a half earlier!! Overall the acting was mostly wooden with fluctuating accents from main characters. There was far too much atmospheric thunder and heay rain (its not like that in Yorkshire!) in outdoor and some indoor sequences. Predicatble story. Filled with groan inducing cinematic cliches too numerous to list and discuss here. The six star rating is for the authentic looking interior sets and excellent lighting . I sure that I will soon forget it. But some might like it.

Emma Mackey is really quite strong in this imagining of the life (and love) of "Wuthering Heights" author Emily Brontë. Portrayed as a rather shy and reluctant woman, she lives in the shadow of her successful teacher sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) with her somewhat wayward brother Bramwell (Fionn Whitehead) under their outwardly imperious father Patrick (Adrian Dunbar). Remember this is set at a time when women were little more than chattels, and her father hoped that she would follow her sister into one of the few professions readily available to ladies of the day. The arrival of curate "Weightman" (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) causes many an heart to flutter and after a rocky start, the two begin to bond... This is a great looking film, shot at the original West Yorkshire home of the Brontë family and together with the almost biblical amounts of thunder and rain, the whole setting is effective in delivering a sense of just how this family lived their life in rural 19th century England. The cast work well together, there is an increasingly engaging - if somewhat bamboozling towards the end - chemistry between Mackey and OJC and there is a sparing degree of dialogue. The story is very much of the woman, and not so much of her writing, and it develops using a potent combination of the powerful score, bleak scenery, some humour - usually deriving from the antics of Bramwell - and from our own imagination, to make this so very different from many similar style period bio-dramas. I didn't think that pace was a problem, but it is a slow burn. The establishment of the characters takes it's time, so don't expect it to hit the grass running. That said, though, I found it a thoughtful and characterful depiction that smacks well of plausibility, love and of mortality, too.

This is is well-directed and well acted with beautiful photography. It is loosely based on Emily Bronte's life and depicts events which are mirrored in Wuthering Heights. It is not hard to find factual errors eg.it was Anne who had the relationship with William Weightman, but if you just treat as a story in its own right, it is a great piece of film-making. I was reminded that the films: Becoming Jane and Shakespeare in Love, were also about famous authors used failed romances as the impetus to write. I noticed that the first edition of her book had her own name inside the cover. Like her sisters she wrote under a pseudonym: Ellis Bell.