Film Carew

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that, in Wuthering Heights – that eternally on-the-syllabus text that, as time ticks on, seems less remarkable as Emily Brontë's only novel and more remarkable as inspiration for one of recorded audio's greatest-ever pop-songs – there isn't a bit where some rural stooge calls Heathcliffe a “fookin' nigga”. So goes this joyfully profane to-screen translation by Andrea Arnold, whose complete lack of reverence for its source leads to one of the most radical adaptations of classic-lit ever brought to screen.

Arnold takes a fierce socio-realist tack (hence the kitchen-sink dialogue on loan from Ken Loach): the film naturally-lit, free from score, reverent unto nature, unafraid of true human behaviour, and almost entirely without dialogue. Throwing all the words away, Arnold is completely severing her film from the drawing-rooms of the costume drama; from those BBC frock movies that take place in stilted sets and on manicured lawns. Here, things are dank, dirty, and determinedly rural; the tale of charged, passionate, possessive love thrown, truly, onto those wiley, windy moors. It's a film not of 'landscape' – of a passive, pretty background – but of environment; where the dappled sunlight makes flowers glow, sure, but where the mud sticks to everything, animals are slaughtered, and a gale forever howls.

Wuthering Heights is a work of immaculate sound-design; in which the emotional tenor of its tortured, teenaged love is set by the ghostly moans of the wind's baleful howl. Arnold tackled stormy adolescent sexuality in her previous flick, Fish Tank, and that's how she reads Brontë's text. As, effectively, a star-cross'd tale o' two kids consumed by a desire they don't understand, and, then, inevitably, are tortured by; their inability to reconcile their passions – to either consecrate them or abandoned them – effectively pushing both to the edge of sanity. The novel harbours that darkness; and though Arnold's take on it shows little care at staying 'true' to the book, the picture captures the feeling and the fury of the Brontë, just in ways that a contemporary cinematic audience will feel. Meaning: it's essentially phenomenological: trying to capture how it feels to be in a place, physically, as a way of conveying how it feels to be in a place, emotionally. It's a piece of pure cinema whose anti-costume-drama stance is much like the central love therein: hot-headed and rebellious and teenaged, but also transformative, transcendent, and duly tragic.

A familiar dramatic divide in films chronicling The Troubles is to make it about families rent asunder, torn apart as brother fights brother, fathers rat out sons, and communities fracture with every bomb blast. Shadow Dancer – the latest narrative feature for James Marsh (whose career is, roughly: amazing documentaries (Wisconsin Death Trip, Man On Wire, Project Nim), so so fiction films (The King, Red Riding: 1980)) – does this, but in an elegant, detached, thinking-man's-spy-thriller kind of way; with a single mum hauled in by Clive Owen's sexy, sexy cop and forced to play informant on her very kin. Said single mum is played by Andrea Riseborough; who, as much as her career feels like it's ascending on some crossover-English-starlet arc, is usually cast as callow, meek, or mewling waifs; all pale skin and wide eyes and elbows. Here, that façade – and that element of her personality – is what Clive Owen's sexy, sexy cop plays on; his cocksuredness carrying command for a lady whose very family life is a moral quandary; who got roped into leaving a bomb at an empty tube-station platform, but whose conscience prevents her from getting fully militant. Thus, as much as it's about sisters and brothers and mothers all possibly betraying each other to the English or the Irish, to the accord-strikers or the hardliners, it's really about the moral conflict of one woman, and the desires she feels to do right, and the desires she feels for a sexy, sexy cop.

Safety Not Guaranteed pits 2012 indie cinema's two most omnipresent bodies – mightily-chinned everyman Mark Duplass and deadpan eye-roller Aubrey Plaza – against each other in a sweet, goofy romance that also doubles as a casual time-travel movie. Writer Derek Connolly and director Colin Trevorrow essentially fictionally do what Ben Steinbauer did with his documentary-of-our-times, Winnebago Man: taking an internet meme and granting a dignity to the subject of its schadenfreude. Here, the meme is an old classified ad soliciting participants for a future time travel mission. Through the film's sentimental lens, we are essentially posed one question: what if this person wasn't some backwoods nutjob suffering from delusions, but maybe someone who really is prepping for such a mission? It's notable that Shane Carruth, creater of the realist time-travel science-piece Primer, was invited to serve as a consultant on Safety Not Guaranteed's own scientific specs; meaning the film is officially alive to the possibility. But it's no nerd out, with the possibility of time travel being really real mostly a fairly-easy dramatic device to make us warm to the unlikely leading-man, and his journey from figure of pitiable mirth to man worthy of making out with our lead. In short: those expecting paradoxes may want to go watch Looper, as this is an amiable, crowd-pleasin' rom-com, really; replete with Jake Johnson as the tedious pussy-crazy-comic-relief stereotype. As much as it may have 'indie' film cred and a sly sense of humour, you can set your watch by the romantic developments: Plaza the sceptic and Duplass the daydreamer due to end up together, be it in the narrative now, the back, or the future.