Manages to bottle the fleeting feeling of spring bliss.

| May 20, 2022

Yes, it is a thing of beauty and, yes, things of beauty are joys for ever but we can also probably say this about them: they don't always add up to the most affecting movies.

| Aug 30, 2018

Wonderful attention is paid to detail, including clothing, furniture and highly-stylized behavior. What is missing is emotion.

| Jan 17, 2018

Director Jane Campion's most enthralling film since The Piano.

| Oct 11, 2017

[Jane Campion] shows us here the beautiful sanctuaries that word and image create together, and the reasons why life requires us ... to abandon them.

| Sep 24, 2014

| Original Score: A | May 6, 2011

Oh Bright Star, wouldst thou were a great film... but thou art not. Thou art good but bitsy.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 23, 2009

Jane Campion's film is as lyrical as you might expect but it's also enlivened with a bracing air of irreverence.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 17, 2009

Campion takes her time to tell her tender story, but the film rewards with a conclusion I found incredibly moving. This is certainly one of the best films of the year.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 16, 2009

Campion, who won fans with The Piano (1993) and lost them with the dismal In the Cut (2003) here returns to the top of her form.

| Nov 22, 2009

Bright Star is an admirable film made by a superb craftsman, but for me, Campion fails to deliver the big emotional punch she hopes to land.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 13, 2009

A combination of unstuffy dialogue, wise casting, unselfconscious performances and sensuous but never pretty photography makes Campion's version of the nineteenth century feel current but not anachronistic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Without major tension, conflict or crisis, Brawne and Keats simply mope about, moon at each other, talk about literature and wait for the great poet to die from tuberculosis.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Dramatically static from first to final frame, it charts the non-progress of the central relationship as a series of nineteenth-century feints and counter-feints.

Full Review | Nov 6, 2009

Steadfastness, truth and a simple, blazing, incandescent humanity. This is a literary life story in which life, for once, is the meaningful word.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Bright Star deals with the sonnets and the bonnets - top marks to the production and costume designer, Janet Patterson - with wit and restraint, and proves that a chaste romance needn't lack for passion, or poetry.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Bright Star is at once sublimely swoonsome yet marvellously down to Earth.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Campion has created another resonant paean to love's pain and joy, and gives new life to John Keats, too often now associated with dusty school books.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Bright Star is that rare and upbraiding thing, a film - perhaps the last one of the year - that seeks not to jam your emotions or scare you silly, but asks you to think about words.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 6, 2009

Despite being visually stunning, it's as dry as hell.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2009