Wuthering Heights review

The interesting British filmmaker Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank, Red Road) retells Emily Brontë’s famous 19th-century tragic-romantic novel with arresting eccentricity: The scratch of a tree branch on a windowpane and the smear of mud on a dress hem signify more than any dialogue. Heathcliff is black, and Cathy, his doomed love, is first seen as a fierce little girl whose passionate bond with the young adopted boy (described by Brontë as a “little Lascar”) is of an almost animal physical nature. Willful, meandering, and intriguing, this Wuthering Heights is similarly headstrong. B+