Jane Eyre: Critic Reviews

Has a few token thunderstorm-on-the-moors scenes but lacks a grand, mythological design. The movie is choppy and prosaic.

A splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie.

In its superbly spare execution, the newest adaptation of Jane Eyre is both faithful to Charlotte Bronte's classic and distinctively original.

While qualifying as the most gorgeously appointed and finely detailed version of the novel so far, still lacks the element of essential fire to make it come fully, even subversively, to life.

This is one of the better Jane Eyres I've seen onscreen, a conception that forsakes movie-groomed glamour for a plainer, less compromised beauty.

Using Bronte's text as the basis for an inquiry into free will versus servitude, Fukunaga mounts a subtly shaded, yet emotionally devastating, examination of what it really means to choose one's own way.

Though there's enough to admire intellectually here, every "Jane Eyre" should also deliver some emotional swoons.

Ms. Wasikowska works with economical purity within the novel's 19th-century English setting. Jane's personal power seems entirely her own, rather than some anachronistic notion of self-empowerment.

Fukunaga's superbly executed direction and careful staging speak very rarely, and yet say so much.

Wasikowska's Jane is as watchful as only a damaged soul can be, and, when challenged, frighteningly fast.

It captures the elemental Bronte passions yet again.

Mia Wasikowska, from Australia, is a relative newcomer who must essentially carry "Jane Eyre," and succeeds with restraint, expressing a strong moral compass.

To no one's surprise, the story still works like Gothic gangbusters, thanks in part to reliable back-court support from Judi Dench (as Mrs. Fairfax) and Sally Hawkins (as Jane's venal guardian).

By opening their movie with the mature Jane, the filmmakers forge an emotional bond between her and the audience.

There is not a drab image or a middling performance in the piece. The freewheeling adaptation drops needless scenes and spurs the story ahead with galloping momentum.

Somehow Wasikowska makes it all seem much more personal, more real. With her stark, starched dresses and blunt, elastic face, she draws you in, making both Jane's pain and incredible resolve tangible.

Beauty, along with a sense of mystery, is what audiences expect in a Gothic romance, and Fukunaga delivers with carefully composed shots of austere landscapes and shadowy Victorian opulence.

You gotta hand it to Charlotte Bronte. One hundred and sixty-four years since she gave hyperkinetic Victorian schoolgirls their first sleepless nights, she's pulling them in all over again.

The candlelight flickers exquisitely even as the passions are slow to ignite in this spare, shrewdly acted but not especially vital retelling of Jane Eyre.

After 160 years, this is a story that still grips the heart and the mind.

Pretty as a postcard, it's also a calling card picture and one that reminds us that women other than Jane Austen wrote timeless, rich tales of romance in an age when women were little more than property.

Luminous in The Kids are All Right and Alice in Wonderland, Wasikowska makes drab seem rad in director Cary Fukunaga's insightful rendering of Bronte's gothic love story, a new classic version of this oft-told tale.

Anyone who savours shades of grey will have a feast.

Cary Joji Fukunaga has very likely surpassed all previous cinematic versions of "Jane Eyre."

Wasikowska is the revelation here -- her wary, intelligent face tells us volumes about this abused but unbowed young woman. But the small roles are also beautifully cast.