Sense and Sensibility review – blue-chip cast decorates Emma Thompson’s pleasurable Austen adaptation

Thirty years later, this richly enjoyable film is back with its quality lineup including Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant alongside Thompson herself Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing. With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly real...

She Came from the Woods review jolly romp raising the ghosts of 80s teen horror

Summer-fun-and-slashing tale of camp counsellors in bloody peril has clear cinematic ancestors but the young cast gives it fresh appeal

This silly but pleasingly jolly horror film offers an update on that perennial staple of the genre: the summer camp beset by a supernatural malignancy. And much like a campfire tale tailor-made to terrify impressionable listeners, this has a streak of self-referentiality that makes it feel ludic as well as lurid. After a 1940s-set prologue that’s explained later, the story settles into the 1980s, a time when this sort of summer-fun-and-slashing package with a large ensemble cast was all the rage (see Sleepaway Camp, The Burning, and of course the Friday the 13th series).

It’s the last day of the season at Camp Briarbrook, and the assorted kids get ready to head home after one last performance-assembly in the mess hall. The camp counsellors, who predictably span the spectrum from theatre nerds and dweebs to glossy teen beauties ripe for terrorising, are also psyched to spend the night partying once the kids are gone. The camp’s owners – paterfamilias Gilbert McCalister (William Sadler), his daughter (Cara Buono, Dr Miller in Mad Men), and her two sons Shawn (Tyler Elliot Burker) and Peter (Spencer List) – look on indulgently, little realising that by the end half of them will be murdered or at least traumatised one way or another. Is the mayhem caused by the undead spirit of camp nurse Agatha (Madeleine Dauer), who bears a grudge for things Gilbert did in the 1940s? Or is there a more quotidian explanation like bears, a hornets’ nest or UFOs?

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