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...

The Drivers Seat (AKA Identikit) review Elizabeth Taylor captivates in bizarre 70s mystery

Taylor is both hammy and subtle as a woman on the verge of a breakdown in this preposterous but watchable 1974 drama that features an extraordinary cameo from Andy Warhol

It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was released under the title Identikit in the US. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.

Taylor plays Lise, a single woman of a certain age who is clearly on the verge of a breakdown. Lise lives in Hamburg, where she is seen buying oddly garish, multicoloured clothes in a department store, high-handedly terrorising the sales assistants and announcing that these garments are appropriate for the warm, southern climes to which she says she is heading. We first see Lise drifting through a surreal department filled with naked mannequins; perhaps The Driver’s Seat has been an influence on Peter Strickland.

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