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...

Stockholm Bloodbath review – like Game of Thrones scripted by Guy Ritchie

Based on a real mass killing, this 16th-century tale of backstabbing and beheadings is a clunker with a laddish edge

‘A great deal of this actually happened,” reads the title card at the start of this action-packed historical epic. Possibly. But it’s unlikely that anyone actually said these words. Like an episode of Game of Thrones scripted by Guy Ritchie, there is a laddish finesse to the dialogue in this 16th-century tale of backstabbing and beheadings. “That sounds like a load of bollocks,” splutters the Danish king Christian II to an adviser in one scene. The actors are mostly Danes and Swedes speaking lines in English, plus a few Brits with a slight Scandi tinge to their accents.

The film is based on real events: the mass killing of Swedish nobles in 1520, ordered by Danish king Christian II (Claes Bang). The script gives history a revisionist twist or two: namely by adding a pair of aristocratic Swedish sisters, beautiful Anne (Sophie Cookson) and skilled hunter Freja (Alba August). The film opens with a massacre at Anne’s wedding perpetrated by King Christian’s attack dogs. The villains are all introduced with geezerish-gangster nicknames: there’s Didrik Slagheck (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) “AKA evilman”. Another is “guy with scar”.

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