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...

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl review – an unmissable, ingenious Christmas treat

Our favourite animated heroes return, facing arch nemesis Feathers McGraw alongside a malfunctioning AI gnome – it’s an exciting and utterly timeless joy

Forget Tom Cruise riding his motorbike off a cliff in Mission: Impossible. Wallace and Gromit are on a comfy narrowboat teetering on the edge of the Pontcysyllte aqueduct, having defiantly chucked a bunch of boots at the villain … weapons which, gloriously, have the sole purpose of facilitating a gag about something getting “rebooted”. Nick Park’s immortal creations return in the first Wallace and Gromit adventure for 16 years, a stop-motion animated sequel to the 1993 Oscar-winning short The Wrong Trousers. It’s exciting, ingenious, funny and an unmissable Christmas treat.

Our human and canine heroes are, as ever, inventors, cheese enthusiasts and warriors in the cause of righteousness and their new confrontation with wickedness involves references to Eric Morecambe, Buster Keaton and the Flintstones – but also to Virginia Woolf and John Milton. So as well as everything else, Wallace and Gromit are doing their bit to keep English literature alive in UK universities. As we join the story, Wallace has invented a new “smart” Gnome-robot, or Norbot (unsettlingly voiced by Reece Shearsmith) which helps around the house and garden. Wallace becomes increasingly infatuated with his new robo-helpmate and Gromit’s feelings are hurt.

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