Bright Star

Directed by Jane Campion

(PG)

***

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English poet John Keats falls for the girl next door.

Bright Star “satisfies a hunger we may not have known we had, a hunger for an exquisitely done, emotional love story,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Director Jane Campion “makes us feel” the unfulfilled longing between John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his neighbor Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), who met two years before the English poet’s death from tuberculosis, in 1818. Marrying “heartbreaking passion” with “formidable filmmaking restraint,” Campion delivers “one of the most moving and transporting” film romances in years. Because they could never afford to marry, their relationship was necessarily one of “bridled passion,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. Still, Campion sometimes keeps too much of a distance, and the film comes across as “detached” rather than rapt with desire. She seems more caught up in Keats’ poetry than in the doomed affair that inspired it. Fortunately, Campion often lets the poetry speak for itself, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. By using Keats’ still “organic and thriving” verse to express his emotions, she makes him and Brawne seem like “timeless lovers, not fossilized ones.”