“Wuthering Heights”

Posted on February 11, 2026 at 2:40 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	ated R for sexual content, some violent content and language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness:	Some peril and violence, a hanging, medical crisis, sad deaths
Diversity Issues:	Class diversity
Date Released to Theaters:	February 13, 2026

Emerald Fennell’s new film is more of a a sexy perfume commercial than a version of the classic Emily Bronte novel. The title and character names are from the book as are the windswept moors that act as setting and metaphor. But the book is not a romance; it is a story of obsession, repression, grief, and generational trauma. This version changes some of the relationships and, significantly, backstories to center the passionate love affair between Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi).

The movie begins with a crude joke. We hear what sounds like a sexual situation, with bedsprings squeaking and increasingly heavy breathing. And then we see that the source of the sounds is….the last strangled breaths of a man who is being hanged. The crowd is watching it as great entertainment. And a young girl (Charlotte Mellington as young Catherine) is mesmerized.

Catherine lives with her dissolute, brutish father (Martin Clunes) in an isolated, once-grand home. There are a few shabby servants and a between-classes woman named Nelly (Hong Chau), the out-of-wedlock daughter of a nobleman, who serves as Cathy’s caretaker. Mr. Earnshaw impulsively brings home a boy he rescued from being beaten. He has no name, so Catherine dubs him Heathcliff (Owen Cooper of “Adolescence” as young Heathcliff), after her late brother.

Catherine and Heathcliff have an instant, deep connection, but it is not entirely reciprocal. They are a lesser version of Buttercup and Wesley; she takes advantage of him and teases him, he is never anything but devoted and sincere, and they never have any kind of honest conversation about their feelings or prospects. She sulks and flounces. When she makes them late for dinner, he takes a beating from Mr. Earnshaw by lying that he was responsible.

The tiny population of the home that gives the book and the movie its name is all the people in this isolated area of the moors until the wealthy Edgar Linton moves five miles away with his ward, Isabella. Fennell is always superb at giving us striking, spectacular images that tell us a great deal about the characters, and the Linton home is one of Production Designer Suzie Davies’ most stunning achievements. Catherine (now played by Robbie) looks almost feral as she goes through a garden wall to enter the Linton’s exquisitely civilized space.

Soon, Heathcliff leaves and Catherine is married to Edgar. She now has magnificent jewels and a series of fabulous gowns in gorgeous settings, a sharp contrast to the wildness of the moors. Just in case we don’t get the point, Isabella makes a doll version of herself and Catherine and puts them in a dollhouse version of the Linton mansion, which itself, like an infinite regression, has a miniature version so the dolls can play with their own dollhouse. Oh, and the Catherine doll has Catherine’s own hair, taken from her hairbrush.

Fennell has some wild details, including Edgar having Catherine’s bedroom painted the color of her complexion, down to her freckle, and Catherine peeking through the floorboards to watch her servants have sex in the stable, using the horse’s bridle as a sex toy. And, again, a departure from the book, when Heathcliff returns, years later, he and Catherine have an affair. Perhaps the most significant departure is eliminating several characters and the multi-generational elements of the story. Or maybe it is when characters in a sexual relationship of domination and humiliation, and the one who is dominated end up chained like a dog and forced to communicate by barking. There’s no reason to believe these people care about each other beyond the fact that there are literally no other people around.

Pretty people in beautiful settings yearning, hurting each other, having sex — eye candy, titillation, but very superficial. At least a perfume commercial is over quickly.

Parents should know that this movie has very explicit sexual situations and references including domination and bondage, an alcoholic and abusive parent, sad deaths, strong language, drinking and smoking.

Family discussion:

If you like this, try: the book and the other movie versions, especially the one starring Sir Laurence Olivier.

Spoiler Alert

Posted on December 8, 2022 at 5:06 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for drug use, thematic elements, and sexual content
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and marijuana
Violence/ Scariness:	Illness and sad death
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 9, 2022

TV Guide journalist Michael Ausiello fell in love with photographer Kit Cowan and wrote a book about their life together and Kit’s death from cancer called Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies. Like Love Story, we know from the beginning that we will be crying at the end. But we expect that it will be a tender, inspiring story, and it is.

Jim Parsons plays Ausiello, a man whose deep attachment to television — and to one show in particular I will not spoil — stems from and perpetuates a tendency to be introverted and self-conscious in his interactions with others, especially possible romantic partners. He calls himself an “FFK,” “former fat kid,” so he is insecure about his body.

Kit (Ben Aldridge) is handsome, confident, and outgoing. He has never considered making a commitment to any kind of romantic or intimate relationship. Both of them are surprised and scared to find themselves caring about each other. Michael is the one who confesses he has always dreamed of someone to lie under the Christmas tree with him, year after year.

They move in together. They lie under the Christmas tree. But they have some problems. Michael worries that Kit is cheating on him with a handsome co-worker. Kit gets impatient. Each of them is irritated with the very changes they introduced each other to. Michael, a non-drinker when they met, is now getting quietly snockered in the evenings. Kit, who didn’t watch much television when they met, is watching too much, even for Kit. Both, of course, are about distancing themselves from having real conversations.

Kit moves out, but they remain close. And then, after one more Christmas celebration, Kit tells Michael he is experiencing pain. Michael goes with him to the doctor and they have the conversation everyone dreads, the one that begins with, “I’m afraid the news is not what we had hoped.”

The movie balances our expectations for a movie love story with specifics about the perspective of these gay men and their friends in the capable hands of director Michael Showalter, who gave us a similar, fact-based story in “The Big Sick.” The title itself makes it clear that this one will not have a happily ever after ending. But it has some wise insights about the connections based on going through the direst circumstances together. Intimacy is terrifying, but in the reflected light of the even bigger terror of loss, we can achieve some clarity about risking all of the pain to face it together, to help each other through the worst.

Parsons leaves behind his iconic role in “the Big Bang Theory” to give us the tender-hearted Ausiello, who has to learn to make real-life connections beyond his attachment to his television “friends.” And Aldridge is endearing as Kit allows himself to be vulnerable. Over the closing credits we see a brief video of the real Kit, a scene re-created for the film. With the book and the movie, Michael has made a lovely tribute to Kit, to love, to being human, and to sharing our stories.

Parents should know that this movie has strong language, sexual references and situations, drinking, marijuana, and terminal cancer.

Family discussion: What pushed Kit and Michael apart and what brought them back together? What do we learn from the reaction of Kit’s parents?

If you like this, try: the book, Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies, and Ausiello’s Instagram account for Kit’s photographs

West Side Story (2021)

Posted on December 9, 2021 at 5:33 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, strong language, thematic content, suggestive material and brief smoking
Profanity:	Strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, references to drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Gang violence, knives, gun, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 10, 2021
Date Released to DVD:	March 21, 2022

Why remake a 60-year-old movie that won ten Oscars and is still beloved, even while admitting its shortcomings and its being quaintly out of date on some of the issues it raises? Because Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have taken the best from the original and made the essence of the story even more powerful and meaningful. “West Side Story,” the original itself a remake of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” itself a reworking of an Italian story that had at least three different versions before Romeo compared Juliet to the sun and Juliet asked what there was in a name. The themes of love, loss, fear, and anger will always inspire our stories, and the incomparable music by Leonard Bernstein, with lyrics by then then-25-year-old Stephen Sondheim, are as thrilling as ever in this new version.

Maybe there will be another remake 60 years from now, but it is hard to imagine it being better than this one. Spielberg’s gift for visual story-telling, with brilliant cinematography from Janusz Kaminski, production design from Adam Stockhausen, and editing by Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn match and enhance the muscular electricity of the Bernstein score. There are star-making performances from the entire cast, especially Ariana DeBose as Anita, Mike Faist as Riff, and Rachel Zegler as Maria. Rita Moreno, who won an Oscar for her performance as Anita 60 years ago, all but steals the movie as Valentina, a new role, replacing Doc, the owner of the convenience store. In this version, she is his widow, their own marriage a symbol of what Tony and Maria aspire to.

Kushner’s changes are subtle and judicious, making the story deeper and more urgent. The opening shots show us that the turf battle has already been lost. The wrecking ball is knocking everything down. The only home the Jets have ever known is being torn down “for slum clearance” to make way for a gentrification project that will include a high-end high-rise and the high-culture Lincoln Center for performing arts. When Anita sings in “America” about some day living in an apartment with a terrace, she is standing near a sign showing the glamorous building that will replace the town-down tenements.

The setting looks like a bombed-out war zone. This makes the the emotion more vivid and the stakes more concrete (in both senses of the word). When “West Side Story” was first written, juvenile delinquents were listed by a majority of Americans as one of their most important concerns, next to atomic weapons. In order to make the concerns of the gangs as visceral today, Kushner shows us why Riff and the Jets feel that everything is being taken from them. The detective tells them that all the white people in the community who were smart enough to get out are gone. They are, he says, “the last of the can’t make it out Caucasians.”

Everything that gave them a sense of power, belonging, and control (“little boy, you’re a man, little man, you’re a king”) is being reduced to rubble and replaced with spaces that would be alien to them even if they could afford them. There is dust everywhere, and everything is washed out, knocked down, and covered with grit. The Jets cannot fight City Hall. All they have left is their fury and what they use to assuage it — the feeling of brotherhood. They sing of the Jets as a family (“you’ve got brothers around; you’re a family man”) while Tony says he envies the Puerto Ricans’ strong, committed biological families. There is no one to take it out on but the newcomers who are even lower on the social hierarchy than they are, the Puerto Ricans. Riff says, “I wake up to everything I knew being sold or wrecked or being taken away by someone I don’t like.”

Their gang, the Sharks, is fueled by resentment at being treated like second-class Americans in their own country. And they, too, are worried about losing their sense of family. They want the opportunities available to white, native English-speaking Americans but they want to remain intact, insular, restricting their associations to those they can trust. Their internal conflict is shown in “America,” where the girls sing of what they can do and buy and the boys jeer at them for ignoring the bigotry they will face — while not being willing to go back to Puerto Rico.

Some changes reflect our more sensitive understanding of the very issues the original depicted. In this version, the Latinx characters are played by Latinx performers of different skin tones and no one wears brownface make-up. All of the performers do their own singing. In addition, the Spanish dialogue is not subtitled. Some gender/sexuality insults remain in the script but the character once derisively called “Anybody’s,” who we might now call non-binary, is portrayed with more depth. The dance numbers are less balletic, more a reflection of the energy of emotions the characters are feeling.

Kushner’s changes to the script are sometimes subtle but every one adds to the emotion and revelation of character. In this version, Tony has even more reason to be reconsidering his commitment to the Jets, and he has an example in Valentina, his employer and friend, of what is possible. The “Cool” song has much more of an impact here, sung by Tony to Riff when he discovers that Riff has bought a gun. “I Feel Pretty,” instead of a bridal shop, is sung in a department store, where Maria is an after-hours cleaner. The dance through the aspirational scenes of mannequins “enjoying” middle class life parallels the reference to the apartment with a terrace. And Tony takes Maria to see The Cloisters, a beautiful cathedral-like setting for “One Hand, One Heart” that evokes the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet.

This story is very much of its time but its themes, too, are timeless, and with this new version we can experience it with the deeper understanding of its themes, a new generation of performers making it as new to us as it is to them, and one nod to the past with Moreno reminding us that like the late Bernstein and Sondheim, brilliance is always forever renewing itself.

Parents should know that this movie includes strong language with some racist terms, sexual references and a non-explicit situation, drinking, smoking, references to drugs, and gang violence, with knives and a gun. Characters are injured and killed.

Family discussion: If the story took place today, who would be in the gangs and how would it be different? What do we learn from the “Office Krupke” song? Why do Riff and Tony see things differently? What advice would you give to Tony and Maria?

If you like this, try: the original 1961 film, “In the Heights,” the wonderful documentary about Rita Moreno, and “Romeo and Juliet”

Son of Saul

Posted on January 14, 2016 at 5:56 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent content, and some graphic nudity
Profanity:	Racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	None
Violence/ Scariness:	Intense and deeply disturbing Holocaust atrocities including shooting, gas chambers, graphic images
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 15, 2016
Date Released to DVD:	April 25, 2016
Amazon.com ASIN:	B01BZBOA30

As we move past the time when there are living witnesses to the Holocaust who can tell us their stories, we need more than ever voices like first-time writer/director László Nemes to tell the stories. I know there are those who will shrug sheepishly and say that they just can’t handle another one. But each story is about a singular individual who had a singular experience. And this Oscar-winning drama is distinctively different in subject matter and in the form of storytelling. It deserves careful attention.

The Nazis took more than lives in the concentration camps. They took identities and they took souls. Saul (Géza Röhrig), the title character, is a Hungarian Jew in an unnamed extermination camp near the end of the war. Because Hungarian dictator Miklos Horthy cooperated with the Nazis but did not allow them to take the 800,000 Hungarian Jews until he could no longer prevent it in 1944 (see Walking with the Enemy), Saul has only been there a short time. Throughout the movie, the camera is close to his face or at his shoulder as he numbly tries to hold on to his life and to some sense of himself amidst the horrific slaughter and nightmarish chaos all around him. We get only glimpses.

In the very first moments, we see him standing silently as a reassuring German voice tells the new arrivals that there will be jobs and food for them, as soon as they clean off in a shower. They leave everything they brought with them, clothes, jewels, money, photos, in the outer room and then, naked, walk into the gas chamber, where they are killed.

What happens to Saul is worse than death. He is a Sonder-kommando, a prisoner forced to assist in this process, from making the new arrivals feel a little less hopeless to ransacking their belongings and removing the remains, which the Nazis will not dignify with the term “bodies.” They are called “pieces.” And he is forced to be a part of it.

Somehow, a boy, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, survives the gas chamber. He is still breathing. So he is sent to the doctor (another prisoner) to be killed and autopsied, to help make the killing process more efficient.

And that is Saul’s breaking point. He becomes convinced that the boy is his son, though it appears likely he never had a child. This may be manifestation of trauma-induced delusion, or it may be an adaptive mechanism to restore his shattered sense of the world. He knows he cannot save this both in life. But perhaps in death he can do one kindness and provide the boy with a religious burial, away from the discarded “pieces.” Increasingly desperate, contrary to his previous flat affect, Saul seeks a rabbi who can say the mourner’s prayer over the boy. Throughout the film, we see quick glimpses of the ways other prisoners hold on to some tiny element of control. For some, it may be keeping a record. For Saul, who seems to see very little of what is going on around him, it is giving a boy a better death.

This insistence on a sacred burial at any cost is a direct link to Sophocles’ 442 BC play Antigone, the final chapter in the Oedipus trilogy. Three thousand years of human history later, and someone is still finding meaning by refusing to make one final compromise.

Parents should know that this is a Holocaust movie with scenes of Nazi brutality and disturbing themes and images including gas chambers, shooting, suffocation, and dead bodies, some nude.

Family discussion: How does the style of this film help to convey the experience of the concentration camp? Why was this boy so important to Saul? What were the special issues faced by the Sonder-kommandos and the doctor?

If you like this, try: “Conspiracy,” “Schindler’s List,” and “Labyrinth of Lies”

The Fault in Our Stars

Posted on June 5, 2014 at 6:00 pm

John Green’s best-selling novel, The Fault in Our Stars is the story of kids with cancer, but it is not about dying. It is about living. This exquisite adaptation is that rare film based on a beloved novel that does full justice to the source material without being static or talky. The screenplay is by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who showed exceptional sensitivity in the bittersweet love stories “(500) Days of Summer” and “The Spectacular Now” (also adapted from a beloved YA book and also starring Shailene Woodley), and it was directed by Josh Boone, of the underrated “Stuck in Love” (also starring Nat Wolff, who appears here as a friend of the central couple).

Remember the hospital scene in “Terms of Endearment?” This one will make you cry more. But it is sad, not depressing.

Woodley plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, whose lungs have been badly compromised and who cannot breathe without a nasal cannula attached to an oxygen tank. Pushed by her mother to attend a support group that meets “literally in the heart of Jesus,” with a guitar-strumming leader who is well-intentioned but unwilling to acknowledge the direness of the circumstances, Hazel catches the eye of lanky Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort, and yes, he played her brother in “Divergent”).

She’s the nerdy girl, he’s the basketball-player and cool guy, which is the classic high school movie romantic setup for opposite attraction except in this case what they have in common is more important than what table they would sit at in the school cafeteria. He is not playing basketball anymore because his leg was amputated due to cancer. What brings them together is not the cancer but the shared worldview they developed as a result of the cancer, with few illusions but an openness to hope, if not hope for a longer life, at least hope for a better life. Hazel worries that she is “a grenade,” that the most significant impact her life will have is the devastating grief she leaves behind.

Hazel and Augustus exchange favorite books. His is a novelization of a video game. Hers is an ambitious, literary novel by a reclusive author named Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe, superb in a tricky role). The book ends abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, when its main character dies, and Hazel is overcome with curiosity about what happens to the characters she left behind. For all they have lost, they still have “cancer perqs,” privileges that come with the combination of pity and guilt felt by people around them. Augustus takes advantage of his to help Hazel meet Van Houten. But it is in the other parts of the journey that they find more important answers and better questions as well.

The characters in the movie like to say, “it’s a metaphor,” but their own story is a metaphor about the issues we all grapple with. Watching people whose biggest problem should be what to wear to the prom confront the problem of making sense of life, finding meaning, risking intimacy is a heightened version for dramatic purposes. But these are the core challenges for all of us, whether our lives will last for 16 years or 116. These teenagers just do not have the luxury the rest of us do of being in denial about how little time there is.

Elgort is marvelous, but then he gets to say swoon-worthy lines like “You realize that trying to keep your distance from me will not lessen my affection for you. All efforts to save me from you will fail.” On the other hand, he has the challenge of grandiloquent lines like. “It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you,” and he says them beautifully. Woodley is in every way (except literally) the heart of the film, and once again delivers a performance of endless sensitivity, even with a cannula in her nose. Fans of the book will find key scenes like the egging of a car and the ultimate romantic restaurant date exactly as they envisioned it. Even the trip to the Anne Frank house, which could have been heavy-handed, is handled well. Anne Frank is, in a way, the spiritual sister of Hazel and Augustus. Like them, she had to find meaning in the midst of devastation. As they walk through the hidden annex where she lived, her words of hope come out of tinny display speakers. And Hazel’s climb up the steep steps to see it is itself a “shout into the void.”

I like the way they call each other by their full names. Even though their time is limited, addressing each other with a touch of formality and grandeur is too important for short cuts. I like the intensity and honesty of their talks; anything less they know they do not have time for. The title comes from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The nobleman Cassius says to Brutus: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He is saying that it is we who determine how we live. But the line that I think of when I see this film is from poet Rabindranath Tagore, who wrote, “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”

Parents should know that the theme of the film is teenagers with cancer. Many characters are very ill and there is a very sad death, as well as brief strong language, sexual references and situation, teen drinking and adult alcohol abuse.

Family discussion: What questions would you like to ask an author about a book you like? How should you choose who will hurt you? What makes some infinities larger than others?

If you like this, try: the book by John Green and the films “Harold and Maude” and “Restless”