Young People Nowadays

These are two gloriously cinematic films, which certainly wouldn't have justice done to them on a television screen. Andrea Arnold puts an astonishing weather-beaten array of natural greens, greys and russets into the frame, and even squares off the frame itself to heighten the sense of claustrophobia and to avoid opening up the film to an easily-delivered vista-of-nature. Her camera follows Heathcliff from beating to hillside to stable, punctuating the barely-imaginable journey Arnold charts for him, from act of charity, to dark obverse, to return of the repressed, with sudden, harsh, raw panoramas.

It was a crying shame that a gruesome pluck-fest of a track by Mumford and Sons was allowed to spray itself over the final few frames and reduce my memory of parts of the film to nothing better than an impressionistic folk music video styled by Toast's Moorland Farm aesthetic.

Lynne Ramsay (maker of the gloriously drifting film of Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar) seems to get a lot more value out of her punctuations of curtains, diffused light, passers-by seen from cars, spacious-yet-ugly interiors. As far as I know, Tilda Swinton has never given a bad performance in a movie, and here she’s given more than enough time to put the viewer through the wringer with some desperately effortful mothering and blank, exhausted stares.