"Wuthering Heights" (Emerald Fennell, 2026)

Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in "Wuthering Heights"

Cast: Margot Robbie, Jacob Elordi, Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, Ewan Mitchell, Amy Morgan, Jessica Knappett, Charlotte Mellington, Owen Cooper, Vy Nguyen. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell, based on a novel by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

I am not a teenage girl, which means that my particular sensibility may hinder me from fully appreciating what Emerald Fennell has done with Emily Brontë's great mad novel, Wuthering Heights. Fennell said that she approached making a film of the novel as if it were being imagined by a teenage girl who had just read the book. She also did something of which I wholeheartedly approve: She put the title in quotation marks because movies and literature are distinctly different media -- no film, however closely it sticks to the source, is the equivalent of a written work. And on those terms, I have to applaud Fennell's movie: It does what it sets out to do. Sometimes at the expense of taste, to be sure: Any movie that starts with an ejaculating corpse is going to have to justify itself, and "Wuthering Heights" never quite recovers from that scene. The scene in which Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) finds Cathy (Margot Robbie) masturbating on the moors, her flesh-colored room at Thrushcross Granger, and her strapless mourning dress continue to push the boundaries of audacity. But the movie benefits from Fennell's decision to go all the way and from its cast's willingness to follow her. This is, in short, one of those movies that are better appreciated if you haven't read the book on which it's based: Brontë's novel is not a paperback bodice-ripper (the covers of which Fennell copies to the point of parody). The film is a sometimes campy but occasionally tedious exercise in excess. 

Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)

Barry Keoghan in Saltburn

Cast: Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe, Carey Mulligan, Paul Rhys, Ewan Mitchell. Screenplay: Emerald Fennell. Cinematography: Linus Sandgren. Production design: Suzie Davies. Film editing: Victoria Boydell. Music: Anthony Willis. 

With its fine cinematography and production design and skilled performances, Emerald Fennell's Saltburn is an exquisite container that's so hollow it echoes. The echoes are those of sharper literary and cinematic satires on the English class system. Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a first-year student at Oxford from an affluent and apparently loving middle class family who pretends to be a poor young man from a dysfunctional family and winds up conning his way into a decadent aristocratic family. Oliver's skill at lying and his lethal ways of covering up his lies recalls Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley, whose adventures began in The Talented Mr. Ripley, memorably filmed by René Clément (as Purple Noon) in 1960 and by Anthony Minghella in 1999. Like Ripley, Oliver is sexually fluid, and makes his way into the Catton family through his infatuation with Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), a handsome and popular fellow student who invites Oliver to spend the summer at the family estate, Saltburn. The Cattons, who include Sir James (Richard E. Grant), Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike), and Felix's sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), are a collection of quirks and vices, including the other guests that summer: Felix's cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe), an American who sees Oliver as a rival, and Elspeth's neurotic friend, Pamela (Carey Mulligan). If the gathering at Saltburn reminds you of Brideshead Revisited, Fennell name-checks its author when Oliver says Felix's description of his family reminds him of Evelyn Waugh; Felix replies that Waugh based his characters on the Cattons. Another analogue might be found in Alan Hollinghurst's novel, a satire on Thatcherite Britain. The Line of Beauty, whose protagonist becomes a part of the wealthy household of an Oxford classmate on whom he has a crush. And Oliver's sexual attraction to Felix, which has him slurping the bathwater in which Felix has masturbated, is an inevitable reminder of the cum-filled peach in André Aciman's novel Call Me by Your Name and Luca Guadagnino's 2017 film version. Now, I don't have anything against borrowing, but it has to be done with some originality. The time is ripe for a satire on post-Brexit Britain, for example, but Fennell doesn't even give us that: Saltburn is set in 2007. The film lacks sharpness and clear intent, so it winds up being a well-mounted, very well acted but wholly derivative collection of mildly shocking incidents.