I recently discovered the movie Bright Star, a Jane Campion period piece romantics are sure to love. Bright Star recounts the three-year relationship between romantic poet John Keats and seamstress Fanny Brawne.
Nominated for an Academy Award for costume design, Bright Star is an enchanting film with artistic cinematography, beautiful music and touching dialog.
Actual love letters exchanged between Keats and Brawne enrich this timeless love story.
Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan calls Bright Star "one of the most moving, most transporting love stories in memory." He enthuses, "Bright Star satisfies a hunger we may not have known we had, a hunger for an exquisitely done, emotional love story that marries heartbreaking passion to formidable filmmaking restraint, all in the service of an unapologetically romantic belief in 'the holiness of the heart's affections.' "
Karen Durbin opines in Elle Magazine, "Campion's award-winning young cinematographer, Grieg Fraser, captures the vitality of Keats' and Fanny's world, as well as its plainness. But he also studs the film with gorgeous scenes of nature so startling good you could frame them. Like Bright Star itself, they delineate the difference between a pretty picture and a piece of cinematic art."
A.O. Scott of the New York Times calls the film "romantic in every sense of the word."
