MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

TheLittleSongbird Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a very complicated and ambitious book, and while heavy-reading it is a fine piece of literature. This 1996 film adaptation is a rock-solid adaptation, that is ambitious and realistic. I will admit some parts like the killing of the pig is anything but tender, but none of the scenes are over-sensationalised.As an adaptation of the book, it works very well. If I had a quibble, the secondary characters could have been developed more than they were depicted. The screenplay is well crafted; the writers and the director have at least some idea how Hardy's work should work on film and stay relatively true to the book. The music both haunting and beautiful at the same time was absolutely outstanding.The direction is very fine, never sluggish and never overdone. It was about right. The cinematography is superb, dark, fluid and sensitive. And the period detail was just as good. It was this element alone that contributed to the mood of the adaptation. The love story here which is dirty and tragic was beautifully realised, and very rarely struck a false note.The performances were just brilliant, no overplaying or underplaying as far as I could see. Special mention must go to the two lead performances. Christopher Ecceleston is a very talented and I think under-appreciated actor, and in the title role he was perfectly cast and showed real versatility. As Sue Brideshead, the beautiful Kate Winslet is positively luminous and is true to her character. Out of the supporting performances, the best is Rachel Griffiths as Arabella, a very modest performance I must say.Overall, has its minor flaws but a very well done adaptation of a complicated book. Always realistic and never overly-sentimental as I feared. Though the ending is heart-rending. 9/10 Bethany Cox

CountZero313 Winterbottom keeps the temperature of the searing original novel in his faithful, brilliantly realised film adaptation. Hardy was sick when writing Jude, out of sorts, and the bleak tale has in some quarters been credited more to bile than his muse. Jude's fate is certainly more damning than other Hardy heroes such as Tess, and the final third of this tale requires a strong heart to get through.Jude Fawley is a self-educated stonemason looking to enter the hallowed halls of (a thinly-disguised) Oxford. Class and snobbery combine to crush that dream, but he fights and wins his other dream, to secure the love of his cousin Sue. Headstrong and independent, a prototype Suffragette, she will face her own stern test and be found wanting.Christopher Eccleston inhabits the character fully. The scene in the pub where he recites the Lord's Creed in Latin, then challenges the undergrads to judge if he got it right, is painful and poignant. Winslet is stunning as the admirable but infuriating Sue Brideshead whose choices in life are oblique but all-too-real. A cold draft of air oozes from her expression every time she shuns Jude. There isn't a missed beat in Winslet's portrayal of a woman who goes from supremely confident to utterly lost.Winterbottom would go on to tinker and experiment, unsuccessfully, with Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge in The Claim. Here, he keeps it strictly BBC, evoking the early industrial age magnificently in his cobbled streets and fog-shrouded spires. An array of British acting talent fill out the supporting roles superbly, most notably Liam Cunningham as the put-upon Phillotson, and Rachel Griffiths as pig-hugging Arabella, whose rising fortune sways in counter-point to Jude's slow, inexorable decline. In one scene where she encounters her estranged son at a fairground, the interaction between woman and child is both naturalistic and magical. The expression on the face of Little Jude's sister is priceless. Perhaps a happy accident, perhaps genius from the director, but all the more tragic for what follows.One of the most ill-fated couples in British literature are vividly brought to life in this film, designed to satisfy fans of the novel. Hardy, one feels, would approve.

IridescentTranquility How to summarise Jude? They say that in the late Victorian era there was a school of thought that almost glorified the state of childhood, believing it to be a perfect time in a person's life when innocence reigned, but I don't believe Thomas Hardy followed this line of thinking. No matter how young, both Jude the father and Jude the son seem weighed down by doom and misery in this film.I think this film fell under the category of "independent film", which is just as well. Following the Thomas Hardy convention whereby nothing can end happily, Jude ultimately ends with a miserable mood, but in a sense this is perfect. Although it's not the sort of film anyone would want to watch on a "down" day, I'm sure that - had this film been given the Hollywood treatment, the storyline would have been mercilessly rearranged to have a loving happy ending. The problem is, if that happened, it wouldn't be Hardy.There is something stark about the opening of the film - the scratchy music, the loneliness of the solitary young Jude, the clattering noise of the bird-scarer and yet, combined with the black-and-white filming, it evokes the appropriate mood for the film so easily and so early on. In amongst the winter scenes and the aerial shots that show only a tiny bit of movement in an otherwise still landscape, Jude and Arabella's wedding is possibly the busiest, most colourful scene in the whole film. Of course, there are also many interesting social and sometimes political issues raised, partly because of the time in which the film is set. Had the story been moved forward a hundred years, there would be nothing remarkable about Sue attending lectures, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer in the pub, visiting Jude without a chaperone. There would be nothing surprising about being educated when you had a job - like Jude's - that didn't require it. But Jude and Sue are tragic in a way - both impulsive people in a world and a time when a commitment like marriage was not to be taken lightly.There are many bad omens in the film - Aunt Drusilla remarking that "The Fawleys were not meant for marrying" - and the particular tragedy of Jude's character is the way he rushes into things only to regret them later. Though Jude is tragic, his cousin and partner Sue is equally blighted - to watch her change during the film from an irreverent, sparky, impertinent, independent single woman into a tortured, guilty (in her own eyes) shadow of her former self is heartbreaking. Although in some ways women's lives and opportunities were limited in various ways in the nineteenth century, as a female with a job, no husband and no parents or other family, she did have quite a lot of freedom. Oddly, Jude's wife Arabella is not so different from Sue - she is as forward and daring physically as Sue is intellectually. During their marriage, she and Jude almost reverse roles - she goes out to kill a pig single-handedly when he is too sensitive to do so. There is an interesting contrast between Jude's sex scenes with Arabella and the one he has with Sue. The wedding night with Arabella is warmly lit and cosy, whereas the scene with Sue is stark, almost grey, with a cold feeling and yet in some ways Sue and Jude are more necessary to each other than Arabella and Jude ever were. On the costume side I note that - as with the more recent Kate Winslet film Finding Neverland - the costumes don't look like fashion plates, they look like real clothes (occasionally none too clean but when you take into account how time-consuming and labour-intensive it must have been to wash them, it's hardly surprising). It seems strange now that Kate must only have been twenty or twenty-one when this film was made - in her first scene she looks mature whereas in others she seems very, very young.This isn't the easiest film to watch - there are a few sections I almost always fast-forward - but that is not to say it's not good. Every time I watch it, a bit of me wants things to end happily, but - as I said before - that just wouldn't be Hardy.

alliforkeeps This film engages the viewer on a personal level as few movies do. I found it utterly poignant, portraying real love at its most raw and human and intense. The performances were beyond outstanding, the script flawless, the cinematography beautiful. It's fascinating the way in which it allows the viewer to get inside the secret places of yearning unique to the human heart. And it also shows real intellectual heft in its grappling of flawed moral absolutes and pointless societal mores.I adored this oft-overlooked, emotionally wrenching work which really delivered. I would heartily recommend it for its artistic merit as well as excellent plot.