Jacob Elordi

Wuthering Heights

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Cathy and Heathcliff face to face

It’s “Wuthering Heights”, in scare quotes, rather than just the plain old Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë’s imagination. Adapter/director Emerald Fennell wants us to know she’s messing about with the text a bit and having fun. Either that or she’s hiding out behind a bit of punctuation. Good luck with that. Actually, the story remains pretty much as Brontë wrote it, though Fennell leaves out the entire “next generation” plotline, as did William Wyler in 1939. Cathy and Heathcliff grow up together on the top of wild and windswept Yorkshire moorland – she the wilful daughter of drunken Mr Earnshaw (an excellent Martin Clunes), he the orphan child Mr E brings home one … Read more

Oh, Canada

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Jacob Elordi as a young Leo

Robert DeNiro turned it down and so Richard Gere wound up with another decent role, in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, a cool look at “heroic” types who have done little more than hitch a ride on a wave. Gere plays a crusading documentarian who, stricken with terminal cancer at the end of his life, is being interviewed by old students – now famous themselves – for a last hurrah. Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill) are here to celebrate the man and his valiant work. That’s the dying Leo’s initial intention, too. But, unsure of himself and realising that this is his last chance to set the record straight, he switches track … Read more

On Swift Horses

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Lee, Muriel and Julius on a swing seat

On Swift Horses is giddy 1950s melodrama for the 21st century, with Will Poulter and Jacob Elordi as brothers charting separate courses through the great American post-War boom. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays the prize for one of them, or she would be if she weren’t also on a journey of her own, towards a sense of self-actualisation. The dynamic is good boy/bad boy, Poulter drawing the short straw as Lee, the hard-working, conformist brother married to wife Muriel (Edgar-Jones), while Elordi has the fun as Julius, the sexy gambler on the road less travelled. In the film’s opening moments Julius arrives back from the Korean War at the homestead of Lee and Muriel and … Read more

Priscilla

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Elvis and Priscilla kiss on their wedding day

So, Priscilla Presley the origin story, authorised version. Priscilla director and adapter Sofia Coppola isn’t out to bust any myths here, taking the onetime wife of Elvis, Priscilla Presley (an executive producer of this movie) at her word, or at the word of her 1985 biography Elvis and Me, at any rate. The result walks the line between high-end hack work and a prison-break drama, albeit one dressed to within an inch of its life. It’s the soup to nuts version of Priscilla’s life with the King – 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu meets Elvis Presley, the most famous man in the world, while he’s stationed in West Germany on military service in 1959. He … Read more

Saltburn

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Oliver relaxes in black tie at Saltburn

The music in Saltburn tells you a lot of what you need to know about the movie. Starting with Zadok the Priest and ending with Sophie Ellis Bextor singing Murder on the Dancefloor, this is a big, gaudy, fun switchback that surely would have been made in Technicolor if the process was still about. A superheated noirish romp is what you get either way. The plot is simple but it plays with expectations about who exactly is zooming who. Poor little rich boy Felix (Jacob Elordi) befriends poor little poor boy Oliver (Barry Keoghan) at Oxford University, where Felix is a student as if by right and scholarship boy Oliver is there on … Read more