The Jane Austen Book Club (2007)

The fact that the ensemble of characters in this romantic comedy (based on a Karen Joy Fowler bestseller) spend each month reading a Jane Austen novel and meeting to discuss it simply means that they are forever comparing Austen's troubled marriages, burgeoning romances, and complicated love triangles to their own: these parallels come thick and fast but are superficial, meaning you can smile - very gently - at this romcom even if you've never read a word of Austen yourself.

★★★☆☆

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Jane Eyre (2011)

Comparison is more than fair: this 2011 adaptation is filmed in the same location (and often in the very same rooms), is based on the same screenplay, and is frequently a scene-by-scene copy of the BBC four-episode TV series of 2009, so the question is why this Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed adaptation, which gives painstaking attention to realising the look and feel of Charlotte Bronte's novel, chops the story to pieces, starting in the middle, unnecessarily, and lurching unevenly through the events of Eyre's life, either glossing over or entirely deleting key moments from the book AND the BBC TV series with the end result a visually-, aurally-pleasing video clip zapped of most of the story's romance and emotion.

★★★☆☆

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