Jane Austen goes Gothic in this darkly dramatic rendering of her Northanger Abbey, a novel that wasn't published until after her early and sudden death. Austen pokes fun at her peers in this story, in which her heroine, Catherine Morland (Katharine Schlesinger), is hopelessly addicted to macabre romance novels that wreak havoc on her imagination. She comes from a large, but loving family, and she's taken, as a companion, to the decadent society of Bath. There, she meets the duplicitous Thorpe siblings, Isabella (Cassie Stuart) and John (Jonathan Coy), and the kindly Tilney sister and brother, Eleanor (Ingrid Lacey) and Henry (Peter Firth). The Tilneys also have an elder brother, the snobbish soldier Frederick (Greg Hicks), and an oddly eerie father, General Tilney (Robert Hardy). Needless to say, all this provides plenty of fodder for fantasies and Catherine comes up with many, even imagining all sorts of evils on a visit to the Tilney family home, Northanger Abbey. The soundtrack is more than a little melodramatic, but it's best to think of it as a humorous touch rather than a serious, punctuating one. -NF Mendoza, Amazon. com.

This film adaptation of a critically acclaimed stage production of Shakespeare's historical drama stars Ian McKellen in the title role. The setting is a comic-book vision of 1930s London: part art deco, part Third Reich, part industrial-age rust and rot. The play's force is turned into a synthetic high by art directors and storyboard sketchers, all of whom have a field day condensing the material into disposable pop imagery. Richard III is a fun film, more than anything, so infatuated with its own monstrous stitchery that even the most awkward casting (Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr. ) seems a part of the ridiculous design. McKellen is the best thing about the movie, his mesmerising portrayal of freakish despotism and poisoned desire a thing to behold. Directed by Richard Loncraine (Bellman and True). -Tom Keogh.

This 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was made just two years after Citizen Kane, and it certainly looks like star Orson Welles muscled his way behind the camera much of the time. (In fact, co-star Joan Fontaine-who plays the title character-has maintained that Welles methodically did just that every day on the set. ) Not that the film's official director was a hack: Robert Stevenson gets the credit, a man who later had a busy career at Disney making numerous live-action hits such as Mary Poppins. But there's no mistaking Welles' masterful hand in this film's bold and creative look, and there's no getting away from his enigmatic charisma as Rochester, the widower who takes in Jane as a governess to his daughter. An engrossing, gorgeous film, there's even a small role for Elizabeth Taylor at the beginning as Jane's unlucky, doomed friend at a cruel boarding school. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

After a slow beginning, in which the complex tangle of relationships is initially confusing, this BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion, develops into an elegant romantic comedy. Austin combines a subtle dissection of the folly of class with a slow-burning, intensely passionate love story. Anne Elliot (Amanda Root) has loved Captain Wentworth (Ciaran Hinds) ever since she was persuaded to reject him years before. Now he has returned from the Napoleonic wars, but will love be allowed to blossom? Especially when Anne is surrounded by the selfish, petty-minded Mary, misguided by Lady Russell, and burdened by a father obsessed with fairness of countenance above all other considerations. Excepting a basic booklet, on-screen character biographies and a Dolby Digital soundtrack, there is nothing to distinguish this DVD from the video version. The picture is very good, but showing some grain, not exceptional, so unless you have a large television there is little advantage over tape. In any format, what makes this adaptation work is the sharp screenplay by Nick Dear and the naturalistic style of director Roger Mitchell (who joined the A-list with Notting Hill, 1999), together eliciting fine performances from the ensemble cast. Less flamboyant than Pride and Prejudice (1995), this is a civilised treat. -Gary S Dalkin.

John Schlesinger's solid adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel sees three rival suitors vying for the affections of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie decked out in a variety of bonnets and frilly dresses), who has just inherited a farm. The men in her life are stout, whiskered yeoman Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), an impoverished local farmer; neurotic, repressed squire William Boldwood (Peter Finch); and handsome rascal Sgt Troy (Terrence Stamp), who dresses as if he's Flashman and breaks women's hearts for a hobby. Thanks to cameraman Nic Roeg and production designer Richard MacDonald (who also worked for Joseph Losey), 19th-century Dorset looks as pretty and as picturesque as a John Constable reproduction on top of a biscuit tin. Not that Schlesinger or screenwriter Frederic Raphael underplay the duress of rural life. We see the hardship of the farm workers' lives as the seasons turn. The film opens with a spectacular sequence in which Gabriel Oak's dog drives his flock of sheep over a cliff, thereby forcing him into penury. Whether hunger or heartbreak, every character here suffers. Bathsheba (like the model Christie plays in Darling) is a free-spirit in a society in which women's rights are severely restricted. -Geoffrey Macnab.

The BBC's six-part drama series based on the life of Elizabeth I, first broadcast in 1971, followed hot on the heels of The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It was an instant popular and critical success. Recently, more opulent films like Elizabeth and Shakespeare in Love (both 1998) have happily mined the life and times of the Virgin Queen to create rich visual banquets. But apart from the occasionally dodgy studio lighting, Elizabeth R stands the test of time well with its patina of classic television intact. Literate scripts reflect their documentary sources, portray the constant tension of a royal existence at the heart of a succession of life-threatening conspiracies, and convey the claustrophobia of an age of intrigue in which it was impossible to distinguish between the watcher and the watched. These first two episodes deal with Elizabeth's adolescence, her dangerous relationship with her sister Mary Tudor, her accession to the throne and a relationship with Earl of Leicester that hovers constantly on the verge of scandal. There are splendid performances from a galaxy of British character actors, but Glenda Jackson dominates in the title role that added television success to a film career then at its peak. -Piers Ford.

"Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again. " From the first classic line of this unforgettable film, Rebecca casts its spell. David O. Selznick brought Alfred Hitchcock to the United States in order to give this adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel the proper atmosphere. The resulting film is a stunning marriage of their sensibilities. It paid off critically and financially as well. Like Gone with the Wind, which Selznick released a year earlier, Rebecca won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Laurence Olivier stars as Maxim de Winter, who, reeling from the recent and unexpected death of his glamorous wife Rebecca, impulsively marries a young and adoring governess (Joan Fontaine). [+]

Dickens was the master of Victorian social satire, ruthlessly exposing the cruelty and absurdity that supported the strictly hierarchical class-structure of the day. This superb production of Our Mutual Friend does full justice to his darkest, most complex novel, fleshing out the satirical bones of the plot with performances that eschew caricature in favour of psychological depth. Anna Friel's Bella is wonderfully complex, her innate goodness struggling with her love of money and desire for advancement. Paul McGann, as the lawyer Wrayburn, is also superb, wrestling with the implications of his feelings for Lizzie. And of course, this being Dickens and the BBC, there's a terrific supporting cast, including Timothy Spall as the melancholy articulator of skeletons, Mr Venus. As the fortunes of the characters rise and fall, the river Thames flows eternally on, the symbolic backbone of this remarkable story. At six hours, this version of Our Mutual Friend is a long production, but not a moment too long. A mystery, a love story, a critique of the pursuit of wealth and status, this is perhaps the best adaptation of Dickens ever to be committed to film. -Simon Leake, Amazon. com.

Steven Spielberg had a banner year in 1993. He scored one of his biggest commercial hits that summer with the mega-hit Jurassic Park, but it was the artistic and critical triumph of Schindler's List that Spielberg called "the most satisfying experience of my career". Adapted from the best-selling book by Thomas Keneally and filmed in Poland with an emphasis on absolute authenticity, Spielberg's masterpiece ranks among the greatest films ever made about the Holocaust during World War II. It's a film about heroism with an unlikely hero at its center-Catholic war profiteer Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who risked his life and went bankrupt to save more than 1,000 Jews from certain death in concentration camps. By employing Jews in his crockery factory manufacturing goods for the German army, Schindler ensures their survival against terrifying odds. At the same time, he must remain solvent with the help of a Jewish accountant (Ben Kingsley) and negotiate business with a vicious, obstinate Nazi commandant (Ralph Fiennes) who enjoys shooting Jews as target practice from the balcony of his villa overlooking a prison camp. Schindler's List gains much of its power not by trying to explain Schindler's motivations, but by dramatising the delicate diplomacy and determination with which he carried out his generous deeds. As a drinker and womanizer who thought nothing of associating with Nazis, Schindler was hardly a model of decency; the film is largely about his transformation in response to the horror around him. Spielberg doesn't flinch from that horror, and the result is a film that combines remarkable humanity with abhorrent inhumanity-a film that functions as a powerful history lesson and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the context of a living nightmare. -Jeff Shannon Both an artistic and a commercial triumph, Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List manages to find some small glimmer of hope for the human spirit amid the abomination that was the Holocaust. [+]

Roman Polanski adapted Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles and came up with this moody, haunting film starring Nastassia Kinski as the farm girl who is misused by the aristocrat for whom she works and who is then caught in a marriage where her initial happiness soon turns to grief. Fans of the novel may feel unpersuaded by Polanski's effort to marry Hardy's Dorset vision with his own fascination with psychosexual impulses toward survival, but the film is an often stunning thing to see, and Kinski's sensitive, intelligent performance lingers in the memory. -Tom Keogh.