Best movie of this year hands down!

That was an excellent one.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I have to admit Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw were very good at playing their characters very well. They actually played a real couple in which it gave us a taste of history based on the relationship especially the hard times that was brought upon them.I'm not a poetry fan but I really enjoyed listening to some of the real John Keats real poems. I find that he's probably much a happier poet if he really felt in love and life giving him surprises especially having poor Fanny as his fiancé!It was really good to see Thomas Brodick Sanger and years & years singer Olly Alexander (didn't notice that he was the sick brother until I looked up Google images to which scene he was in) involved in this movie. He really is a good actor for a singer honestly. Safe to say, this is my first film of him in it, now for the next ones :D

....this starts out promising and does at times get a little slow, but because I love Ben Wishaw had to stick with it. Though it was nice not to see any gratuitous sex, just two people who were deeply in love and you felt it. A very nice film and very sad! I am surprised to see the guy who played Mr Brown, Paul Schnider, is American! A very convincing Scotsman and definitely a superb support. Abbie Cornish, I don't think is English, was also brilliant. When she heard of John's death her grief was very realistic, I really felt her pain! Ben Whishaw, as ever, extremely watchable and convincing. Also the young girl who played Fanny Brawne's young sister Toots was one to watch, very good little actress!

Bright Star is a fairly standard sort of biopic, investigating the life love and work - for they are all barely distinguishable - of romantic poet John Keats. What sets Jane Campion's account of his love for Fanny Brawne is its sensuality. The photography is of the first rank, Greig Fraser's attention to the image apparent from the first frame, holding lint-dusted linen in high-contrast light and then opening up into an endless sequence of meticulously constructed compositions. Janet Patterson's costume design needs to be adventurous and brilliantly executed, given that Abbie Cornish's Fanny is a proud fashion pioneer. Indeed Cornish and Ben Whishaw's Keats are also highly photogenic actors. From interior production design to the seasonal appearance of locations, manufactured or found, everything has both a tangible and aural quality. Image blends across the soft-touch sound design and allows the profusion of poetry quotations to emerge without awkwardness. This is the secret of good film making - when the visual seems to make provision for everything that needs to be said. Wish I'd seen it on a big screen. 7/10

"Bright Star" is a filmed biography of the poet John Keats, concentrating on his romantic relationship with Fanny Brawne during the last three years of his life. The story opens in 1818 when Keats and Fanny are introduced to one another while he is staying at the Hampstead home of his friend Charles Brown, and ends with his death from tuberculosis in Rome three years later. The title is derived from a sonnet by Keats named "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art". (I keep the original spelling). The poem is believed to have been inspired by that romance and, although the reference in its opening line is clearly to a literal star, not a metaphorical one, Fanny has become known as Keats's "bright star".Recent years have seen a glut of films based on the novels of Keats's older contemporary Jane Austen, and these may have served as the inspiration for another film with a literary theme set against a Regency background. The film was directed by Jane Campion, who has made a number of other films with a literary or historical background, such as "An Angel at My Table" (a biography of the writer Janet Frame), "The Piano" (set in 19th century New Zealand), and "Portrait of a Lady" (based upon a novel by Henry James).As portrayed by Abbie Cornish, Fanny is a young lady of good family, obsessed with fashion and with creating dresses, hats, and other garments for herself. She is also flirtatious and seemingly shallow, a strange match for the more intellectual Keats. Another possible obstacle to their union is that Keats comes from a relatively humble background and fears that, because of the difference in their social standing, Fanny's family will not welcome him as a prospective match for her. As the film progresses, however, we begin to see more of Fanny's more serious side, and she and Keats fall deeply in love.I didn't care much for Ben Whishaw's performance in the first film I saw him in, "Perfume" from 2006, but he has certainly improved as an actor since then, on the basis of both this film and "Brideshead Revisited". Here he plays Keats as a rather quiet young man, externally aloof and reserved but deeply passionate underneath.As one might expect of a film from Campion on this particular theme, there is little in the way of physical action; the film deals more with emotional states and with the growth of love between Keats and Fanny. Like a number of British period dramas, the film is not only visually attractive but also sensitive and poetic and, in its tragic conclusion, deeply moving. A most enjoyable evening's viewing. 7/10