Pictureland

They're kooky, not so creepy - the Stoker Family.   Oh, adolescence.  It can be such a dark, difficult time.  Particularly if you’re the unfortunate India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska).  Not only does she bear a surname which provides rhyming fodder for the menacing jocks who lurk outside her high school.  But not long into Stoker , the young woman finds out that her beloved father has died in his SUV in a mysterious accident.  Fast upon that shock, the father’s heretofore unseen brother, the mysterious Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up after the funeral and quickly ingratiates himself with India’s not-terribly-mournful mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), very much to the chagrin of the melancholy child. Lest this begin to sound like a contemporary, female Hamlet - dad barely dead and mom getting cozy with the creepy uncle almost before the body's cold -  first-time screenwriter Wentworth Miller has cited Hitchcock and not Shakespeare ...

"What's your tale of woe?  All  governesses have their tale of woe."  If you're at all familiar with Jane Eyre, you know that she's got a doozy.   But when the stern Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) asks this of his relatively new governess, she downplays her woeful backstory.  One of the great strengths of this latest Jane Eyre, written by Moira Buffini and directed by Cary Fukunaga, is that it too downplays some of the Gothic excess inherent in Charlotte Bronte's novel.  This allows for a better focus on one of the great heroines of 19th-century literature, who sometimes is lost amidst the privation and suffering of her youth and the dramatic goings-on at Thornfield Hall - you know, the brooding guy with the crazy wife in the attic.   All the better that Jane be played by Mia Wasikowska.  The lovely young actress ( The Kids Are Alrig ht, Alice in Wonderland ) has had her hair dyed red and...