Emma Thompson picks up her Victorian-era pen to take on the based-on-a-true story of John Ruskin (Greg Wise), a certain sort of aesthete — you know, the kind that might fall in love with an innocent girl, only to find himself horrified by her eventual womanhood and its dirty, dirty implications. Unfortunately, art critic Ruskin doesn't realize his mistake until his bride Effie (a moon-faced and perpetually wounded Dakota Fanning) disrobes on their wedding night. The slow-motion nightmare that follows is as gorgeously shot and subtly acted as it is broadly written; if Victorians were too polite to simply have it out, Thompson can at least have Ruskin rant about how Venice used to be Europe's "most chaste pearl," but is now "a harlot, dedicated to pleasure and voluptuousness." And she can toss in a grotesquely overbearing mother-in-law for comic relief. Thompson herself plays a sort of proto-feminist advisor, but the enemy here isn't misogyny so much as it is gynophobia. Ruskin only hates his wife because she terrifies him — if a woman threatens to tether his artistic solo flights, just imagine what kids would do. (2015) — Matthew Lickona
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