Pride & Prejudice

The cast of Bennet sisters are young and credible, their group scenes are filmed with hip Altmanesque overlapping dialogue, while the director Joe Wright’s roaming camera gives every exchange an unexpected urgency.

"Wright’s filmmaking is elegant, vibrant and prudently ostentatious."

Joe Wright should be applauded for delivering a vividly realised Austen adap -- one which confirms Knightley has graduated from the Jackie Bisset of the '00s to this decade's Julie Christie.

Breathes new life into characters and conversations never before quite wholly free from the printed page.

It's a fitfully engaging romance, it's just not Pride and Prejudice.

Keira's cat-smile suggests such supernal all-knowingness that, with Austen's adapted dialogue (via Deborah Moggach) tripping off her tongue, she comes off as an eighteenth-century Maureen Dowd.

Wright embraces the tactility of touch, the energy of chaos, and the beauty of stolen glances. Regardless of which Austen is your favorite, it’s easy to fall in love with Wright’s visual feast of a movie.

Now, more than ever, audiences could do with some old-fashioned love stories. A time when dances were arranged for people to meet, marry, and settle down together. When the highest accolade a man and woman could hope for was marriage to someone nice.

[Keira] Knightly sparks as Elizabeth, an intelligent and ambitious young woman in a society that doesn’t allows for opportunities for such women.

Between Wright’s magnetically captivating vision and the impeccable performances, Pride and Prejudice 2005 shines as a leading benchmark of a breathtaking adaptation, earning a rightful stamp of approval from countless longtime fans.