Jude

British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom didn't make a particularly good film until Welcome to Sarajevo, and this curiously dry adaptation of Thomas Hardy's last novel is a good example. Christopher Eccleston plays Jude Fawley, a self-educated stonemason who dreams of attending university but identifies with the working class. Kate Winslet is his cousin Sue Bridehead, a young woman with suffragette leanings and a position as a teacher's assistant. When the two enter into an illicit union, they are condemned to the margins of society, ultimately resulting in a horrifying tragedy. Winterbottom takes an oddly lean approach to Hardy's deterministic story, which leaves a viewer feeling short on emotion just when one needs it for the from-bad-to-worse third act. Welcome to Sarajevo proved that Winterbottom needs a whole other level of personal involvement to make a film that inspires him. Jude isn't one of those lucky films. --Tom Keogh