Favorites of 2025: Movies and television
Television
For us this was an especially rich year for television series, beginning in May with PBS's Miss Austen, which also rounded out the Austen 250th anniversary year with its rebroadcast in November. In between we caught up on three series we'd missed the first go-round.
Miss Austen. Written by Andrea Gibb, based on the novel by Gill Hornby; directed by Aisling Walsh. Produced by BBC Studios and PBS Masterpiece, 4 episodes, 2025.
Keeley Hawes (Cassandra Austen) in Miss Austen. Image credit: BBC. Image source: RadioTimes.com
Miss Austen is a wonderful, complex, historically-informed series that rewards repeated viewings. E&I favorite Keeley Hawes (featured in previous favorites Wives & Daughters (1999) and Tipping the Velvet (2002)) is the Miss Austen of the title, Jane Austen's older sister Cassandra. It's 1840, 23 years after Jane's premature death, and Cassandra's co-sister-in-law Eliza Lloyd Fowle (Madeline Walker) has died in possession of dozens of letters from Jane. Both Cassandra and her overbearing sister-in-law Mary Lloyd Austen (a wonderfully awful Jessica Hynes), Eliza's sister and the widow of Cassandra's brother James, arrive at the Fowle home to support Eliza's bereaved daughter Isabella (Rose Leslie)—but also in desperate competition to find the letters. Mary wants them as part of her research for a biography she's planning to write about James, while Cassandra dreads the prospect of Jane's witty and indiscreet private letters being published. [1]
Rose Leslie (Isabella Fowle), Keeley Hawes (Cassandra Austen), Mirren Mack (the servant Dinah), and Jessica Hynes (Mary Lloyd Austen) in Miss Austen. Image credit: Robert Viglasky/BBC. Image source: RadioTimes.com
Spoiler alert, but not really: it's Cassandra who finds the letters and manages (despite several close calls) to conceal their discovery from the insistently inquisitive Mary. Re-reading them inspires in Cassandra memories of her engagement to Eliza's brother-in-law Tom Fowle (Calam Lynch), and his untimely death on a voyage to the West Indies (a real-life occurrence). It also brings back memories of Cassandra's life with Jane. A word has to be said about Patsy Ferran's vibrant embodiment of Jane: both the actress and the writing in these scenes are absolutely brilliant. Hers is by far the best portrayal of Jane we've seen, far surpassing those of Olivia Williams in the sour Miss Austen Regrets (BBC, 2007) and Anne Hathaway in the glamorized and falsified Becoming Jane (2007).
Patsy Ferran (Jane Austen), Madeleine Walker (Eliza Fowle), Synnøve Karlsen (young Cassandra Austen), and Liv Hill (young Mary) in Miss Austen. Image credit: Robert Viglasky/Bonnie Productions and PBS Masterpiece. Image source: TVinsider.com
Together, Hawes and the well-cast Synnøve Karlsen as her younger self give an immensely sympathetic portrayal of Cassandra, whose emotional wounds from the death of her fiancé and of Jane, and her sorrow at feeling unable to accept the love of the (fictional) suitor Henry Hobday (Max Irons), are freshly reopened by Jane's letters. The depiction of Cassandra is so touching, in fact, that we are lured into hoping that the wrong character will find the letters—because Cassandra's purpose in seeking them is to ensure that they can never be brought to light. Miss Austen enables us to see that act as one of love, as well as of destruction.
A sequel, Miss Austen Returns, based on Gill Hornby's novel The Elopement, has been announced from the same creative team, with Keeley Hawes reprising her role as Cassandra. We're very much looking forward to it—especially if Patsy Ferran also returns as Jane.
Fingersmith. Written by Peter Ransley, based on the novel by Sarah Waters; directed by Aisling Walsh. Produced by BBC Television, 3 episodes, 2005.
Elaine Cassidy (Maude Lily) and Sally Hawkins (Sue Trinker) in Fingersmith. Image credit: Aisling Walsh.
A con man nicknamed "Gentleman" (Rupert Evans) plots to cheat the sheltered heiress Maud Lily (Elaine Cassidy) out of her inheritance by marrying her, getting control of her money, and then committing her to an insane asylum. To further his scheme he recruits Sue Trinker (Sally Hawkins), an orphan raised as a thief in the slums of London, to go to work under a false identity as the heiress's maid. Sue is tasked with becoming Maud's confidante and advisor, and urging her to elope with Gentleman. Contrary to plan, she falls in love with the intended victim. But in Sarah Waters' twist-filled story, who will wind up betraying whom?
Everyone is perfectly suited to their roles. The locations evoke almost too viscerally the crowded slums of Victorian London and the decaying grandeur of the country estate of Maud's creepy guardian Uncle Christopher (Charles Dance). And Aisling Walsh's direction brings out many fleeting subtleties and nuances in the interactions among the characters. (A word of caution: the series, like the book, features some disturbing and violent scenes.) Brilliant work all around—but I recommend seeing it after you've read the book. For more on Waters' novel, please see the full-length review of Fingersmith, which was also one of my favorite books of 2025.
Hornblower. Written by Russell Lewis ("The Even Chance"), Mike Cullen ("The Examination for Lieutenant"), Patrick Harbinson ("The Duchess and the Devil"), Chris Ould ("The Frogs and the Lobsters"), T.R. Bowen ("Mutiny"), Ben Rostul ("Retribution"), Niall Leonard ("Loyalty"), and Stephen Churchett ("Duty"), based on the novels Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower, and Hornblower and the Hotspur by C.S. Forester; directed by Andrew Grieve. Produced by ITV, 8 episodes, 1998–2003.
Ioan Gruffudd as Horatio Hornblower. Image source: Into the Woods
While I gravitate to period literary dramas full of rustling muslin and subtle social and emotional nuance, my loving partner loves manly swashbuckling tales from the era of tall ships. (I'll leave it to the amateur psychologists among my readership to speculate about the reasons for our complementary tastes.) Hornblower stars Ioan Gruffudd (William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace) as Horatio Hornblower, who at the start of the first episode is a raw midshipman and by the end of the series has been promoted to post-captain. [2]
Gruffudd is surprisingly convincing as young midshipman (at 17 Hornblower is getting a late start—some of his peers would have already served onboard for five years), whom we gradually see mature and gain confidence as battle succeeds battle. He manages the action scenes with panache, although Hornblower is not your typical action hero: when ordered the climb the rigging on the heaving ship Hornblower's fear of heights and tendency to seasickness come to the fore. A regular presence is Hornblower's sometime commanding officer and mentor Captain Edward Pellew (Robert Lindsay), an all-too-rare example of both competence and decency in the hierarchy of the Royal Navy.
Still from Hornblower: Loyalty (2003), showing the realism of the series' sailing ships and armaments. Image source: Internet Movie Firearms Database.
The episodes feature Hornblower in action against the French during the Napoleonic wars. But the films don't only show us broadsides and boardings, the brutality of naval close combat in the early 19th century. They also portray the daily indignities of life on board crowded ships with no privacy, the constant jockeying for position and testing of authority among the men, and the sheer difficulties of navigating and maneuvering ships entirely dependent on the power of the wind. The sailing and battle scenes are generally well-filmed, detailed and vividly realistic.
Still from Hornblower: Loyalty (2003): Greg Wise as loyalist Major Andre Côtard in the foreground. Image source: Internet Movie Firearms Database.
If you liked the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003, based on two Patrick O'Brien novels), the Hornblower series is 13+ hours of similarly perilous situations, hair-breadth escapes, and pitched ship-to-ship battles whose outcomes depend as much on wit and skill as on sheer firepower.
Agatha Christie's Poirot. Written by Clive Exton ("The Mysterious Affair at Styles," S3.E1, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," S7.E1, and "Murder in Mesopotamia," S8.E2), Anthony Horowitz ("Hickory Dickory Dock," S6.E2, "Lord Edgeware Dies," S7.E2, and "Evil Under the Sun," S8.E1), Kevin Elyot ("Death on the Nile," S9.E1), and others, based on the novels of Agatha Christie. Directed by Edward Bennett (10 episodes), Renny Rye (9 episodes), Andrew Grieve (9 episodes), Brian Farnham (6 episodes), and others. Produced by ITV, 1989–2013.
David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. Image source: Virtual-History.com
There are 70 (!) episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot, starring David Suchet as the eponymous Belgian detective hero of Christie's first novel, the locked-room country house mystery The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and many subsequent novels and stories. My loving partner and I must have been among the last people on the planet who hadn't yet seen an episode. And so far we've only managed to see seven episodes scattered over five seasons; clearly we have some catching up to do. But we've been struck by the attention to period detail in the costumes and settings—every episode we've seen has been gorgeous to look at—and by how skillfully David Suchet renders Poirot as a multidimensional character, not just a collection of impeccable suits, behavioral quirks and catchphrases.
Honorable mention, Jane Austen division
Death Comes to Pemberley. Written by Juliette Towhidi, based on the novel by P.D. James after characters from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice; directed by Daniel Percival. Produced by BBC Drama Productions and PBS Masterpiece, 3 episodes, 2013.
Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth Darcy in Death Comes to Pemberley. Image credit: Daniel Percival.
Jane Austen famously has little to say about what happens to her heroines and heroes after they marry in the final pages of her novels. In Pride and Prejudice we hear about many other characters' reactions, but of Elizabeth and Darcy very little. Elizabeth does write to her aunt Mrs. Gardiner after her engagement and before her marriage, "I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but no one with such justice" (Ch. LX).
Faced with only vague accounts of the couple's post-wedding felicity, multiple authors have been unable to resist the temptation to carry the story forward. In her 2011 novel which is the basis of this three-episode 2013 BBC series, P.D. James concocts a murder mystery that takes place roughly six years after the events of Pride and Prejudice. The scoundrel George Wickham is the prime suspect (of course!), but as we might guess from time-honored mystery conventions, the character found kneeling next to the still-warm corpse crying out "I killed him, I killed him!" is rarely the true culprit.
Jenna Coleman as Lydia Bennet Wickham.
On the plus side, Jenna Coleman, who plays the young Queen Victoria in the excellent ITV series Victoria (2016-19), is delightful in the role of the pleasure-loving flirt Lydia Wickham. Matthew Goode nicely suggests Wickham's highly mixed character, nine parts blackguard to one part brave soldier with his own peculiar sense of honor (which evidently does not extend to women). And of course the costumes, sets and locations provide copious eye-candy, along with visual allusions to the brilliant 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth and Colin Firth as Darcy. As Darcy in Death Comes to Pemberley, Matthew Rhys is directed to assume the taciturn, glowering, haughty character of Darcy's first appearance in Pride and Prejudice, rather than the kinder, gentler Darcy that six years of marital bliss with Elizabeth would surely have produced.
Juliette Towhidi's script is filled with un-Austenesque language, and the story involves multiple implausibilities and incongruities. So the series satisfies neither as a continuation of Pride and Prejudice nor as a mystery. The main reason to watch is E&I favorite Anna Maxwell Martin's excellent performance as Elizabeth Bennet Darcy; whether her performance will outweigh the series' many annoyances will depend on the viewer. For more, please see the full-length review of Death Comes to Pemberley.
Mansfield Park. Written by Ken Taylor, based on the novel by Jane Austen; directed by David Giles. Produced by BBC Television, 6 episodes, 1983.
Sylvestra Le Touzel as Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. Image source: Jane Austen Reviews
From the update to Six months with Jane Austen: Favorite adaptations and final thoughts:
This adaptation is far from perfect. The annoying music by composer Derek Bourgeois that plays during the opening and closing titles is far out of period—it sounds like it dates from eight or nine decades after the time in which the novel is set. As with other BBC series of the era it was shot on video, and so the image is soft-grained and flattened. And despite the five-hour running time, the conclusion feels rushed: we cut too quickly from Edmund Bertram's revelation of Mary Crawford's worldly principles to his wondering "whether a very different type of woman might not do just as well—or a great deal better." The delicious comedy of Austen's final chapter—"I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people"—is, alas, missing.
But otherwise the dramatization by Ken Taylor is very faithful to the novel, with large chunks of the dialogue coming straight from Austen. Sylvestra Le Touzel, familiar from many later roles (including Amazing Grace and my favorite adaptation of Northanger Abbey), plausibly looks Fanny Price's age (18 at the end of the novel), and credibly expresses her mix of social timidity and moral strength—although perhaps she is directed to convey wide-eyed panic once or twice too often. Nicholas Farrell is an ideal Edmund; we can believe him principled, and yet subject to temptation against his better judgment. The other actors' performances are good across the board. Special honors from this viewer go to Anna Massey as a wonderfully horrible Mrs. Norris, and to Jackie Smith-Wood as the flirtatious and harp-playing Mary Crawford.
Movies
This was a year when we spent most of our viewing time with television series or streamed operas and concerts. Of the few movies we saw for the first time (as opposed to rewatching), none quite rose to the status of a favorite, and only one merited an honorable mention (see below). But there was one memorable film rewatch event that surprised and delighted in equal measure:
Clueless. Written and directed by Amy Heckerling, based on Emma by Jane Austen, 1995.
Brittany Murphy as Tai (Harriet Smith), Alicia Silverstone as Cher (Emma), and Stacy Dash as Dionne in Clueless. Image source: TVinsider.com
This July marked the 30th anniversary of the release of Amy Heckerling's high school comedy Clueless, an occasion that inspired a Jane Austen Society of North America watch party at which Heckerling was an honored guest.
In the film Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is the glamorous queen bee of Bronson Alcott High School. She spends her time organizing the social lives of her friends, and her special project is the new girl Tai (Brittany Murphy). Although Cher generally keeps boys at a distance, when a handsome and stylish new guy appears, Christian (Justin Walker), she finds herself unexpectedly becoming attracted to him. Meanwhile, Cher's sardonic stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd) finds fault with everything she does. Any resemblance to Emma Woodhouse, Harriet Smith, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightley in Austen's Emma is purely intentional.
I confess that the first time I saw Clueless, about two decades after its release and more than three decades after I'd graduated from high school, I felt I'd waited too long to see it; I later wrote that "I liked this movie less than I was expecting to." I found some of the humor crude or slapsticky (it is, of course, a high school comedy), and felt like I'd long ago aged out of its target audience.
But the watch party, with running chat commentary by hundreds of JASNA members attuned to every Emma allusion, was thoroughly (or "Totally!", as Cher might say) enjoyable and enabled me to see the film with renewed appreciation. I updated Six months with Jane Austen: Favorite adaptations and final thoughts, "After a Jane Austen Society of North America Clueless watch party today, I find I have to upgrade my estimation of this movie. Cher is a wonderful comic creation, delightfully portrayed by Alicia Silverstone. She's not exactly Emma, but there are many clever parallels to scenes from the book. (And some equally clever divergences: Christian is concealing a different sort of romantic secret than Frank Churchill.) Heckerling's script includes some priceless, laugh-out-loud lines, and the film just glows thanks to her direction and Bill Pope's cinematography. I'm glad I gave it a second chance."
Honorable mention
Amazing Grace. Written by Steven Knight; directed by Michael Apted, 2006.
Ioan Gruffudd as William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace. Image credit: Michael Apted.
This film is a well-intentioned portrayal of the role of William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd of Hornblower) in the struggle to end the British slave trade in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It has an amazing cast, with costume designs and hair or wig styles often directly modelled on paintings of the historical figures they are portraying.
But as I wrote in my full-length review of Amazing Grace, "despite the excellence signalled by the director [Michael Apted of the Up documentary series] and cast, as well as the evident care taken with many of the costumes and settings, the screenplay by Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things (2002)) undermines the entire enterprise. It simplifies, and at times falsifies, the complex history of abolition in Britain. . .[The] social background to Wilberforce's actions is largely absent, and several important figures, such as the advocate Granville Sharp, the poet William Cowper, and the former slave Ignatius Sancho, are missing entirely. Other major abolitionists such as Thomas Clarkson [Rufus Sewell] and Olaudah Equiano [Youssou N'Dour] are given merely supporting roles. . .Perhaps only someone such as Ken Loach or Mike Leigh (writer and director of Peterloo (2018)) could do greater justice to the complexity of the movement for abolition and the failings, inconsistencies, and conflicts, as well as the courage and rectitude, of those who ultimately brought an end to British slavery."
Other favorites of 2025:
- The family trees in Deirdre Le Faye's Jane Austen: A Family Record, Second Edition (Cambridge, 2004, "Family pedigrees," [pp. 345–355]), were of immense help in figuring out all the characters and their relation(s) to one another. "Family pedigrees," though, makes the Austens and their relatives sound like dogs or horses.
- C.S. Forester wrote a dozen or so Hornblower titles, which follow Hornblower up the command chain to admiral. Hornblower's career is modelled loosely on that of Lord Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar.
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