Excellent remake of a remade remake.

Rating: 8/10 (27 August 2016)

The lighting, costume design and art direction alone make this film a standout, but also the cinematography and editing match the material and make this "timeless" film highly entertaining.
In Joe Wright's high-end retelling of the story, a young woman at the lowest, and most economically vulnerable end of the landed gentry of early 1800's England, must find a suitable partner. The man she finds is basically a total asshat, but as the plot unfolds, it's revealed that the negative allegation's made against him aren't actually true, and although his family would forbid it, he's prepared to transcend the class structure of his era for "pure love".
Keira Knightley is effortlessly beautiful in every scene, even when she falls in the mud or throws a tantrum, she basically grits into a photogenic grimace, and her 'petulant' look somewhat betrays the underlying entitlement of the actress.
The weather is perfect in every scene though and every prop, costume piece, window frame and even sagging, unappealing street view looks like a work of art.
The film's romantic core is something of a contradiction; ultimately, Bennett is a sexually attractive woman of lower social standing and the pompous, self-regarding Mr Darcy that loves her has a lot of money and property - making the plot seem somewhat more like a marriage of material gain rather than anything remotely revolutionary.
Regardless, generations of new readers pick up Jane Austin's classics, although as a newcomer you can be left wondering a little as to what readers see in their literary hero's concept; Austin's story is essentially a film about a women's lack of self-determination in an era before any real political and labor representation, and the film wallows in the pretensions and resentments of Britain's entrenched class system of yore. Thank god for the Sex Pistols.