Category: Film

Seen through the lens of the London Soundtrack Festival, Emma reveals itself as a film elevated by its music. Introduced by composer Rachel Portman in an onstage conversation, it plays like a case study in how score can become structure, not just accompaniment, but the very thing that gives a film its tone and emotional coherence.

Douglas McGrath’s version of Jane Austen’s novel has long been characterised as light, witty, even “Miramaxed”, a work that prioritises accessibility over textual fidelity. But what becomes newly apparent in this context is how deliberate that lightness is. The film moves quickly, compressing social intricacies into bright and legible gestures. 

From the opening bars, her music establishes a world of buoyancy and control: lilting strings, playful woodwinds, melodies that seem to drift rather than resolve. These are now recognisable Portman signatures, but in Emma they align us with Emma Woodhouse’s perspective, a consciousness that experiences social life as something manageable and orchestrable. The score subtly endorses her world.

Gwyneth Paltrow’s performance sits comfortably within this tonal design. Her Emma is bright, composed, faintly insulated: a young woman whose confidence is cushioned by the film’s aesthetic softness. Around her, Jeremy Northam’s grounded Mr. Knightley, Toni Collette’s pliant Harriet, and Ewan McGregor’s performative Frank Churchill all move with a kind of musical logic, their interactions shaped as much by rhythm as by dialogue. Even the comedy, often cited as the film’s greatest strength, lands with a precision that feels scored as much as written.

Portman’s reflections on her process complicate this apparent effortlessness. Working primarily at the piano, she describes melody as a way of externalising something internal, translating instinct into structure. Watching a film, she identifies key stretches, not isolated scenes but clusters of time, and begins there, allowing themes to carry across narrative space. In Emma, that approach results in a gently insistent score that guides the viewer through Emma’s emotional arc even when the film itself resists introspection.

Her comments on changing industry practices are equally revealing. Where directors once encountered a completed score in something like a first performance, an unveiling, contemporary filmmaking often dissolves that moment through constant iteration. Emma belongs to that earlier paradigm, and the confidence of the music reflects it. There is little sense of compromise or over-explanation; the score trusts its own tone and, in doing so, asks the film to meet it.

Critically, the music has often been described in soft-focus terms, “sweet,” “soothing,” “string-rich”, sometimes even criticised for its familiarity. Yet that familiarity is part of its function. The repetitions, the circling melodies, mirror Emma’s own limited perspective, her tendency to see patterns where there are none, to impose narrative where there is only contingency. The score comforts but it also contains.

Placed against later interpretations, particularly the more overtly textured work by Isobel Waller-Bridge and David Schweitzer for Emma, Portman’s approach can seem almost restrained. Where the 2020 adaptation expands outward, layering themes and vocal textures, Emma (1996) narrows inward, committing to a singular tonal identity. It is less interested in variety than in consistency, less in reinterpreting Austen than in smoothing her into something continuous and playable.

Three decades on, Emma endures not because it resolves the tensions between fidelity and accessibility, but because it sidesteps them. It becomes, instead, a film about tone, about the management of feeling, about the quiet authority of music to make even the most familiar story feel newly composed.

The London Soundtrack Festival concludes on Sunday April 12th 2026, with a variety of concerts, talks, Q&A’s and podcast recordings on offer.

Being dubbed “The worst film of all time” is not usually an indicator of a great night out. However, Ed Wood is no usual director-writer-producer. His 1956 cult classic Plan 9 From Outer Space kicks off what the BFI states as the key title for their Trash! The Wildest Film You’ve Ever Seen season: an entertaining romp through retro B-movie madness, camp capers and the tell-tale sign of a wider societal parable being explored through schlocky sets and even worse acting. It is clear from the outset of the night’s double bill that Plan 9 is something special, though. Afforded an extended intro by not one but three guest speakers, we hear first from BFI curator William Fowler, followed by Head of Conservation, Kieron Webb and finally author Ken Hollings; each one discussing a unique element to their relationship with the fan favourite in an almost full house. A special 35mm edition of the film has been brought out for our viewing pleasure, as close as possible to the version original audiences would have experienced, including the splice in reel 1. It certainly feels as though we are about to witness cinematic history all over again.

For those less familiar with director Ed Wood’s masterpiece, Plan 9 is an eighty-minute wild ride about grave-robbing aliens who resurrect the recently dead to repopulate their alien race. Made on a budget of about £25, there is no doubt the script is atrocious and the acting as wooden as the cardboard props. Bela Lugosi (of vintage Dracula fame) is portrayed as the leading ghoul, his scenes shot aimlessly before there was a script. Iconic temptress Vampira portrays his recently deceased wife come back to kill. A mish-mash of hilariously inept police procedural, alien/zombie/vampire crossover and a genuine overarching message of anti-atomic bomb sentiment post WW2 and you get a vague sense of the piece. Beloved for a reason, there are a million quotable one-liners and unintentional visual gags (flimsy tombstones, a multipurpose cheap curtain and dinky plastic UFO saucers on wire). Plan 9 is an authentically chaotic but beloved B-movie classic that traverses the ratings parabola from good to bad and genuinely back to good again.

What better way to appreciate Ed Wood’s masterpiece than to follow it with a noir biopic about the man himself? In the BFI Screen 1, with its plush red velvet seating and golden velvet curtain, art deco proscenium arch and excellent technology, we are presented with Tim Burton’s 1994 love letter to one of his biggest influences. Filmed in beautifully lit greyscale- homage to Mr Wood’s own work- we are treated to a practically perfect depiction of his Sisyphean task to get his films made, distributed and celebrated. Johnny Depp portrays the Wood superbly, full of optimism, openness and vulnerability with his own lifestyle. We learn of his trials and tribulations to get Glen or Glenda made, right through to the infamous Plan 9. Burton achieves excellent panache in depicting accurately both Ed Wood’s methods as well as his own rather identifiable visual style. Dramatic, almost Renaissance lighting is complemented by Howard Shore’s mellifluously retro soundtrack with classical motifs. Martin Landau won an Oscar for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi in this film and rightly so. Ed Wood is as much about Wood’s journey with Lugosi in his tragic final year as it is about Wood himself. Ed Wood is Tim Burton at his creative finest before perhaps going the way of self-parody in later films.

Ultimately, this double bill is an exceptional chance to view films which, in isolation, have their own merits, but together are greater than the sum of their parts. Almost like an earlier version of Tommy Wiseu’s The Room (also dubbed the worst film ever made), and subsequently his own biopic, The Disaster Artist, we get a sense of storytelling nostalgia alongside an appreciation for a creative mind that no longer exists and never got to experience praise in his own lifetime. Ed Wood’s big film premiere finale for Plan 9 finally gives its subject the fantasy future it always deserved.

Trash! Season plays until 30^th April 2026 at the BFI.