Film review: Carey Mulligan dazzles in Far from the Madding Crowd

At a momentwhen even action fantasies are subjected to avid feminist analysis (cheers to Mad Max: Fury Road and boos to Jurassic World), it might be time to spare a thought for Far from the Madding Crowd. A salient statement of female empowerment despite its antiquity, Thomas Hardy's 1874 novel has been awaiting a mainstream revival since John Schlesinger's 1967 adaptation.

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg, a pioneering mind whose early success, Festen (1998), is the antithesis of this new movie's sumptuous cinematography and period setting, has arguably never found his mojo with English-language filmmaking. Until now, that is.

But if the breakthrough of a maverick European director means nothing to you, consider the novel's influence: Hardy's proto-feminist heroine's surname — and her ability to think outside the box inhabited by her contemporaries — was shared (if not spelled the same way) by Katniss Everdeen, the revolutionary leader in The Hunger Games series.

When compared to Katniss, who partakes in straightforward endeavours such as overturning a totalitarian regime, Bathsheba Everdene (played by a feisty Carey Mulligan) has a more complicated task at hand: which of her three admirers should this late-Victorian woman choose to marry when tying the knot makes little sense to the free spirit in her?