With three films now under her belt, the auteurist obsessions of English writer/director Emerald Fennell are becoming obvious, even though she’s not particularly subtle about her cinematic proclivities. In fact, her latest film, an “adaptation” of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel “Wuthering Heights” (the title is stylized with quotes as an ironic nod to the liberties Fennell takes with the text), opens with a direct acknowledgment of her own tendency to eroticize death.

We hear it first: groaning, wood squeaking, a kind of climax. As the picture comes up, we discover these sounds are not sexual in nature, but the noises coming from a man publicly hanged, a spectacle that sends the crowd, including a young Catherine Earnshaw (Charlotte Mellington), into an ecstatic frenzy. It’s a cheeky bait-and-switch from Fennell.

In her first film, “Promising Young Woman,” a troubled heroine sets out on a rape-revenge suicide mission; in her second, “Saltburn,” the antihero humps the grave of his dead best friend and dances naked through a mansion after he eradicates the family tree. Sex is never far from death, and death is inherently sexy in all of Fennell’s films, which she announces at the top of “Wuthering Heights.” But as the French say, the orgasm is, after all, “la petite mort,” the little death.

The hanging represents a kind of barbaric sensuality that will tempt Cathy over the course of her life, particularly in her relationship with her adopted brother (or “pet”) Heathcliff, a wretch from Liverpool (Owen Cooper) who grows into a strapping, rough, alluring young man (Jacob Elordi), who smolders intensely in the direction of the lovely, but still petulant, adult Cathy (Margot Robbie).

Forbidden, abject desire is the main theme that Fennell draws out from Brontë’s sprawling, tempestuous (and much adapted) novel, which she has abridged, condensed and elaborated upon to her own specific ends. It’s almost a fan fiction of sorts, as Fennell explores and experiments with the characters and story while inserting some daringly kinky sex.

Strange then, that “Wuthering Heights” feels so unsatisfying. Fennell boldly goes places the novel does not, but like her previous two films, it just adds up to a lot of empty provocation, without much to motivate or undergird this performative naughtiness. The film could use the boning of a good corset, pulled taut. Instead, it all feels a bit messy.

But Fennell loves mess. Cathy pranks and teases long-suffering Heathcliff, leaving eggs in his bed (he curiously fingers the yolks). When she experiences a sexual awakening with him while spying on a pair of servants in the barn, suddenly everything takes on a new texture, in which Fennell, the director, delights: a snail trail of slime on a window pane; bread dough as moist and manhandled as human flesh.

Wild and wind-whipped, Cathy is simultaneously repelled by Heathcliff and drawn to him; her sexuality rooted in disgust. She declares to her beleaguered maid and confidant Nelly (Hong Chau) that she can’t marry Heathcliff because it would “degrade” her. Fennell suggests that’s exactly what most women want Heathcliff to do.

Propelled by poverty and class consciousness, Cathy throws herself at a wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif), and finds herself trapped in an over-designed gilded cage, in an estate where the floors are painted blood red and the mantlepiece crawls with white plaster hands. Heathcliff disappears before returning with a moneyed glow-up, setting Cathy’s heart — and loins — aflutter once again. It’s a real friends-to-lovers-to-enemies- to-lovers tale.

But while there are a few memorably lusty moments — Elordi lifting Robbie by the corset strings is a thrill — and plenty of tightly bound bosom heaving, in general, Fennell overpromises and under-delivers on the sex in “Wuthering Heights.” She tries in vain to get her freak on, but most of the Cathy/Heathcliff stuff is too vanilla to get pulses racing, despite all their horny rain-soaked torment.

Robbie’s movie star charisma and stunning costumes by Jacqueline Durran make her the visual centerpiece of the film, but Elordi proves to be the necessary grounding force. As in his Oscar-nominated performance in “Frankenstein,” Elordi palpably sells Heathcliff’s anguish: his heartache at Cathy’s rejection, his insecurity, the cruelty he clings to as revenge.

In this playfully anachronistic version, Fennell puts forth some intriguing ideas and intoxicating cinematic images, but never manages to achieve a firm grasp on the tone of her “Wuthering Heights,” which whips like a loose skirt in the breeze, see-sawing between earnestness and arch, over-stylized melodrama. After two hours of oddly funny skulduggery and muddy rutting, she asks the audience to turn on the waterworks with a big, bloody show and a soapy montage. Alas, we’re all bone-dry, because none of the emotional components meaningfully cohere. The surface pleasures of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” may be plenty, but the story itself, well, it never achieves climax.

‘Wuthering Heights’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, some violent content and language)

Running time: 2:16

How to watch: In theaters Feb. 10

Related Articles

Review: With a dose of paranoia and a charming cast, ‘The ‘Burbs’ draws you into its mystery

‘GOAT’ review: Latest from Sony Pictures Animations gets too few buckets

Sam Darnold wins Super Bowl championship right where he revived his career with San Francisco

Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny delivers joyful Super Bowl halftime show

Sharing with the 1989 Tom Hanks film a title, a vague premise, a little paranoid spirit and a Universal Studios backlot street, “The ‘Burbs,” now on Peacock, stars Keke Palmer and Jack Whitehall as newlywed new parents who have moved into the house he grew up in — his parents are on “a cruise forever” — in Hinkley Hills, the self-proclaimed “safest town in America.”

Well, obviously not. First of all, that’s not a real thing. But more to the point, no one’s going to make an eight-hour streaming series (ending in a cliffhanger) about an actually safe town. Even Sheriff Taylor had the occasion to welcome someone worse than Otis the town drunk into the Mayberry jail. In post-post-war American culture, suburbs and small towns are more often than not a stage for secrets, sorrows, scandals and satire. The stories of John Cheever, the novels of Stephen King, “The Stepford Wives,” “Blue Velvet” and its godchild “Twin Peaks,” “Desperate Housewives” (filmed on the same backlot street as “The ‘Burbs”), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” last year’s “Grosse Pointe Garden Society,” which I mention in protest of its cancellation, are set there — it’s a long list.

Samira Fisher (Palmer) is a civil litigation lawyer still on maternity leave, a job reflecting her inquisitive, inquisitorial nature. Husband Rob (Whitehall) is a book editor, a fact referred to only twice in eight hours, but which allows for scenes in which he rides a soundstage commuter train to the big city (presumably New York) with boyhood friend and once-more next-door neighbor Naveen (Kapil Talwalkar), whose wife has just left him for their dentist. Samira, Naveen and Rory (Kyrie McAlpin), an overachieving late tween who has a merit badge in swaddling, a recommendation from Michelle Obama on her mother’s helper resume and a notary public’s license, are the only people of color in town, but racism isn’t really an issue, past a few raised eyebrows and odd comment. (“What a cute little mocha munchkin,” says a shifty librarian of baby Miles.) “It’s a nice area,” says Naveen, “and people like to think of themselves as nice, so they try to act nice until they’re actually nice.”

As we open, the Fishers have been tentatively residing on Ashfield Place (“over by Ashfield Street near Ashfield Crescent”), for some indeterminable short time. Apart from Naveen, neither has met, or as much as spoken to, any of their new neighbors, though Samira — feeling insecure postpartum and going out only at night to push Miles in his stroller — watches them through the window.

That will change, of course, or this will be one of television’s most radically conceived shows. Fascinated by a dilapidated, supposedly uninhabited house across the street — the same backlot where the Munsters mansion rose many years ago, for your drawer of fun facts — she’s drawn out into a mystery: The rumor is that 20 years earlier a teenage girl was killed and buried there by her parents, who subsequently disappeared. Rob says there’s nothing in it, and in a way that tells you maybe there is.

Left to right, Kapil Talwalkar as Naveen, Erica Dasher as Betsy, Jack Whitehall as Rob, Keke Palmer as Samira, in Peacock’s “The ‘Burbs.” (Elizabeth Morris/Peacock/TNS)

Out in the world, she will find her quirky Scooby Gang: widow Lynn (Julia Duffy), still attached to her late husband; Dana (Paula Pell), a retired Marine whose wife has been deployed to somewhere she can’t reveal; and Tod (Mark Proksch), a taciturn, deadpan “lone wolf” with an assortment of skills and a recumbent tricycle. (Their shared nemeses is Agnes, played by Danielle Kennedy, “our evil overlord,” the stiff-necked president of the homeowner’s association.) They bond over wine (drinking it) and close ranks around Samira after the police roust her on her own front porch. By the end of the first episode, Samira is determined to stay in Hinkley Hills, warmed by new friends, enchanted by the fireflies and in love with the “sweet suburban air.”

Weird goings-on in a creepy old “haunted” house is as basic a trope as exists in the horror-comedy mystery genre (see Martin and Lewis’ “Scared Stiff,” Bob Hope’s “The Ghost Breakers,” Abbott and Costello’s “Hold That Ghost” and assorted Three Stooges shorts). Suddenly there’s a “for sale” sign on this one, and just as suddenly, it’s sold. The new owner is Gary (Justin Kirk), who chases off anyone who comes around. Tod notes that the security system he’s installed is “overkill” for a private residence, necessary only “if you are in danger, you have something to hide — or both.” You are meant to regard him as suspicious; Samira does.

Created by Celeste Hughey, “The ‘Burbs” is pretty good, a good time — not the most elegant description, but probably the words that would come out of my mouth were you to ask me, conversationally, how it was. I suppose most of it adds up even if doesn’t always feel that way while watching it. It hops from tone to tone, and goes on a little long, in the modern manner, which dilutes the suspense. The characters are half-, let’s say three-quarters-formed, which is formed enough; everyone plays their part. The Hardy Boys were not known for psychological depth, and I read a lot of those books. A lot. Indeed, depth would only get in the way of the plot, which is primarily concerned with fooling you and fooling you again. When a character isn’t what they seem, making the false front too emotionally relatable is counterproductive; the viewer, using myself as an example, will feel cheated, annoyed. I won’t say whether that happens here.

That isn’t to say that the actors, every one of them, aren’t as good as can be. I’ll show up for Pell and Duffy anywhere, anytime. Proksch, well known to viewers of Tim Heidecker’s “On Cinema at the Cinema,” is weird in an original way. The British Whitehall, primarily known as a stand-up comedian, panel show guest and presenter, makes a fine romantic lead. Kirk is appealingly standoffish, if such a thing might be imagined. As Samira’s brother, Langston, RJ Cyler has only a small role, but he pops onscreen and, having the advantage of not being tied up in any of the major plotlines, provides something of a relief from them. And Palmer, an old pro at 32 — her career goes back to “Akeelah and the Bee” and Nickelodeon’s “True Jackson” — does all sorts of wonderful small things with her face and her voice. She’s an excellent Nancy Drew, and the world can never have enough of those.

Related Articles

Movie review: Fennell’s messy ‘Wuthering Heights’ a playful, unsatisfying adaptation

‘GOAT’ review: Latest from Sony Pictures Animations gets too few buckets

Sam Darnold wins Super Bowl championship right where he revived his career with San Francisco

Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny delivers joyful Super Bowl halftime show

Sony Pictures Animation has made the world sit up and take notice in recent years thanks to its first two excellent “Spider-Verse” films, which have dazzled on the big screen, and the highly enjoyable and downright infectious “KPop Demon Hunters,” the most-watched title in the history of streaming giant Netflix, with more than 500 million global views.

Now the studio brings us “GOAT,” an underdog tale of a small hooper with a big heart.

While we won’t go so far as to call it “baaaaaad” — sorry, last goat joke, we promise — it’s not in the class of the other movies.

In auditoriums this week, “GOAT” is an example of what we’ll call “short-attention-span theater,” a flick too busy throwing stuff against the wall, with too little of it sticking, to find its emotional core.

It’s promising early on, with its expectedly great looks obvious from the start and an effective-enough introduction to its likable lead character, Will Harris (Caleb McLaughlin). We meet the scrappy goat when he’s just, well, a kid — as he’s being taken to see his first roarball game by his loving mom.

We should stop here and explain that roarball is a lot like basketball, only it’s played by animals and on potentially hazardous surfaces such as ice and one that sits precariously below stalactites. The co-ed game is played exclusively by large creatures, or “bigs,” who are happy to repeat a commonly used phrase: “Smalls don’t ball.”

Nonetheless, as Will watches the hometown Vineland Thorns — with his favorite player, superstar black leopard Jett Filmore (Gabrielle Union) — play, he says, “That’s gonna be me, Mom.”

A decade later, with Mom gone, diner delivery man Will holds on to that dream — trying to sneak practice time at a venue known as “the cage” before the bigs kick him out — even as he’s struggling to hold on to the room he’s renting.

Meanwhile, Jett is still the Thorns’ star, but she’s never brought home the Claw — the league’s championship trophy — with some fans suggesting that, deep into her career, “she’s washed.”

In town to take on the Thorns with his team, the Magma, reigning roarball league MVP Mane Attraction (Aaron Pierre), shows up at the cage to take on all ballers brave enough to go against him for cash. When Will puts up his rent money to face off with Mane, he gets the best of the cocky horse, if only momentarily.

Still, the little goat does enough to go viral, and he’s soon signed by the Thorns’ publicity-hungry warthog owner, Flo Everson (Jenifer Lewis), as the team’s sixth player. When asked by the excited Will if Jett is on board with this, Flo lies through her tusks by claiming it was the star’s idea.

Boy, that is not the case, as Jett — the de facto coach, holding much more power than the teams’ actual leader, Dennis Cooper (Patton Oswalt) — refuses to let Will on the court with her and the other team members: high-strung ostrich Olivia Burke (Nicola Coughlan); Modo Olachenko (Nick Kroll), a Komodo dragon with a big personality; defensive specialist rhino Archie Everhardt (McLaughlin’s “Stranger Things” castmate David Harbour), who’s also a girl dad; Lenny Williamson (Stephen Curry), a giraffe who also aspires to be a rapper.

Of course, Will’s time in purgatory lasts only so long, “GOAT” from there bouncing its narrative ball all over the place wildly. There’s a potentially compelling story about an older player mentoring and then passing the torch to a younger player, but the story by Nicolas Curcio and Peter Chiarelli and screenplay by Aaron Buchsbaum and Teddy Riley only flirts with it.

Director Tyree Dillihay oversees an affair that is energetic and likely to appeal to plenty of young viewers but decidedly lacking in strong storytelling. “GOAT,” which gets some mileage out of the dual meaning of the word, which in sports also is an acronym for “greatest of all time,” succeeds in celebrating the culture that surrounds basketball. That aspect of the movie takes it only so far, however.

Again, it does look pretty darn cool, the filmmakers utilizing tech developed for video games, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, for some of its undeniable razzle-dazzle. Plus, the character designs are distinct and the world they inhabit is well-conceived and executed.

And “GOAT” does deliver a few humorous moments, our favorite being a frustrated Jett putting in earbuds to listen to a song in which a cat repeatedly sings “meow,” but it’s not exactly a laugh riot.

Lastly, the voice performances are solid, with “Stranger Things” star McLaughlin helping to craft Will into an appealing hero.

The movie’s ties to real-world basketball include Union, wife of retired NBA star Dwyane Wade, and, of course, Curry, a longtime star for the Golden State Warriors. However, even the use of Curry feels off; why have arguably the greatest of all time when it comes to long-distance shooting not voice a sharp shooter in the movie?

“GOAT” has some game, but for all the shots it takes, it scores too few points.

‘GOAT’

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for some rude humor and brief mild language)

Running time: 1:40

How to watch: In theaters Feb. 13

Related Articles

Movie review: Fennell’s messy ‘Wuthering Heights’ a playful, unsatisfying adaptation

Review: With a dose of paranoia and a charming cast, ‘The ‘Burbs’ draws you into its mystery

Sam Darnold wins Super Bowl championship right where he revived his career with San Francisco

Seattle Seahawks win the Super Bowl

Bad Bunny delivers joyful Super Bowl halftime show

Defending Class 2A Hill-Murray has set the table nicely for a repeat run.

The Pioneers are the top side in the big school division after downing previously unbeaten Woodbury in the Class 2A, Section 4 final.

Brackets for both classes were unveiled Saturday morning.

Defending Class A champion Dodge County is seeded fourth, setting the stage for a potential showdown with top-seeded Warroad in the semis, should both teams advance. Dodge County toppled Warroad in overtime of last year’s state title game.

There is no East Metro team in the Class A field for the second straight year.

The winner’s bracket for each tournament will be played at Grand Casino Arena in downtown St. Paul. The semifinals and finals for each class will be televised on KSTC Channel 45. Quarterfinals can be viewed online on the Neighborhood Sports Network.

The complete brackets for each class are listed below and can be found on the MSHSL site.

Brackets will be updated daily on the website with results throughout the tournament.

MN CLASS 2A GIRLS STATE HOCKEY TOURNAMENT

Thursday’s quarterfinals

No. 1 Hill-Murray vs. No. 8 Lakeville North, 11 a.m.

No. 4 Edina vs. No. 5 Bemidji, 1 p.m.

No. 2 Centennial/Spring Lake Park vs. No. 7 Farmington, 6 p.m.

No. 3 Holy Family vs. No. 6 Andover, 8 p.m.

Friday’s semifinals

Thursday afternoon quarterfinal winners, 6 p.m.

Thursday evening quarterfinal winners, 8 p.m.

Saturday’s final

Friday semifinal winners, 7 p.m.

MN CLASS A GIRLS STATE HOCKEY TOURNAMENT

Wednesday’s quarterfinals

No. 1 Warroad vs. No. 8 Luverne, 11 a.m.

No. 4 Dodge County vs. No. 5 Proctor/Hermantown, 1 p.m.

No. 2 Breck vs. No. 7 Saint Cloud, 6 p.m.

No. 3 Blake vs. No. 6 Mankato East, 8 p.m.

Friday’s semifinals

Wednesday afternoon quarterfinal winners, 11 a.m.

Wednesday evening quarterfinal winners, 1 p.m.

Saturday’s final

Friday afternoon semifinal winners, 4 p.m.

Related Articles

State skiing: Stillwater boys, SPA/Summit School girls clinch Nordic team titles

Vikings’ girls flag football league is expanding

Girls hockey: Lakeville North beats Apple Valley 1-0 to advance to state

State Nordic skiing: SPA sisters take team sprint title

Girls hockey: A roundup of Tuesday’s section tournament action