NOTHING explores the depths of emotion and drama like a great movie melodrama, and a new season of films at Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre, starting on 4th November, sets out to celebrate the genre with a programme that ranges from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? to Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet.

The BFI Film Audience Network’s new nationwide season, Too Much: Melodrama On Film, invited audiences to follow their emotions and get swept away by the big screen experience.

Too Much celebrates the excess and dramatic potency of a form of cinema that champions emotional intensity over propriety and good taste. As Poole’s only independent cinema, the arts centre is augmenting its regular film programme of British, classic, world and indie titles across a range of genres with this month of big screen melodrama.

“The BFI’s Too Much season is a wonderful opportunity to showcase some exceptional films for our audiences,” says Katy Griffiths, Lighthouse head of programming. “This thoughtfully curated programme offers a really diverse range of films all designed to stir your emotions. From modern classics to vintage echoes of Hollywood’s golden era – I can’t wait to see them on the big screen.”

With its roots in the exaggerated performance and expressive staging of the silent era, the melodramatic mode evolved to incorporate a wealth of genres and stories. United by their emotion-driven plots, vivid visual language and self-conscious audience manipulation, these films are designed to make you break down in tears, cause a scene, fall in love … to feel something!

The season opens with Robert Aldrich’s 1962 psychological horror film, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, starring Bette Davis (pictured) and Joan Crawford. A former vaudeville child star torments her paraplegic sister, who eclipsed her as a movie star, while desperately clinging to hopes of a comeback.

All That Heaven Allows (1955), directed by Douglas Sirk, stars Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in a story of an upper-class widow who falls in love with a much younger, down-to-earth nurseryman, much to the disapproval of her children and criticism of her country club peers.

Baz Luhrman provoked a wide range of critical responses when he updated Romeo and Juliet and set it on Verona Beach, California, but this 1996 punk version of Shakespeare’s tragedy made stars of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes and is now regarded as a classic.

Johnny Guitar, a 1954 Western directed by Nicholas Ray, stars Joan Crawford as a strong-willed female saloon owner who is wrongly suspected of murder and bank robbery by a lynch mob, after helping a wounded gang member.

Robert Zemickis directed the 1992 horror film, Death Becomes Her. When a fading actress learns of an immortality treatment, she sees it as a way to outdo her long-time rival – it stars Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn.

Visit the Lighthouse website www.lighthousepoole.co.uk for more information or to book.