The Atlantic

The Delicate and Demanding World of <em>Emma</em>

The director Autumn de Wilde’s precise aesthetic is an ideal match for the rigid social rules of Jane Austen’s classic novel.
Source: Focus Features

This might sound like a ludicrous complaint, but moviegoers have been bereft of Jane Austen adaptations of late. Yes, almost all of the celebrated author’s works have been committed to film at one point or another; a boom began in the ’90s and ran into the early 2000s, yielding such memorable efforts as , Douglas McGrath’s , Patricia Rozema’s , and Joe Wright’s . But recent years have featured more glancing hits—a half-hearted , a movie about an , another about an . In the past 13 years, only Whit Stillman’s terrific , based on one of Austen’s least known works, has really connected.

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