Why You Should Watch 'Love & Friendship'

Though the novels of Jane Austen positively drip with witticisms, catty descriptive asides and zingy ironies, their film versions all too often tend to soft-sell the comedy. Emma Thompson’s elegant adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was wry and knowing, though only the most hopeful of high-school English teachers would argue for it as genuinely side-splitting; Joe Wright’s take on Pride and Prejudice played up swooning romance over barbed interplay. Both the Paltrow- and Taylor-Joy-starring iterations of Emma are light, pastel-hued baubles, but more feathery than they are genuinely funny; the laughs only came with a rewrite as drastic as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless.