There will be blood

EMMA.

Crit

Title typography [sic]; see, it's a period film . . . OK, forgive them; the picture itself is much cleverer.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a perfect Austen heroine, and her Emma is perfectly dreadful, throughout the first several reels but especially at one dreadfullest moment; don't worry: you'll know it when you see it. Everyone does, even the dreadful one herself.

Brave of screenwriter Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde (and of Taylor-Joy herself) to turn moral ugliness to 11, but of course they still can't hide the inevitability of Emma + Knightly (Johnny Flynn). Oops, spoiler. But then you've read the book.

• Holy crap! In the Heights! Yes, please.

Now you don't

The Invisible Man

Crit

Gee, whilikers, what a well-made scary! What has this Leigh Whannell done before? Uh, a buttload of Saw flicks and nothing I'd seen. Nonetheless, a masterpiece of tease and terror, shot with an eye both atmospheric and narrative, a score that underpins the belly swoops, and a star, Elisabeth Moss, we've seen terrorized before, but not this way. And no, I'm not gonna say a word about the plot. Just see it. Get it? SEE it?

• Only notable trailer is notable only because the film is cowritten by Jordan Peele: Candyman.

The same old story

Premature

Crit

Nothing in this story of young love that we haven't seen before, nothing very dramatic except to the extent that young love is the quintessence of drama, but it all feels fresh, and yes, that's partly because the film is set on and around 145th Street and populated not by the pretty white people we're accustomed to seeing young and in love the screen but by pretty brown people who stake a hungry claim to that screen. Quotidian colorblind heartbreak, cowritten and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green.

Ordinary Love

Crit

Likewise, nothing here we haven't seen before: cancer as it affects not just one body but the body that is couplehood. And the sharp writing (by Owen McCafferty) is  sometimes too sharp to be contextually believable. But Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson sell it, and raise it. But what kept distracting me was: where in Northern Ireland is this set?

• Trailer for Military Wives: Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, but it looks like a clichéfest.

Should never have taken the very best

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band

Crit

Get this straight: nothing was Robbie's fault. It was all those secondary guys in the (The) band (Band), especially crazy paranoid junkie Levon.

I have no idea what the truth is. This is a truth, certainly; certainly there are others. But this truth is emphatically Robbie Robertson's, with the other talking heads confirming it or providing easily dismissed (or ignored) countertestimony. Which, OK, fine: it pretends to nothing else, and for someone who has enjoyed the music without getting much into the mythology, it's a chance to hear some of the former and get a one-facet primer on the latter. Fair enough. But don't try to tell that to my Levon-loving friends.

Enter the dragon

Latter-day M4

So called because while I did only 3 movies, the final M is for Mormon, as in Book of, which was just as much fun as I'd long anticipated (it celebrates its ninth anniversary next month!), but we don't do live here.

Dolor y gloria (Pain and glory)

VE

The scattered past as heroin dreams in Pedro Almodóvar's largely autobiographical and literally titled film. Always been a big Pedro fan, always struggled to say why. Let's just say this: humanity in extremis. Banderas the best I've ever seen him, Cruz plays frustration perfectly, and the kid cast as young Salvador, Asier Flores, gives one of those kid performances so good it seems like it's not acting.

This came to the hard-to-get-to theater on the edge of town and left before I knew it was there, so while I wouldn't ordinarily have included it in a Manhattan trip, it was a must today.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a lady on fire)

VE

This, in contrast, probably will come to my downtown theater [update: yup], but because it was so convenient and I didn't have a crowded itinerary of musts, I treated myself to a screening on Village East's big screen.

A film about gaze, female in this case, and perhaps more sympathetic and less unwelcome for that, but still complicated, especially as the gazed-at turns gazer, both at the gazer and at herself through an imagined perspective of the gazer's eyes. As I said, complicated.

Also a thrilling festival of sisterhood, with men onscreen for maybe 5 minutes, and pretty much just in the way for that. No surprise that we're so disposable.

Buffaloed

Quad

Not remotely a great film, but it manages one great feat: makes us sympathize with and root for a character whose behavior and moral standards are despicable. Credit Zoey Deutsch for making debt collection seem like something a human being might do.

• A wealth of trailers, most notably for the documentaries Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things and The Booksellers, the extra-odd Extra Ordinary, and the wtf? Run This Town.

#TheBusinessWe'veChosen

The Assistant

Crit

Jane wants to be a film producer, so she doesn't mind the Uber commute from an Astoria that seems to be somewhere east of the Hamptons, and she doesn't mind the 15-hour days of work that includes making the coffee and doing the lunch runs and cleaning the boss's sofa (don't ask) and other tasks they apparently teach at Northwestern; she doesn't even mind (much) her hierarchical debasement before two colleagues who aren't much more experienced and are substantially less professional but who have been blessed with penises. She is going to make it in this biz, and she knows there are exorbitant dues to be paid.

But Jane has a problem. No, don't be silly: her problem isn't her Harvey Weinsteinish boss, a bullying sexual predator. She's lucky, you see, as an unsympathetic HR drone tells her: she's "not his type."

The problem, Jane's potentially professionally fatal flaw, is a conscience. Which might explain her not-his-typeness: Jane wears that disfiguring flaw on her face from the start of her commute to the donut she tries to choke down for dinner. This is a spare film, soft-spoken and elliptical, and it's that face--of Julia Garner--that does most of the heavy lifting. Garner (who is about the 15th-best reason to binge The Americans if you somehow missed it--and there are so many reasons to watch the series that 15th-best is still a very good reason), like the film, doesn't do flash, but few actors her age can do stoic defeat as well. Contemplating the career the actor should have ahead of her is some consolation for having to contemplate the career probably awaiting the character.

• Holy crap, new Wes Anderson movie coming, with all my favorite actors! The French Dispatch. And the few favorite actors who aren't in that are in Sally Potter's upcoming The Roads Not Taken.

Soft focus

The Photograph

Crit

Woo, boy, is this ever a Valentine's Day date movie! Is this ever not an old unattached bull elephant's weekday popcorn lunch movie.

That said, if you're in the market for an intergenerational pair of love stories, and if you're not bothered by the fact that the feminism/independence/career subtext is decidedly sub- and the takeaway from it is that that triad is just a palatable consolation prize, then you could do lots worse than spending 100 minutes in love with these 4 beautiful and engaging people. And if you've never heard Al Green sing a Kris Kristofferson song, here's your chance. Plus I think there's a Yale University Press book behind Lil Rel Howery in the safe-from-the-hurricane scene, but you'll have to confirm that yourself.

• Two first-view trailers for me: F9: The Fast Saga (probably not) and The Secret: Dare to Dream (oh, good god, no).