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.