Love & Friendship

Writer-director Whit Stillman departs from the milieu of the contemporary New York upper crust that he so memorably explored in such films as Damsels in Distress, The Last Days of Disco and Metropolitan for this sharp-tongued and riotously funny examination of 18th-century polite society. Adapting Jane Austen’s long-unpublished epistolary novella Lady Susan, Stillman creates a period piece whose spirit is unmistakably modern.