Movie Nation

What an unalloyed delight “Emma.” is. As “Emma” always is, and indeed, as most Jane Austen adaptations are.

Unless you try to add zombies.

This time, Anya Taylor-Joy of “Thoroughbreds” and “Glass” has the title role, and turns her big expressive eyes on the mean girl arrogance of Austen’s heroine.

The comedy is frothier than most recent versions of the story have managed, which makes the lump-in-the-throat romance of the third act more of a teary-eyed surprise.

Bill Nighy makes Emma’s dad adorably distinct, thanks to a script that emphasizes the droll, lean clothes horse (Bill N. was BORN to wear these costumes) as a hypochondriac.

Neighborly Mr. Knightley (Johnny Flynn of TV’s “Vanity Fair”) is a more rough-hewn voice-of-conscience for meddling match-maker Emma. He even has a facial scar that suggests he’s dueled with foils on occasion.

The dizzy, simple “companion” Emma is so set on pairing up “above her station,” Harriet (Mia Goth) is dizzier than ever. The snobby vicar Mr. Elton (John O’Connor) as pitiably repellent as usual, the dashing Frank Churchill (Callum Turner) makes the most of his belated entrance and everybody else whom you remember from every other “Emma” carries her or his weight.

And how easy is it to come off as witty and refined with lines like these?

“There is one thing a gentleman can always find time to do — his duty.”

“Do not attempt, with your good nature, to understand a bad one!”

“I am ready to die if you refuse me.”

Emma is a young woman about to turn 20 who has just formed her latest “match,” that of her governess (Gemma Whelan) to a wealthy neighbor-widower (Rupert Graves).

“I must admit I have not yet been proven wrong,” she boasts. She’ll set up her poor, fatherless friend Harriet with Mr. Elton, the vicar. No, she won’t hear any protests from her grumpy lifelong friend, George Knightley.

“She is pretty and she is good-tempered,” he pleads. “And that is all…Nobody within her reach will ever be good enough for her.”

Emma keeps Harriet away from a handsome farmer who loves her as she hurls Harriet and Mr. Elton into situations.

As everyone is prone to sharing letters from relations, Emma gets to read up on the mysterious and absent heir, Frank Churchill, and side-eye the “accomplished” Jane Fairfax (Amber Anderson of “Black Mirror”), who also could return at any moment.

Knightley fumes and her father whimpers about each and every “terrible day” in his gorgeous, baroque mansion where he feels perpetual drafts, fretting about even a hint of over-exertion. A little snowfall sends him into a panicked retreat to the warm (but drafty, apparently) comforts of home.

First-time feature director Autumn de Wilde gives us the lush lives of leisure and “making a good match” that Austen adaptations on the big screen are famous for. And she underscores the class distinctions and the barely-seen/never-heard army of servants it takes to live these Austenesque lives of privilege.

Two valets dress Mr. Woodhouse (Nighy), one for each shoe they slip on him in silence. No brow must be furrowed pulling off a stocking or tightening a bodice. There’s “a girl for that.”

Care was exercised in costumes — fine fabrics and custom cuts for all the wealthy folks who live in houses grand enough to have names like Hartfield, Donwell Abbey, Randalls. The simpler folk have simpler cuts from rougher cloth.

And every so often there’s a reminder of what might not be under those luxurious, immaculate costumes — underwear. Yes, this is Austen with bare bottoms.

The director keeps her ringleted star in tight shots, emphasizing her most expressive eyes as they express contempt, pity, dismay and hurt. Taylor-Joy makes a mean coquette here, and it takes a little humiliation — botched matchmaking, thwarted courtship with a suitably rich (and mean) equal, and of course her inevitable recognition that gallantry and kindness matter — to allow love and vulnerability into her life.

The value in a sexy dueling scar is not to be discounted, either.

I can’t say this is head and shoulders above any other “Emma.” to come along. But de Wilde, her leading lady and her production team have made the matchmaker in need of her own match fresh and modern in a period piece detailed — right down to the acapella folk tunes and hymns sung on the soundtrack.

Indeed, right down to the underwear, or lack of it.

MPAA Rating: PG, for brief partial nudity.

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy Johnny Flynn, Mia Goth, Callum Turner, Amber Anderson, Miranda Hart, Josh O’Connor, Rupert Graves, Gemma Whelan and Bill Nighy

Credits: Directed by Autumn de Wilde, script by Eleanor Catton, based on the novel by Jane Austen. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:05

Anime films based on popular manga are the ultimate filmgoing “Stranger in a Strange Land” experience. They’re an alien movie outing that doesn’t abide by normal rules of plot, logic and story and an animated experience which you can’t measure against other animation.

So dropping in on one, as I tend to do, can seem unfair to aficionados, as the films are a bit of a head-scratch to anybody who isn’t invested in one of these “DragonBall” or whatever money makers.

To those not deep into the genre, the films look choppy, under-animated, and if not “cheap” then kind of sketchy, stylized in a way that looks unfinished. They are the closest to a comic book that a “comic book movie” ever comes.

While most movies — even five-or-more sequels into a franchise — need to stand alone as their own story with a beginning, middle and end with characters introduced and taken through character arcs, that doesn’t apply here.

The movies are for fans only But let’s see what the kids are burning their hours on these days.

“My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising” is the second feature film based on the long-running manga series, which has also spawned TV and video games. Fans deeply invested in the characters hoot and holler back at the screen when this or that hero makes a dramatic entrance or reemergence, this magic power is shared, that miraculous “He’s not dead after all” resurrection arrives.

I didn’t see this in an empty theater, and the box office receipts prove the franchise has a fanbase. But as a movie, is the story or the animation worth a 104 minute investment in time?

Maybe if you’re really young and time is something you’ve got a lot of. Yeah, you can pick up on (more or less) what’s happening within a few minutes. But I can’t say it’s really worth it.

Here is a tale of a future where humanity has acquired “quirks,” super-human powers. There are kids who want to be superheroes. A pair of feuding friends — Izuku Midoriya and Katsuki Bakugo — are role models to the kids.

And they themselves idolize All Might, whose All-for-One powers are what our hero apprentices will need when League of Villains member Nine (Johnny Yong Bosch) threatens Nabu Island, where kids — including hero-in-training Deku — are holed up.

Nine wants them because he can acquire nine quirks to complement his own power, and Deku has access to All-for-One.

The animated effects — battle royales of the “Transformers” variety, only in drawn animation — are tolerable.

The dialogue is peppered with “hero” rules and codes of honor of the “A real hero will always find a way for justice to be served!”

The villain is all “Why won’t you weaklings DIE already?” Classic villain trash talk.

And there’s a smattering of profanity mixed in with the epic fights to let us know how adult this all is. Sure.

There are a lot of characters to invest in, too many for a single feature film to allow that to happen. The running gags provided by returning characters are a big way “Heroes Rising” is a movie that panders to the fanbase and does nothing at all to lure in newcomers.

If you haven’t been playing along, watching along or reading along, you’ll still recognize the archetypes and story tropes. The arc here is folk-tale ancient, at its bare bones. It’s all the clutter dressing that simple story up that is what the fans are here for and anybody else will regard as supernaturalist jibberish.

A single movie as part of this long continuum won’t give you much that doesn’t feel puerile or incoherent or unoriginal. And I can’t see enough in this junk food film that would send anybody new to “My Hero Academia” (love those Japanese titles) back to “catch up” on the origin stories.

Still, it takes all types.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and language (dubbed)

Cast: The voices of Felecia Angelle, Christopher Bevins, Johnny Yong Bosch, Justin Briner, Clifford Chapin and Dani Chambers.

Credits: Directed by Kenji Nagasaki, script by Yôsuke Kuroda, based on the manga by Kōhei Horikoshi. A Funimation release.

Running time: 1:44

“Mistaken” is a story of one woman’s torment in the weeks and months after 9/11.

Laila Besheer was interrogated repeatedly by the F.B.I. after the hijackings, once grabbed and grilled in an airport basement office for hours — while pregnant — because of her married name. Laila, a native of Morocco and a longtime American citizen, was married to a fellow named Muhammad Atta.

No, it wasn’t “THE” Muhammad Atta. That should have been obvious fairly early on. But as she and HER Muhammad Atta had flown to New York the week before 9/11, and stayed at a hotel at the World Trade Center, well, you can understand the confusion.

Nadia Kounda plays Besheer as an increasingly alarmed and rattled wife who can’t really say she knows everything about her architectural engineer husband’s past. The agent grilling her (Chantal Nchako) has to restrain her fellow agents and the armed guards outside the door.

Not that she’s all that restrained herself.

“How about a trip to QUANTICO?”

That’s a lot to process for a very pregnant, very uncomfortable Muslim (not devout) woman being subjected to a strip search, dehydration and no bathroom breaks.

Writer-director Alfred Robbins’ mostly-bland by-the-book bio shows us Laila’s middle class childhood in Morocco, a near-fatal accident that set her on her life’s path early, her nursing school education in Baltimore, a failed marriage to a local (Jonathan Regier) and remarriage to an Egyptian named Muhammad Atta.

The interrogation scenes are over-the-top, bordering on violent and all but crossing the line into parody.

But in the days after 9/11, that was probably not inaccurate. The “There’s something else planned” panic of those days got plenty of civil rights trampled on.

The confusion is somewhat understandable, and the threatening phone calls and life-shattering prejudices that followed would have been a test for anyone. There’s a Laila Atta who is an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts. She probably had a few ugly days with that surname.

But true story or not, “Mistaken” is a fairly blase and stiff recreation of one woman’s life and trials, padded out with more background that we don’t need (childhood) because giving more of her American years would give away the feeble attempt at mystery here. We’re meant, I assume, to wonder if she was indeed married to “THAT” Muhammad Atta.

That explains the film’s own tortured life. It began life as a 2013 drama “Raljat,” was revived under the title “Mistaken” in 2017 and is only now gaining release.

All that trouble for an interesting 9/11 story broadly-acted and rather flatly told.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Nadia Kounda, Chantal Nchako, Jonathan Regier

Credits: Written and directed by Alfred Robbins.

Running time: 1:24

Ian Daniels directed this film about environmental racism…in Canada, too.

There’s something about a real-world global pandemic that takes some of the “fun” out of such dystopian tales on the big screen.

But “Only” is too good to dismiss, just escapist enough to make us forget “Hell, I could tune in to CNN if I wanted to see this.”

It’s a story told out of order, flashbacks scattered through a tale that begins with the grim fatalism of a voice-over narration that asks, “Do you forgive me?”

A comet, Covino, skipped by the Earth. What looked like snow but was more like nuclear fallout rained down. And people got sick. Women? They started dying.

Freida Pinto plays the aptly-named Eva, a survivor. Leslie Odom, Jr.  is Will, her husband and protector.

We’re introduced to them just as soldiers, roll up wearing gas masks, pounding on their door. They’re looking for a woman searching based on a tip.

Names on the lease are parsed, the apartment — UV lights and plastic sheeting “sealing” it off from the contagion — is tossed. But the officer in charge (we never see him) lets his humanity slip through the mask.

“I’m not taking a sick one,” he says to Will, telling him and us that “he knows” where she’s hidden. “I know what they do with the sick ones.”

They are on their own, welcome to spend their remaining hours/days together, duct-taping her chest, covering her head and putting on makeup to simulate a five o’clock shadow so that they can have “one last cooked meal” together as they head out on the run.

Vandalized billboards suggest the length of time this pandemic has been around, urging citizens to “Get Tested” for “The Embryo Project.”

There are rewards for “healthy women.” Draconian measures to procure them are official policy. Will has listened to Eva’s doctor dad, who had very specific intructions, “rules” that might let them survive. Will is protecting them both from the virus as long as possible. He is set on defending her by any means necessary.

Writer-director Takashi Doscher (“Still” was his.) bathes this hellish future-present in the greys and blues of doom, eternal winter.

He’s mashed up “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Children of Men” and the recent Casey Affleck dystopia “Light of My Life” in creating this bleak landscape where the end of the human race is within sight.

“Science,” glimpsed on TV and online, is both the hope for salvation and a palpable threat. Religious extremists are violently resisting the scientific solution dictated from on high.

Eva and Will? They’re trying not to fight, trying to not think about The Worst, struggling to stay on the same page as a couple — him trying to protect her, her wondering if there’s any point to that now, any point at all.

Will drifts from the reassuring “This’ll be over in a few weeks” to “I’m waiting for you to wake up and realize that ‘this’ is ‘life’ now.”

Yes, it’s derivative, with story beats from every sci-fi dystopia of recent vintage — “The Road,” “28 Days Later,” and especially “Light of My Life.”

It’s not the “Only” movie to follow this arc, to deliver one expected scene after another. But it is a sci-fi parable with performances that click and situations — tried and true as they are — that pop. We can only hope that “It’s only a movie” will be the way we look back on it.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Freida Pinto, Lesley Odom Jr.

Credits: Written and directed by Takashi Doscher.  A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:37

Aaron Fisher wrote, directed and stars in a pretty convincing portrait of manic depression in “Inside the Rain,” a “finding yourself/finding love” romance staggered by cliches and delusional missteps.

The director Fisher gives the actor Fisher places to shine. The screenwriter Fisher doesn’t provide enough of those places, or share enough of them with the supporting cast.

We meet Ben Glass, 25, as he starts college. He’s on a lot of meds. He’s had a lot of problems. He sees a shrink (Rosie Perez, testy and adorable) regularly. And he’s in the habit of augmenting his meds with vodka-energy drink cocktails to take the edge off.

First day in film class is how we learn he is “literally bi-polar.” “ADHD, OCD, borderline personality disorder…You name it, I have it.”

His self-description to his classmate, Daisy (Katie Claire McGrath) is what gets him into trouble. His illness makes him “recklessly extravagant.” That’s all it takes for her to ignore his “on the spectrum” weirdness, his resting-mental-case-face and his tank-top oriented wardrobe and sleep with him.

Her “You need to go now” post-coitus sends himself into a tailspin — a suicide attempt. He guilts her in the process, she over-reacts (not really) and the school is ready to kick him out.

“I’m going to make a movie to show what REALLY happened!”

If you’re saying “How lame is that?” you’re not alone. But the student filmmaker making a movie about his struggles element is mostly-consigned to the frustrations of fund-raising, the odd cameo of “a Hollywood producer” low-life (Eric Roberts) who is friends with his Dad (Paul Schulze), and casting.

Ben wants this “model” who serves as a literal sushi bar — they serve fish on her naked (fig leaves) body — at the local strip club to star in his film. Emma (Ellen Toland of “The Chaperone”) just wants “somebody to take me seriously.”

Ben and Emma hang out, try to crowdfund his movie and cope with his mood swings.  He’s hellbent on fighting this college disciplinary thing, refusing to take his meds if Dad doesn’t hire him a lawyer, hellbent on making this movie, determined to use his paintball team as his crew.

Fisher’s scenes with Perez are the ones with the pop to them — feisty, light-hearted exchanges with her promising to “cure you within six weeks” (No psychiatrist would EVER say that.), him nursing delusional depression or manic “highs” where “I’m THE MAN” applies to paintball, movie-making or dating a model/stripper WAY out of his league.

Ben’s confession that “I SHOULD feel sorry for myself,” his “This happens a lot, honestly” to the young woman he texted his suicide note to, even his turning on his phone to play Emma a song as he walks her to her car, all feel like real moments trapped in a movie that can’t quite get out of its own way.

Toland, Perez, Roberts and Schulze are the most polished performers here. Fisher, being unknown, has an amateurish authenticity that works in the character’s favor if not the story’s.

The trite — Roberts’ cameo is pointless, the paintball thing is straight out of “The Big Bang Theory” — overwhelms what could be interesting in this scattered romantic dramedy that takes a Bob Dylan lyric from “Just Like a Woman” as its title.

And all that title does is highlight how much more on-the-money the soundtrack is than the movie it underscores.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity, substance abuse

Cast: Aaron Fisher, Ellen Toland, Catherine Curtin, Paul Schulze, Rita Raider, Eric Roberts and Rosie Perez.

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Fisher. An Act 13 release.

Running time: 1:30

“The Social Ones” is a knowing smirk of a farce about social media “influencers” and the dizzy, faux importance they have in our cell-and-selfie-obsessed culture.

Funny people vamp up funny characters in a deadpan comedy that lightly lampoons the phenomenon without quite landing the sucker punches or the laughs it needs to come off.

Writer-director Laura Kosann and her sister Danielle Kosann star as Mia and Ava, star reporter and photographer for National Influencer Magazine. They round up broadly-drawn social media “stars” of the moment for this mockumentary send-up of the very idea “influencers.”

There’s Dan (Colton Ryan), “The King of Snapchat,” a would-be video daredevil who has no actual skills at the various stunts he attempts.

Josie Z (Amanda Giobbi) is a “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” Instagram fashionista, a diva forever abusing her hapless intern (Davram Stiefler).

“My nose job is FRESH. I KNOW how I want it to look!”

Dixie Bell (Desi Domo) is “The Goddess of Viral Food,” a Gordon Ramsay-mouthed chef running a team of minions who does “hybrid desserts” from “the six basic food groups” which include “pizza…stuff stuffed with CHEESE….and anything you can dye with a rainbow.”

She’s having a fling with KapPhatJawacki (Setareki Wainiqolo), the demented “Meme God.”

And Nicole Kang in Jane Zap, a vlogger dressed in kittenish Hello Kitty-wear, dressing up “models” (pets she borrows) for video photo shoots.

The sister-journalists deadpan about how “‘Engagement’ doesn’t mean ‘marriage’ any more,” and how their anxiety kicks in every time they have to profile one of these “legends,” because it’s not like “just casually approaching Gandhi at a DINNER PARTY.”

Peter Scolari’s an academic doltishly teaching doltish college kids the most basic elements of social media — “What is a ‘like?’ Anyone? A troll?”

Stephanie March is the shrink to Social Media Nation, counseling “hot” Internet couples, influencers struggling to cope with the pressure of their “fame” in an office with “#” and “@” paintings on the wall.

Debra Jo Rupp is the overheated, Anne Rice-ish novelist of sex and tech fetishism, “#touchingwithouttouching.”

And Richard Kind? Well, you’ll see.

It’s hard to send up a phenomenon that already seems like a parody of “real life.” And pausing for big servings of “message” stops it cold.

You know what “The Social Ones” is? It’s a film festival comedy, one that plays better to a forgiving, message-savvy audience. Despite the comically committed bigger-name cameos, the send-up of a “troll farm,” and the best of the over-the-top influencers (Giobbi is a stitch), it rarely achieves much beyond a smirk of recognition.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Desi Domo, Colton Ryan, Amanda Giobbi, Setareki Wainiqolo, Nicole Kang, Danielle Kosann , Laura Kosann, Peter Scolari, Debra Jo Rupp and Richard Kind

Credits: Written and directed by Laura Kosann. A Comedy Dynamics release.

Running time: 1:27

Exhibitor Relations reports.

1. THE INVISIBLE MAN ($28M)
2. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG ($16M)
3. THE CALL OF THE WILD ($13M)
4. MY HERO ACADEMIA: HEROES RISING ($5M)
5. BAD BOYS FOR LIFE ($4.3M) https://t.co/K4DVZFeSU9 https://twitter.com/ERCboxoffice/status/1234164691099779073?s=20