Love & Friendship is the acclaimed 2016 Jane Austen drama written and directed by Whit Stillman. The film stars Kate Beckinsale, Chloë Sevigny, Xavier Samuel and Stephen Fry. Although it was adapted from Austen’s novel Lady Susan, the film was produced under the borrowed title of her juvenile story Love and Friendship.

The Ryde Lions will provide one of their splendid full afternoon teas afterwards, included in the ticket price, raising more money for Island good causes.

Tickets are £10 and it is essential to pre-book please as only 40 seats are available. Please call Judith on 875738 or email her on [email protected] to reserve seats.

Doors will open at 2.30pm. The film will start at 3.00pm and end at approximately 4.35 pm, followed by afternoon tea.

*****The Guardian

“What audacity, what elegance! Here is a hilariously self-aware period comedy polished to a brilliant sheen. Whit Stillman was probably born to direct a Jane Austen movie. But he has found a new way of dramatising Austen – or just found a new Austen, an Austen who appears to have pre-emptively absorbed 21st-century satire and inoculated herself against it. This Stillman has done by lighting on an early, posthumously published novella, Lady Susan, bringing it to the screen, and renaming it after a quite separate piece of juvenilia, thus playfully echoing the classic noun balances of her more famous titles.”

***** The Telegraph

“It’s with ticklish glee, then, that you watch Love & Friendship live up to every possible expectation you could set for it, opening out the adulterous games of Austen’s surprisingly risqué text and elaborating on them with impish, often breathlessly funny verve. It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life. Not the least of his film’s coups is handing Kate Beckinsale her best role in, ooh, 20 years, since she played Emma Woodhouse in Andrew Davies’s 1996 Emma on ITV.”