Angus Imrie

Emma review: An unexpectedly sexy Valentine's Day watch

Anya Taylor-Joy plays the aristocratic matchmaker Emma in this chocolate-box adaptation of Jane Austen's beloved novel.

A mother is driving her sulky teenaged son to school. She's complaining about his father, being broke, him. He's bored, unresponsive. Suddenly a man jumps into the car. He's got a gun, tells her to drive. And then all kinds of unexpected, but quite logical, things start to happen. This is, after all, a comedy by Simon Brett which means cannily observed characters and sparkling dialogue. It also has the huge benefit of a delicious performance from Samantha Bond as the mother and a most convincing one from Angus Imrie as the son.

The first of three stand-alone comedies concerning persons in vehicles. In Simon Brett's Get Away, Samantha Bond plays a weary divorcee, on the school run with a moaning teenage son (Angus Imrie) who thinks life is boring. When an armed robber (Stephen Critchlow) gets into the car, life gets less boring, but not by much: the bandit's another weary divorcee, and these are the sort of radio characters who, in the heat of a domestic argument or even an armed car-jacking, somehow continue to speak as if they're reading brittle wit from an over-precise script. When the denouement arrives you'll have been parked up waiting for it for several minutes, but all this is perhaps part of the charm of a neat, cosy vignette that moves smoothly from A to B.