Made in Britain, remade in America

Best: “Clueless”

Transplanting a work of classic literature to a contemporary setting can result in an overly gimmicky mess, but writer-director Amy Heckerling strikes just the right balance between timeless and au courant in her 1995 update of Jane Austen’s Emma. Austen’s meddling matchmaker, a fixture of 19th-century English high society, becomes Beverly Hills high schooler Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) who boasts an array of quotable catchphrases that Austen could never have imagined (“As if!” “That’s like so five years ago.”). And so a narrative first published in 1815 blossomed into a modern teen-movie classic.