THE INVISIBLE MAN

R, 110 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. When Cecilia’s abusive ex takes his own life and leaves her his fortune, she suspects his death was a hoax. As a series of coincidences turn lethal, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) works to prove that she is being hunted by someone nobody can see. A review wasn’t available by deadline.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE

1/2 R, 121 minutes. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas. “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” obeys all the accepted conventions of juicy gothic romance: In a drafty mansion on a windswept coast, a mismatched couple tries to ignore the irresistible pull of forbidden love. Passions proceed to seethe, tensions simmer and bodices literally heave. The twist in Céline Sciamma’s intriguing but inert take on the genre is that the couple is two women: Marianne (Noémie Merlant) has arrived at the stately Brittany home of Héloise (Adèle Haenel) to paint her portrait, which is to be sent directly to a potential suitor in Milan in the 18th-century equivalent of match. com. Héloise, a moody young woman given to deep, meaningful looks and walks on the beach, has no interest in posing, which is why her strategically minded mother (Valeria Golino) has asked Marianne to pursue her enterprise in secret, gathering her material from observational subterfuge. That contrivance and the stolen glances it entails gives “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” an extra frisson of danger, even if Sciamma and her audience know exactly where this will lead: Drenched in fetishistic pleasures (those bodices!) and a faint mist of tragedy, the film is less about the narrative itself than its attempt to marry eroticism and feminist theory. As an exercise in watching — Marianne watches Héloise, who watches Marianne, as the viewers watch them both — “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” becomes a critical treatise on the male gaze, which for a century has reduced women to passive objects. Much in the same way Lorene Scafaria played with those ideas in “Hustlers” last year, Sciamma obviously has fun subverting those traditional norms; and, like Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” her film is steeped in the economics of marriage as a form of security and lifelong servitude. If Sciamma’s imagery (diaphanous scarves and, in one sequence, a strategically placed mirror) is often too-obvious, and her love for pregnant silences and doleful stares begins to feel tiresome, the filmmaker makes sure that “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” looks sensational: Claire Mathon’s sensuous cinematography, glowing with candlelight and embers, is as much a character as the gorgeous women on screen. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post