Generally cited by Austen adherents (Janeites to you) as the favorite among her six novels, “Pride & Prejudice” is likewise filmland’s preferred Austen property.

Joe Wright’s fresh and spirited account of the modest young woman who melts an icy aristocrat to a puddle of love stars the exuberant Keira Knightley as Lizzie and the implacable Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy. It is the 10th – 11th if you count “Bridget Jones’s Diary” – adaptation of “P&P.” Others include “Bride and Prejudice,” the 2004 Bollywood rendition, and “A Latter-Day Comedy,” the 2003 Mormon one.

Whatever number it is chronologically on the “P&P” parade, Wright’s film ranks first in verve. Quite simply, it is the essential “P&P.”

Most Janeites are partial to the 1995 BBC miniseries with the delightful Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. But although scrupulously faithful to the book, it is the opposite of cinematic.

The mini-series lumbered; this one gallops. Not always gracefully, but enthusiastically. Knightley’s coltish Lizzie is the correct age and temperament, a girl-woman who, although intelligent, initially mistakes Darcy’s diffidence for indifference.

“I could forgive his vanity had he not wounded mine!” Lizzie confides to her friend after meeting the imperious Darcy at a village ball where her mother hopes to make matches for her five marriageable daughters.

Deborah Moggach’s lively script (reportedly doctored by Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for her adaptation of Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”) paints Lizzie as a laugher and Darcy a glowerer.

How can they make conversation if he won’t crack a smile at her witticisms? They literally dance around each other, Wright’s camera hovering between them as the puzzled Darcy wonders whether Lizzie’s curt curtsey is an expression of contempt or of social deference.

Wright and Moggach open the windows on “P&P” and let it breathe. Resisting the urge to frame the film as a series of tableaux, all the better to admire the Georgian decor and costumes, they keep camera, characters and plot moving at a clip, striding through spaces where others might saunter. The result is an earthier, more kinetic film, an action movie in which heroine and hero take turns being hunter and hunted.

I’m not sure whether Knightley is a great actress, but the screen’s reigning tomboy is well-suited to the role of Lizzie. A cross between Audrey Hepburn and Winona Ryder, she radiates intelligence and beauty sabotaged by impulsiveness.

Likewise, Macfadyen is an ideal Darcy, a man too complex to reveal himself at first glance but who becomes more fascinating the more we see him.

Knightley’s impulsiveness and Macfadyen’s inhibition are a good fit, and as the movie proceeds their mutual magnetism is undeniable and undeniably sexy.

Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn are excellent as Lizzie’s parents, likewise Tom Hollander as her cousin, the too-reverent reverend. My one complaint about the film is that the American release version has a silly, anachronistic coda. I wish that it had ended, as the English version, with Sutherland’s fatherly benediction.