Stranger on Earth

Spike Jonze’s Her may just be the year’s most relevant movie yet. The reasons? I can’t recall a recent movie that has managed to portray life in the 21 st -century and its trademark loneliness so accurately. Jonze has created a futuristic city that’s very much like every metropolis in the world today: gorgeous skyscrapers, heaving crowds, superior technological advancement. Every individual is connected to the digital heart of the city, and lives are lived not out in the open, but in between the electric pulses of an invisible world. In the ether there are Operating Systems that talk to lonely human beings who seek companionship. Theodore (a disarming Joaquin Phoenix), an isolated writer, buys an OS which sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson, and in time falls in love with her. She calls herself Samantha, has desires and hopes just like a woman of flesh and bone. For Theodore the line between reality and virtual reality is quickly and irreversibly blurred. ...

It took a few days for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master to sink in. Seldom have I been so bewildered and enchanted by a film and not instantly grasped why it should have such an effect on me. I have seen several other Oscar-nominated films since, but the ingredients that make up The Master – the rolling blue waves, the obscene sand sculpture, the anguish in the eyes of Freddie Quell (an otherworldly Joaquin Phoenix), the madcap motorbike race through the desert, the probing psychological sessions with the Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Amy Adams’ cryptic, mildly sinister character – have not lost their hypnotic effect one tiny bit. The film’s length and halting pace help. You are immersed in the tormented world of a war veteran who has long learnt to numb his pain with alcohol and drifts in and out of reality. When Quell comes under the tutelage of the Master, we are both relieved and worried for him. He may be out of the storm, but what tempest has he got himself ...