While writer/director Spike Jonze creates a fascinating contemporary romance tale, complete with realistic snags, what is most interesting is the story's underlying commentary.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 5, 2017

One half of the relationship at the center of 'Her' may lack a physical form, but it is nonetheless a film about the universality of romance: its longing, its intensity, and its transformative power - for the best, and the worst.

| Jun 18, 2016

The quasi-science fiction story of the film feels entirely possible, as Phoenix stares around him at passersby, all entranced with an electronic device in their hands.

| Original Score: A | Apr 23, 2015

Phoenix's performance is imbued with such genuine heartsickness that Theodore's musings on why his marriage fell apart ring of piercing, real-life regret, not break-up bromides.

| May 22, 2014

As Her slips into an inevitable melancholy, it becomes less about trans-humanity and more about, well, humanity.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 28, 2014

In the battle between head and heart there remains a Tin Man-shaped hole, leaving the viewer smiling wryly at the thought-provoking conceits while remaining as emotionally isolated as the movie's protagonist.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 16, 2014

It's still an inspired, playful, erotic and gently tender look at our technology co-dependence, relationships and modern loneliness that is, undoubtedly, the love story of 2014.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2014

It is a sweet-natured and melancholy film, beautifully directed, that manages to be satirical about love in a digital, distracted age without losing its heartfelt quality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2014

The combination of Jonze's dialogue, the intensity of the performances and the way the film's style wraps you up in Theodore and Samantha's inner-ear relationship makes this feel like a uniquely apt diagnosis of contemporary ills.

| Feb 14, 2014

Her is a brilliantly reimagined rom-com, only obliquely interested in its sci-fi setting, which is casually disclosed as the film goes on, never foregrounded.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2014

The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 13, 2014

We need more subplots. (Even just one.) Instead we get a life sentence of staring at Phoenix's face while the actor, as skilfully as he can, goes through the 12 steps of disenchantment in his one-man LA therapy classes.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 13, 2014

Whimsical futuro-romance effortlessly evolves into ambiguous, unfathomable hard sci-fi in Spike Jonze's best film to date.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 13, 2014

A concept like Her can be expressed satirically or sincerely but it can't easily be both. Jonze, who also wrote the screenplay, plumps wisely for the second option. It's the right move.

| Feb 12, 2014

A keeper of a film, quietly dazzling

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2014

Jonze has made a sweet, smart, silly, serious film for our times, only set in the future.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 10, 2014

[A] tender, wry, deceptively modest package -- and the closer you look, the more it reveals itself to be the proverbial Movie For Our Times.

| Feb 6, 2014

Her left me as empty as an unplugged monitor.

| Original Score: C- | Feb 4, 2014

A sublimely original film about human connections that feels personal - yet makes a haunting statement about all of society.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 11, 2014

It's an odd, sad love story, combined with a meditation on technology as an accelerator of social loneliness. Not a small part of it seems to be an allegory of lonely guys and their fear of women.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 10, 2014