MOVIE REVIEWS: HER

“Exquisite” — that’s the word New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis uses to describe Spike Jonze’s Her, about a man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with a computer operating system, played by Scarlett Johansson. “This is a movie you want to reach out and caress, about a man who, like everyone else around him in this near future, has retreated from other people into a machine world. In “Her, the great question isn’t whether machines can think, but whether human beings can still feel,” Dargis concludes. Most critics agree that Phoenix delivers the performance of his career. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes that it’s a “a tour de force that couldn’t be more different than his character in The Master.” And Claudia Puig in USA Today calls Phoenix’s performance “superbly nuanced” and the film itself “inventive, intimate and wryly funny.”