Her

Spike Jonze is, despite proof consisting only of four features, one of the best filmmakers working today. His latest, Her handily verifies it. It seems difficult to justify seeing it on paper, but look at the evidence closer: Quickly evolving from producer/co-creator of MTV’s juvenilia celebration Jackass, to directing music videos (granted, award-winning ones), Jonze saw an Oscar nod for Best Director his first time out at the helm of a feature-length film (Being John Malkovich). He and eminently postmodern screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann followed up Malkovich with the equally solipsistic Adaptation., a film that, while just as assured a directorial effort as its predecessor, undeniably read more like a personal statement by the latter of the two partners.
Then, he achieved the seemingly impossible task of adapting the late Maurice Sendak’s bedtime classic, Where the Wild Things Are, in a way that not only made its notorious crank of an author happy, but simultaneously distilled and embellished the story to a form that so perfectly fit the new medium, it may compete with its own source material for imaginations captured in the coming generations. There was a trajectory forming across these three films, and it took until now to see it: This time, Jonze has summoned his source material from thin air. Serving as his own screenwriter, Jonze undoubtedly dug deep into his own cobbled-together experiences as both someone who has suffered through divorce to produce a film that will slug it out with the big boys come Oscar time.
Her centers around Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), ghostwriter
of “personalized” greeting cards and love letters, working at the firm, Beautiful Handwritten Letters (a company providing a service that, incredibly, does not already exist). Twombly has grown increasingly antisocial following the separation from his wife (Rooney Mara). He’s dragging his feet signing the divorce papers, and generally doing a terrific job rebuffing the attempts of his BFF Amy (Amy Adams) to set him up on dates. It’s only after Twombly upgrades his desktop PC’s operating system with a staggeringly intuitive artificial intelligence, “Samantha,” (Scarlett Johansson) that he begins to emerge from his self-imposed hermetic lifestyle.