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Critics reviews

HER

Spike Jonze United States, 2013
You have to wonder what Her says about the present moment—when so many of us are, indeed, "in love" with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and buzzers—that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it's the people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all the personality.
May 14, 2015
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The path that Jonze displays inHer is a kind of reductio ad absurdum presented as a logical consequence -- your computer, as a marketed, focus-grouped product, will know precisely how to talk to you, and will therefore become an ideal lover. This is compelling as far as it goes, but Jonze suffers from a lack of imagination when it comes to any real consequences from this turn of events.
July 24, 2014
The empathetic leap demanded by this movie is the recognition that HER is fundamentally about her. Samantha's story parallels Pinocchio's, though we never quite grasped his nebulous, essentially academic reasons for preferring fallible flesh to durable wood. Why should he want to be a real boy, anyway? In contrast, Samantha's yearning for a body—any body—reasserts the centrality of that vessel to the human (and superhuman?) experience.
May 2, 2014
Why did this soft movie hit so hard? Because the film is about universal things. Love, connection, intimacy, seeking it, finding it, losing it, not knowing how to let go into it, not knowing how to let go of ourselves. I felt I lived through several once-but-no-more relationships in the course of the film. It encompasses it all. Happy sad embarrassing painful. It's all of it. And without judgment. Of/at any step.
April 25, 2014
Her involves white urban professionals and their dilemmas, but that fact is a lot less significant than the group most vividly represented here: empaths. Not literal psychics, but people with extraordinary emotional intelligence and compassion. Theodore, Samantha, Amy, and the sex surrogate all take on other people's pain, joys and yearnings as their own—and not in any cheap or parasitic way. Each of them indulges this talent with a sense of morality, responsibility.
April 25, 2014
How does Samantha evolve from a woman uncomfortable with the non-corporeality of her "body" to one happy to relegate herself to the cosmos? Only through the intervention of a filmmaker eager to write himself out of the uncomfortable situations his idiosyncratic characters take him into.
April 24, 2014
For all its occasional sluggishness, Her is a wonderful movie – and I still haven't mentioned the two best things about it (three if you count the superb lead performances). One is the look, a velvety, pastel-coloured smoothness that feels like the film is taking place in a giant womb. And the other is the bittersweet quality – because Samantha, in the end, is all too human.
April 17, 2014
[When Theodore and Samantha have sex,] the screen fades to black, which is meant to indicate how intimacy can make it feel as though the rest of the world has faded away. We hear this literally in their voice-overs: "Everything else just disappeared," and "It was just you and me." But the black screen also helps show what it's like to be an OS, bodiless and floating. That is, it helps us, the audience, empathize too, with a kind of being we've never encountered before.
March 2, 2014
Neither I'm Here nor even Being John Malkovich has quite the sophistication Jonze shows in this, his first sole feature screenplay credit. Her is as talky and complex as any film scripted by his erstwhile partner Charlie Kaufman... 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.
February 14, 2014
KurzweilAI
Although there are caveats I could (and will) mention about the details of the OS and how the lovers interact, the movie compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can — will — be believably human and lovable. This is a breakthrough concept in cinematic futurism in the way that The Matrix presented a realistic vision that virtual reality will ultimately be as real as, well, real reality.
February 10, 2014
The Pinocchio Theory
[In Passion,] DePalma shows the actuality of neoliberal subjectivity, in which everything is vicious competition in the service of self-entrepreneurship, with female sexuality as the linchpin of the whole structure. In contrast, Jonze shows neoliberal subjectivity's self-deluding idealization of itself as total sincerity, maintaining this emotional nakedness and yearning within the parameters of a world in which "sincerity" can itself only be a commodity...
January 21, 2014
There's nothing wrong with the writing or acting, but there is not much of a sense of intimacy between Catherine and Theodore, and the main reason for this is that the couple looks mismatched, and the main reason that they look mismatched is that one of them has no visible skin texture. Having chosen a beautiful young actress, Jonze presents her beauty thoughtlessly, for he doesn't really know what to do with it other than to signpost in the broadest way: this is a desirable love object.
January 16, 2014