EIFF 2015: She's Funny That Way

Peter Bogdanovich’s movies come marinaded in his love of Hollywood's Golden Age. In this dizzy soufflé he’s channelling Lubitsch, Sturges and Hawks. Like them, he creates an off-kilter comic world that’s hermitically sealed but airy. The setting is New York, but it’s the New York of the movies, a city of eight million where everyone's connected by a single degree of separation.

The outlandish plot takes the form of intertwined romantic imbroglios centred around Brooklyn call girl Izzy (Poots). A theatre director with a Pretty Woman-complex (Wilson) has just given her 30 grand to give up turning tricks and pursue acting. This sends her number one John (Austin Pendleton) into meltdown. A belligerent therapist (Jennifer Aniston), her put-upon playwright husband (Will Forte) and the world’s most conspicuous private-eye (George Morfogen) pile on the comic complications. Like the 40s screwballs it pinches from, it's daft and often hilarious – particularly angry Aniston. What's missing, however, is the romance; the heat. We're left with a delicious and frothy cappuccino, but without any of the espresso hit. [Jamie Dunn]