Rebecca Hall is destined for the A-list on the strength of her performance as Vicky in Woody Allen's new film. The young British actress is marvelous as a straight-laced arts student who's looking forward to her forthcoming marriage to her financially stable, but boring, New York boyfriend.

She's gone to spend the summer in Barcelona with her best friend Cristina, who the accented voice over (the kind you hear on movie trailers) informs us is a failed short film director with a free-love attitude attracted to difficult boyfriends. Finally, Allen gives Scarlett Johansson a role where she can excel.

The entrance of Javier Bardem as the recently divorced cad artist Juan Antonio is one of the finest scenes in any Allen film. He walks up to the young Americans in a restaurant and suggests both girls join him on a weekend away and in bed, together! An idea that immediately appeals to Cristina.

For a brief moment it looks like Allen is going to veer into predictability when Juan Antonio sleeps with Vicky, but this one-night-stand is just the first heartbeat of confusion that infuses all the characters in their romantic escapades.



Scarlett Johansson as one half of Vicky Christina. Cristina, who doesn't know that Vicky slept with Juan Antonio, starts dating the artist. If the entrance of Bardem was great, the arrival of Penelope Cruz, playing his ex-wife and muse Mary Elena, is even better. She skates all over the thin line that separates genius and madness and her constant mood swings are the source of much hilarity, especially when she movies in to share a house with Juan Antonio and Cristina.

Years spent appearing in the films of Pedro Almodovar has made Cruz particularly adept at playing unstable women, and the screen sizzles when she locks lips with both Bardem and Johansson. In this artists' residence everyone gets to have their cake and eat it.

Also deserving mention is Patricia Clarkson who plays the girls' host and confidante in Barcelona, determined to not let Vicky make the same mistakes she did and end up in a stale relationship.

Making a film in the Spanish sunshine seems to have given Allen his mojo back. His three London films were bogged-down by misfiring murder mystery subplots, whereas in Barcelona Allen seems content to concentrate on affairs of the heart. It's also extremely light with hardly a pause for breath, skillfully jumping from one shenanigan to another in the style of an old-fashioned screwball comedy.