Her Review

Jonze's future is the film's best idea: no chrome, no dystopia, just a Los Angeles of soft coral and mustard interiors, pastel high-waisted trousers, and a skyline borrowed from Shanghai, so that alienation reads as coziness. Hoyte van Hoytema shoots Theodore in shallow-focus close-up almost throughout, which keeps the audience inside a face reacting to a voice. That is the technical dare, and Joaquin Phoenix meets it, playing a man who writes other people's intimate letters for a living and has none of his own.

Scarlett Johansson, working only in sound, gives Samantha a curiosity that turns audibly into something larger than the relationship can hold. The double date at the cabin and the surrogate sequence are as excruciating as anything in live-action romance. The late act, when Samantha explains what she has become, tips toward stated theme rather than dramatized feeling, and Amy Adams is underserved. But the closing rooftop, two humans sitting quietly after the software has left, is a perfect final image.