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Review: Spike Jonze gets real magic out of Phoenix and Johansson in Her

One of the reasons Spike Jonze remains so interesting as a filmmaker is because each individual piece of art he creates seems to exist in its own world, and only when you set it all next to each other and consider the full range of what he creates do you get a full picture of just how emotionally rich and complicated his body of work really is. I'm almost glad I hadn't seen all of "Her" yet when we spoke at this year's Toronto Film Festival, because I think I might have been too emotional to fully articulate my reaction at that point.

Jonze can certainly indulge his goofball side with very silly things, but he has also made movies that contain devastating endings, broken-hearted masterworks that clobber the audience with a bracingly direct quality. I would argue that "Being John Malkovich" could be on a short list of the very saddest endings of all time. I remember being horrified by it the first time I saw it and wondering why more people weren't just battered by the suggestion of Cusack's fate, of the hell his daily life would be living silently trapped behind someone else's eyes. "Adaptation" was one of the most complicated and difficult emotional reactions I've ever had to a movie, and it took me a long time to work my way up a second viewing. And then "Where The Wild Things Are"… well, we've said enough about that.