Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Whilst the rest of the country was glued to ITV/ITV HD to watch England draw with America in their first World Cup match, me and my Mum ate Strawberry Cheesecake Haagan-Daas and watched Woody Allen's 2008 release Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

The premise is simple, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) are best friends, despite sharing very different outlooks on life. Before Vicky's marries Doug (Chris Messina), her and Cristina venture out to Barcelona to spend the summer. Whilst there, they both become enraptured with Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a Spanish artist, recently divorced from his hotheaded wife, Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).

I'd never seen a Woody Allen film before, but I loved the semi-ironic narration of events as they unfolded on stage. There is also a totally bohemian lifestyle constructed between Cristina, Juan Antonio and Maria Elena that is dealt with with maturity and without exploiting any of the actors-something that many directors now do in order to attract certain audiences to the screen. The shooting of Barcelona and other small towns in Spain was beautiful, and it seemed that the film must have been great fun to shoot. Also interesting in the film was the secondary plot-the interest in what 'art' is-how one can express yourself through creative means, be it through painting, music or photography. There is also discussions about the idea of what love is, the way people can be somehow perfect for each other, but unable to stand each other.

Performance wise, the whole cast is a great ensemble. Rebecca Hall is wonderful as the uptight Vicky. This is quite the debut performance, and she manages to capture the feelings of a woman who thought she knew exactly what she wanted, until she came to Spain.

Scarlett Johansson, who I have previously only really seen in The Other Boleyn Girl, seems totally at home doing comedy, and playing the romantic, free-spirited Cristina-who is 'only sure of what she didn't want'.

Javier Bardem, who won an Oscar for his performance in No Country for Old Men, which is surely a totally different role to the smouldering Spanish artist he plays here-believable as a man who enraptures two very different women, and who works on very different moral principles to those of most others.

The Oscar-winning performance of the film is that of Penelope Cruz, who is really not on screen for very long. In the time she is, she delivers a performance that is, like the character she plays, crazy but whenever she is on screen, one can't help but looking at her.

I've already added Annie Hall and Manhattan onto my LoveFilm list, in order to see more of Woody Allen's films, and I hope that they'll all be as good as this one.