Whatever Works (2009 Woody Allen & scr)

Experimental as ever, with Larry David often addressing us directly (to the bemusement of the fellow participants) and ironically commenting on the audience, who are paying for a Hollywood producer's new swimming pool, and who may still be left at the end of the film:

David is extremely amusing (and good - note long single take to camera near the beginning) as a pessimistic cynic, full of wonderfully funny invective and hostility, whose life is sort of changed when he meets a young Mississippi girl Evan Rachel Wood (who's just fab, like many of Woody's leading ladies).

"That's the most disgusting story I ever heard!"

The wonderful plot thickens when she is visited by her mother Patricia Clarkson (equally good) and -separately - father Ed Begley Jr, and meets hunk Henry Cavill.

Many funny lines of course "It wasn't an affair, it was a brief interlude of infidelity" and "he's got two noses and four arms".

Lazily - I mean casually - staged, the impact is all the greater when we do have an occasional reaction shot, or - as in this case - Evan steps meaningfully into shot:

Beautifully presented as always - by the sadly missed Harris Savides - and with a typically eclectic score that jumps from Beethoven to jazz.

Also can't resist things like reference to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - that how scientists observe an experiment affects the outcome. In an incredible coincidence I later read Cameron Crowe's 1979 interview with Richard Dreyfuss for Rolling Stone and the actor referred to the same thing!