Like Crazy (12A)

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones, Alex Kingston

Anthony Quinn
Friday 27 January 2012 01:00 GMT
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The writer-director Drake Doremus has made something a little classier than your traditional romcom, thanks largely to his young and soon-to-be-famous leads.

Felicity Jones plays Anna, a journalism student at college in LA who falls for her classmate Jacob (Anton Yelchin). A budding furniture-designer, he makes her a wooden chair as a courtship gift, so she's sitting pretty. All is hunky-dory until Anna overstays her student visa, displeasing US immigration and ensuring our two lovebirds will have to spend several months apart. Can their "crazy" thing endure?

Jones is adorable as Anna, convincingly impulsive and youthful (she is actually 28, though could pass for 19), while Yelchin is sweetly unsure of himself as Jacob – even those chairs he makes don't look all that confident. What halters the movie is its lack of drama – is a bureaucratic hurdle really enough to drive them apart? – and a needling suspicion that it's just the tiniest bit soppy. I really wanted to love it, though for most of the time I liked it well enough.

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