Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer may not be on quite the same level as some of last decade's best romantic comedies—it is no Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, the film its non-linear structure seems most indebted to—but it nonetheless has its charms. Incidentally, these charms have names: Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, who make watching the film easy even when it's at its least original or most cringeworthy. Both Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel have gone from strength to strength over the course of the noughties. The former gave one of the most criminally overlooked performances of the decade in 2004's Mysterious Skin and the latter gave her best performance so far in 2003's All the Real Girls. It is quite something to see them together on screen: not only are they easy to watch, they are ones to watch, too. Summer screens at the Open Air Cinema on Tuesday and will be followed on Wednesday by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. While some may find the picture morally questionable—not only in its gleeful depiction of violence, but also in its problematic assertion that one can rewrite history at will—it is in fact something of a return to form for the filmmaker. Inglourious Basterds poses some interesting, difficult-to-answer questions about cinema and its relationship with history and memory, as well as about the artist's duty, if indeed such a duty can be said to exist, to both these things. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard have spent the greater part of their careers grappling with these questions, and are no closer to fashioning an answer than they were when they began. One doubts that Tarantino ever grappled with such matters. Indeed, one wonders whether he would have picked up his camera and made a film like this if he had done.

Review, 16 January 2010