Director Sam Mendes has some sort of hold over me, cinematically speaking. He’s made five feature length films, and I’ve loved four of them! (The fifth, Jarhead is good as well).

This one revolves around a couple travelling across America, trying to find the perfect place to settle down and raise their unborn baby.

The central couple, played by John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, are pitch-perfect in their performances – Rudolph in particular is fantastic. The supporting characters in the first two-thirds of the film are fully realised in their pretentiousness, selfishness and, well, wankiness, by actors like Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Allison Janney, and the last third introduces a dose of dramatic reality through the characters and performances of Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey and Paul Schneider. All three of these actors brought a level of devastation to their characters’ predicaments.

Mendes guides the movie along its clever screenplay, exploring the themes and issues of finding your place in the world, the responsibility of becoming parents (or the devastation of not being able to), the beauty of finding your soul mate and many others.

With this film, Mendes has shown that he can do his trademark relationship stories in a comedic indie vein as well as his usual more dramatic style. This is one of those films that can touch your soul despite (or maybe because of) its simplicity. Unless you think breast-feeding other people’s babies is OK… in which case you are the pretentious, selfish wankers that are being mocked here!