Jason Reitman, who directed a personal favourite film of mine (Juno) has come up trumps again with Up in the Air.

The film stars George Clooney (yay!) as Ryan Bingham, a travelling ‘Firing-Man’, who loves the 290 days a year he spends away from home as well as the distance that provides him from those around him, including his family. All seems well until he meets his female counterpart in the beautiful and charismatic Alex (Farmiga) and a change at his job makes him take on a student, Natalie (Kendrick), to teach her the ropes. The role is great for Clooney and his female co-stars match him all the way.

What the movie is really about though is lifestyle and relationship choices. Choosing between independence and freedom or commitment and well-established relationships. As a result, Up in the Air will give you something to talk about well after the credits have finished, which I think is the mark of a good movie...

Well, unless you are using words like ‘crappy’, ‘terrible’, ‘boring’ or ‘tedious’, in which case the movie probably wasn’t that great. But you certainly won’t have that problem with this film. Don’t miss one of the movie highlights of the year.

Years ago, screenwriter/director Mateo Blanco (Homar) used a pseudonym for his scripts, ‘Harry Caine’ (spoken by Spaniards, this sounds like ‘hurricane’). Then an accident occurred (which we find out about in due course), turning him blind and unable to direct films. As a result he began going only by the name of Harry Caine; Mateo Blanco was no more.

Whatever happened all those years ago is closely connected with his close friend and indispensable personal assistant Judit (Portillo); the disgraced, and recently deceased entrepreneur Martel (Gómez); and a gorgeous woman who was the lover of both Martel and Mateo (Cruz). We spend the film discovering, bit by bit, what the connections between these people are, and why Mateo Blanco is now Harry Caine.

Although the film is more than half flashback, the flashbacks don’t happen gratuitously, such as when a character stares into the middle distance for no good reason and suddenly it’s fifteen years earlier. Rather, we see what happens as the characters tell one another what happened. When you get right down to it, the film consists almost entirely of story telling. And Almodóvar, who’s been doing this for 30 years, is now a marvellously polished storyteller, able to make us feel the tension behind the calm, colourful surface even when we think we can’t.