La La Land

If ever there was a film to banish the blues, it's La La Land. In this Tinseltown-set musical from Whiplash's Damien Chazelle, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play antagonists turned lovers - she's a barista and jobbing actress, he's a pianist eager to open a jazz club. Fate keeps throwing them together until eventually they stick, that's before their respective careers pull them in different directions. This is career-best work from Stone who displays great strength, buoyant charisma, winning cheekiness and aching vulnerability - all, somehow, with the lightest of touches. While not quite her equal, Gosling complements her charmingly. Some of the flashier sequences have the feel of showboating but the film grows more intimate as it wears on. La La Land pays tribute to the great musicals, emulating MGM's finest, but the audacious Chazelle infuses every scene with a modern sensibility, ingeniously working technology into the frolics. As gorgeous in its gloom as in its wonderfully shameless whimsy, this is a dizzying whirlwind of romance and sorrow - cinema to make you swoon.