Like Crazy

True love conquers everything... except US immigration policy. At least that's how it goes for Jacob and Anna, the twenty-something romantic leads in writer-director Drake Doremus's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner.

British Anna (Felicity Jones) meets American Jacob (Anton Yelchin) in class at UCLA. They go for coffee, gaze at each other longingly through glass door panes, ride ecstatically in dodgem cars, run hand-in-hand on the beach and, before you know it, love has struck. But then Anna outstays her student visa and is banished from the US, never to return. Cue tears, hefty air fares, missed phone calls and awkward conversations about 'seeing other people'.

A lot of the film's dialogue was improvised, and it shows - for better and worse. When it works, the couple's exchanges feel almost uncomfortably familiar and credible. When it doesn't, it sounds like two young actors who, while very talented, could have done with a firmer guiding hand.

The main downside of the improvised approach is that the characters feel underdeveloped. Their motivations for staying or not staying together are sometimes absent or unconvincing why, for example, does Jacob not move to the UK? Add to this the fact that the character of Anna is in turns gratingly kooky and smugly middle class, and it becomes increasingly difficult to care what happens to their relationship.

Watching the most nauseatingly loved-up and wall-punchingly painful scenes from someone else's relationship is ultimately just not that enjoyable. And Like Crazy's emotional highs and lows are less artfully navigated than those in 2010's similarly-themed Blue Valentine.

While some nifty editing and hand-held camerawork manage to liven things up a bit, the film feels very long for its 90 minutes, and you can't help but wish they'd just grow up and get over each other already.