As a friend of mine put it, Freida Pinto is the new Scar-Jo. Woody Allen seems to have switched it up, muse-wise, in his latest film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, but Naomi Watts is still batting for the blondes. In the stylish world Allen crafts, life is complicated. Helena’s (Gemma Jones) husband Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left her, because he refuses to grow old. As such, she’s badgered her daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) so much, she resorts to sending her mother to a fake psychic, just so she’ll stop coming ’round so often for sherry. Helena’s constant visiting puts even more pressure on Sally’s strained marriage to Roy (Josh Brolin), a writer who has been toiling for years to follow up his first, “promising” novel. Sally’s lifelong dream to open her own art gallery has taken a backseat to her desire for a family, but Roy’s writer’s block doesn’t exactly put them in a child-rearing financial place. Things are fraught with tension, until inspiration strikes: for Roy, in the form of Dia (Frieda Pinto), a beautiful musician in the apartment across the way, and for Sally in the form of a new job at a gallery and a sexy new boss (Antonio Banderas). While her parents hurtle down very different paths of destruction (Helena’s spiritual, Alfie’s blond), Sally and Roy watch their marriage crumble around them. A winning tale of intersecting lives, passions, and destructive decisions, this film feels like a well-styled slice of true life.

–By Haley Cullingham