Strange Planet

It's New Year, and time is running out for Judy and her pals Alice and Sally, and Ewan and his mates Joel and Neil. A couple of steps out of college, they're still learning about the world and their own place in it. Judy (Karvan), for example, is a hard-boiled careerist who wants to get over her thing for married men, while Ewan (Long) feels 'emotionally numb' and drops out of his law firm job to write. Following this six-pack over the course of a year, we begin to get a sense of who's meant for whom; the only real surprise is how long it takes them to find each other. Australian writer/director Croghan made her first film, Love and Other Catastrophes, when she was only 24. Her second is another ensemble romantic comedy, a little older, and on a slightly more expansive scale; smart, bitty, but never more than half-achieved. This has plenty of energy, but at the expense of focus - indeed, it bears the hallmarks of an editing fix-up. Woody Allen makes this stuff look very easy. Croghan proves it isn't.