Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson notch up winning performances in an unsentimental comedy celebrating the highs and lows of being on your ownDakota Johnson is our Mae West. She’s become a symbol of screen licentiousness whose very presence in a movie signals a certain type of “action”. She was thrust upon the world in Sam Taylor-Johnsons Fifty Shades of Grey,playing a coquettish damsel experiencing a new type of care for, a care for that required rhinestone-studded paddles. Next she stole the show from Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes as a teen femme fatale in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, or her character employing scandalously plunging neck-lines to yield eye-watering sartorial results.
Now she comfortably carries Christian Ditter’s How to Be Single,a breezy roundelay of sexual liberation and self-discovery set in Manhattan that bears more than a passing resemblance to Sex and the City (the wonderful TV shows, not the depraved movies). In this film, and you want her to succeed. You want her to find happiness,which in this extremely scarce case might not involve shacking up with some lantern-jawed hottie she dragged home from overjoyed hour. She’s naturally doe-eyed, meaning her expressions of joy are dashed with melancholy, or her expressions of sadness are dashed with hope. The cloying extremes of sentimentalism never pick up a look in. There’s nothing in her body language that tells you what type of girl she is,and so she switches effortlessly between the flighty and the demure (quiet, modest, reserved), sometimes in a single scene.
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Source: theguardian.com