Lucy
Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Amr Waked, Choi Min-sik
Director: Luc Besson

is a wonderfully wacky return to form for maverick French director Luc Besson, who started his career by testing the limits of cinema with the atmospheric (1988), the razor-sharp thriller (1994) and the wild sci-fi romp (1997).

Those productions set a standard that was always going to be hard to maintain, but here Besson is back to his best, conjuring up a script that makes its concepts plausible - even when they have no right to be - and setting a pace that never lets anyone (actors or audience) pause for rest or reflection.

The film is about a new drug that expands a person's brain capacity - based on the theory (or myth) that we only use, at most, 10 per cent of ours. Scarlett Johansson shines as Lucy, a young American waster living in Taiwan, who falls foul of a plan to export the drug and whose world is forever altered when she ingests some of the nasty stuff.

A great deal of the movie's success comes down to how believable Johansson makes Lucy's transformation: she gets smarter and smarter and harder and harder. Soon Lucy is able to lay waste to anyone who crosses her path while she tracks down a professor (Morgan Freeman) she thinks is the only person who might understand her dilemma, and benefit from the things she is learning.