Starring: Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany, Steven Berkoff Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Category: IIA (English, French and Italian)
For action thrillers involving a couple in the lead - especially a master fugitive and a bystander helplessly sucked into the escapade - that first encounter nearly always defines what follows.
And in The Tourist, the 'meet-cute' happens on a train leaving one city of romance (Paris) for another (Venice): British woman-of-mystery Elise Ward (Angelina Jolie) asks US maths teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp, below with Jolie) - who is reading a thriller novel - to imagine what her story is.
After offering a melodramatic tale, Frank is instructed by Elise to invite her for dinner - only for the woman to tut at his delivery like a dialogue coach drilling an actor.
It's a scene overflowing with irony, with the actors playing it up with arched-eyebrow smugness.
Isn't this chic, the filmmakers probably thought. We have the two most photogenic actors in the world - a point emphasised from the start, when Elise/Jolie is gazed at by detectives/viewers through surveillance cameras - so let's go all postmodern with these witty cross-references to the artificiality of filmmaking.
The characters offer lines which explicitly foreshadow the narrative - such as when Elise, looking at an ornament of double-faced deity Janus, says how each person has two sides and 'we should learn to embrace both'.