The Coen Brothers return with this giddy technicolor love letter to Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1950s, a carefree, gorgeously crafted comedy that is the most fun we've had in years.

At its centre is Josh Brolin playing a fictionalised version of real life studio 'fixer' Eddie Mannix, the man tasked with keeping Hollywood scandals - whether you were gay, had a baby out of wedlock, had a secret kink or whatever your poison was - out of the gossip columns whilst keeping his big budget productions on track. When Capitol Pictures' biggest star, Baird Whitlock (George Clooney, a toga-wearing matinee idol), is kidnapped and held to ransom midway through the shooting of a big bucks biblical epic, it falls to Eddie to hush up the fiasco and bring Baird back.

Of course, finding out where Baird was taken and why is but one of the film's many pleasures, as Eddie negotiates through the backlots and enclaves of Hollywood, dodging secret communists, big cigars, and even bigger egos. Stuffed with all star appearances from the likes of Tilda Swinton (as twin gossip columnists who hate each other), Scarlett Johansson (as an Esther Williams-style aquatic movie star with a foul mouth), Ralph Fiennes (as a camp Brit director), Channing Tatum (who threatens to steal the entire show in a dazzling tap dance number that proves he's today's Gene Kelly) and even Christopher Lambert and Dolph Lundgren, the cast - and the Coens - are clearly having a real hoot. You will too - mark our words.

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