Noah Baumbach is no stranger to bringing horrible characters to the screen, like Ben Stiller in Greenberg playing an arrogant, selfish fellow who doesn't realise anyone else might actually have a life as well, or Jeff Daniels in The Squid And The Whale, another egotist happy to ruin his family for the sake of nailing a young woman. The top of the worst list prior to Frances Ha, however, was Nicole Kidman in Margot At The Wedding. Manipulative, selfish, everything you'd expect but heightened tenfold. Ready to absolutely destroy her sister's wedding, and in fact her son's life, so that she can be the centre of attention at all costs.

Somehow with Frances Ha Baumbach has made the ultimate Baumbach film in that every single character is worse than Margot, every single young person in the B&W Woody Allen-wannabe New York world the film inhabits is selfish, idiotic, childish and worst of all, they think they are the nicest, most charming people in history.

You see Frances Ha is not meant to be anything like Baumbach's other work, even the more overtly comic debut of his Kicking & Screaming, it is meant to be a sweet, innocent look at a young woman and the friends she makes on her journey to stay childlike for just that little bit longer before life comes a-knocking. It plays out, however, like a group of annoying jerks talking for 90 minutes, dancing like hipsters and thinking that everything is ironic and cool because they know about it before others. It is torture. Absolute torture. These people are the kinds of people you don't ever socialise with, the kinds of people you hope get run over by a bus on the way home. Alas this film offers no catharsis in that way, instead everyone has 'happy' endings. Everyone. It's a fantasy about modern life in the 20-something bohemian world, and it is everything that is wrong with modern culture. Much like Spring Breakers and the Bling Ring dealt with the vacuous teens, Frances Ha highlights the vacuous, imbecilic young adults, and welcomes them with open arms.

Co-written by star Greta Gerwig, you'd think she'd have some self-awareness of what films like Lola Versus and Damsels In Distress have done for her image, but rather than tackle them head on she, like Frances herself, lives in a blissful world where the bad energy is ignored for the five or six folks who actually like that dreck. In as much, Frances Ha is so annoying, aggravatingly so, in its attempts to be off-beat, quirky, innocent fun that you want to grab the film by its throat, screaming how bad it really is. And it's at this point when we move on to the B&W choice for the film. The ugly, ugly choice only chosen to be different. Well, and so that the film gets friendly comparisons with Manhattan and as such Woody Allen in general, you'll note it worked in this review earlier. An absolute eyesore of a film, the black and white effect just makes everything uglier and more dull to look at. Nothing is cutesy and off-beat, just fricking ugly, like an instagram wank for 90 minutes.

Frances Ha may be the worst film of the year. It's only 90 minutes long, but I can tell you that it feels longer than The Lone Ranger, and that is no mean feat. An utter pile of crap from a director who has made some brilliant films in his past, led by a lead actress who nailed her big moment in Greenberg and coasted on BS indie darling rubbish ever since. Now in her moment to change everything, she is all too happy to embrace being cutesy and quirky, and it makes for an incredibly annoying experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone at Guantanamo Bay. Dire in every conceivable way.