Or This is Forty if you’re foreign. Or This is 40 if you’re lazy and/or correct. However you spell it the title of this film fills you in almost perfectly on both its plots and intentions: this is a film about what it is like to be fourty…or forty, or 40. That though is a pretty vague mission statement, one that could and certainly already has made for many, many drastically different movies over the years – fourty (or fort- Ok, I’ll stop now) is of course the age of utmost industry potency and the perfect age for products to advertise to and so the stories we see are often written by and for people of this bracket – and so despite the plainness of the title it is another name on the poster that actually tells you the most about the movie: Judd Apatow.

No matter how you spell it Apatow’s name is a major brand at the moment – not only does he make a lot of massive movies but he apparently also produces an amount that would make even Guillermo Del Toro blush – but unlike most brand names put there his has real meaning to it. I would argue that Apatow is perhaps the most defined auteur currently working in cinema; regardless of whether or not you like his films you know exactly what to expect when you walk into one: namely shocking sexual and scatological humour mixed with strong social observation and all of this spoken by real and relatable characters in a context not too far off our own. Therefore it takes almost no imagination to picture what Judd Apatow’s This is Fourty is about, so I won’t bother synopsising it, but I will say this: the one thing that I never imagined was that the film would be this damn good.

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