Cate Blanchett is a force of nature in Woody Allen’s latest, which finds the filmmaker in more complex territory after the fun but lightweight To Rome With Love and leaves viewers often not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

In an eponymous lead role owing more than a little to A Streetcar Named Desire’s Blanche DuBois, whom she played on stage not so long ago, Blanchett gives an extraordinary performance. Her Jasmine, the neurotic widow of a fraudulent Wall Street banker (Alec Baldwin), is recovering from a nervous breakdown when she turns up to stay at the modest San Francisco flat of her sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins), a supermarket checkout clerk.

See-sawing between the present and her New York past, the film explores with humour and insight the differences between the two women, born of different parents but raised in the same family. While Ginger is well-adjusted, despite her relative poverty, Jasmine is an emotional wreck for whom wealth has brought unrealistic expectations that bring misery when not met.

Dividing them even more than wealth and class, however, is their different approaches to life, for while Ginger is able to learn from her mistakes, Jasmine is trapped inside a cycle of bad...