Okay, we've all been there. You wake up in the morning feeling as if you've been hit across the back of the neck with a cricket bat, you've got cuts and bruises that you can't quite account for, your throat is ripped raw, and every blood vessel in your eyes has popped. Just about everyone has had a knocking-on-death's-door hangover, making the new hit comedy The Hangover instantly relatable as well as uproariously hilarious. Representing another winner from savvy, inventively comic filmmaker Todd Phillips (Road Trip, Old School, Starsky & Hutch), and a surprising turnaround from hack screenwriting team Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (Four Holidays, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past), The Hangover has already been a massive hit in the states, and sits happily alongside other recent gut-busters like Wedding Crashers, Step Brothers and Pineapple Express with its voluble mix of raunch, absurdity, witty characterisation and rapid fire gags.

When alpha-male Phil (Bradley Cooper), pussy-whipped dentist Stu (Ed Helms) and chronic weirdo Alan (Zach Galifianakis) wake up in their Las Vegas hotel room after a wild bucks' night for their buddy Doug (Justin Bartha), they draw a blank. There's a tiger in the bathroom, chickens wandering around the hallways, a blow-up sex doll in the spa, a baby in a cupboard, and Stu is missing a tooth. There's one more thing: the groom-to-be is nowhere to be seen. Realising that they've all been drugged the night before, the horribly worse-for-wear trio of mismatched buddies set out in the scorching daylight heat of Las Vegas to search for their missing pal and put together the shattered pieces of what happened to them the night before.

The Hangover hits all the right notes. The characters are the perfect mix of strange and cool, and the actors all acquit themselves beautifully. Bradley Cooper is an obvious star and leading man in the making, while Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis bring reams of eccentric comic energy to the party. They're ably backed by a bunch of bizarrely comic supporting characters (most notably Ken Jeong's camp, preening gangster and Rob Riggle's brutish cop); a rolling barrage of inventive set-ups; and constantly stinging, enjoyably "wrong" dialogue. Hilarious from go-to-whoa and visually compelling in its rarely seen Vegas-by-day aesthetic, The Hangover is the very definition of raucous entertainment, and will undoubtedly rate as one of the comedies of the year.