A nosy-neighbor fable about the mounting suspicion that the brand-new widower in the apartment down the hall may also be his wife's murderer. During a routine condolatory visit, the wife next door (Diane Keaton) discovers what looks to be an urn of ashes while searching in the kitchen cabinets for …
Sticky seriocomedy, from a second-rate stage play by Scott McPherson, concerning the reunion of two middle-aged sisters after one of them is diagnosed with leukemia: all of the characters are at least half-cracked; most of them more than half. Meryl Streep, as a chain-smoking cosmetologist and single mom, is typically …
In New York City’s splendor, Michelle and Allen’s romance is at the point where it is time for the parents to finally meet. But now face-to-face, the dinner quickly spirals out of control as the parents realize each spouse is sleeping with the other. Trying to hide the affairs from …
Woody Allen's ethereal variant on Ingmar Bergman's earthier Smiles of a Summer Night. Can Allen have expected anyone to be terribly interested, when he himself was evidently not? On the one hand, the material tends to be a bit academic, with much sport made of a university pedant, author of …
The actual "incident" on which this is based occurred in 1901, but the visual style harks back nearer to Rembrandt -- and Rembrandt, at that, covered with three centuries of dust, and examined at dusk without the lights on. Illumination of some sort is sorely needed. Why would the prison …
The issue of women's independence formulated in terms that were already old in the green years of Katharine Hepburn, who would be easy to imagine in the central role of a poor girl from the Australian bush country with her head in the clouds of literature, art, music, all the …
A retarded romantic comedy -- er, romantic comedy for the retarded -- er, romantic comedy about the retarded, and yes, for them in a way, after all. Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi, playing a couple of self-motivated mental defectives who find one another among the mere mental indolents of Bay …
After her doctor issues a death sentence, Martha (Diane Keaton) packs up and moves to a retirement community in Georgia where it’s presumably much cheaper to shoot than New York or L.A. While unpacking she discovers a megaphone and high school uniform and decides to go out cheering. That is …
You do not have to be abnormally sensitive to detect irony in Warren Beatty treating the life of American communist and journalist John Reed -- or that part of his life tangled up with Louise Bryant -- on the cinematic scale of late-period David Lean: a forty-million-dollar monument to Conspicuous …
A companion piece to Woody Allen's Match Point only insofar as it prolongs his revitalizing sojourn in England. The half-year interval between their releases is nothing out of the ordinary for the chop-chop Woodman. Nor is the repeat appearance of Scarlett Johansson in the female lead any more remarkable than …
The 200-years-in-the-future format admits some fond reprises of science-fiction nonsense (battling a giant blob of chocolate pudding with a broom) and the usual round of gags about computers, robots, utopias. Typically, in this sterile and stark white-black-and-flesh-colored movie, Woody Allen is so negligent about establishing comic ambience or momentum that …
Wrinkly romance between Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, both of whom fudge a bit on their ages (she, when she estimates herself to be "almost" twenty years older than an explicit thirty-six-year-old; and he, when he holds up three fingers to indicate how far he is past sixty), but both …
Although it finds room, in its three hours, for nearly every known gangster-movie gambit, there is no sense of having gotten at last to the bottom of the criminal underworld. The refined pictorial compositions and lighting effects are styled, misguidedly, after Rembrandt rather than the daily tabloids. And Marlon Brando's …
What begins as a passable Woody Allen knockoff, all the way to the old-time jazz accompaniment, gets increasingly silly and labored as it widens its social sphere to Mississippi and Idaho. Star-studded cast (Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Garry Shandling, Nastassja Kinski, Andie MacDowell, Jenna Elfman, Charlton Heston) and …
Intently, insistently, strainingly eccentric family portrait centered around a twelve-year-old boy whose mother is stricken with terminal cancer and whose father, already distracted by his crackpot inventions (e. g., a remote-control tent over the boy's bed), is distracted further by his wife's illness. So the boy opts to stay over …