Woody Allen's sarcastic takeoff on Dr. Reuben's slow-witted sex guide, retaining only the title and the question-answer format, is set up as a series of seven blue-joke skits, each done as a parody of a distinct film genre; the cause for laughter is not always so distinct. With Gene Wilder, …
Something very close to a sex comedy for grownups. John Turturro writes, directs, and stars in the carefully crafted, beautifully shot story of Fioravante, a strong, silent-type florist who agrees to do a favor for an old friend (Woody Allen) whose NYC bookstore has just gone out of business. It …
The premise, or thesis, taken from a work of nonfiction by Dr. Louise J. Kaplan and spelled out on screen in a printed preamble, asserts that conformance to the "normal" is the biggest perversion of all. Or something like that. First-time filmmaker Susan Streitfeld has attempted, with some degree of …
Can we just go ahead and agree that the actress Greta Gerwig is (for better and for worse) our generation's Katherine Hepburn? Adore or despise, she is a force of nature, something to be reckoned with. Here, she makes vaguely misanthropic director Noah Baumbach put down his torturer's tools in …
Urban romantic crime comedy about a pair of Brooklyn aerosol paint pundits (rookies Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson) who need $500 to make their dream of "bombing" the Mets' home run apple a reality. From its opening long-take robbery of a paint store, backed by King Coleman’s "Let’s Shimmy," one …
The adaptation of Sue Miller's novel dawdles through some biographical background of doubtful import, and through a standard movie romance blossoming out of a Meet-Cute at the laundromat (she has removed his wet underwear from the dryer in his absence, but has left behind a pair of pink panties of …
Noah Baumbach, writer and director of The Squid and the Whale, features Ben Stiller as a kind of middle-aged-crazy Jesse Eisenberg (nose up, shoulders forward), a self-absorbed self-conscious ineffectual intellectual, who, upon his release from a mental hospital, wants to concentrate on “really trying to do nothing for a while,” …
Hannah and Her Sisters runs an hour and forty-six minutes, rather long for a Woody Allen film, in fact the first of his films whose running time has stretched all the way to three figures. One might hope going into it that this would be a reflection of the larger …
Chris Rock herewith puts himself in the category, if not the league, of Chaplin, Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen: the comic-hyphen-director, if not the comic-hyphen-auteur. A Capra-esque Little Man comedy, a Rocky of the political arena, it casts Rock as a piddling D.C. alderman who, on the strength of a …
Woody Allen, besides writing and directing, plays a has-been filmmaker whose chance at a comeback comes in the form of a bone thrown to him by his former wife -- a $60 million remake of a Forties B-movie -- who is now consort to the philistine head of Galaxy Pictures. …
Woody Allen's experiment with the hand-held camera. At its worst, the camerawork suggests the manic manneredness of those jostled-elbow, buckled-knee TV advertisements currently in vogue. At its somewhat better -- at its somewhat more rationalizable -- it suggests the informal intimacy of a home movie or the formless immediacy of …
Documentarian and unmistakable cinephile Stig Björkman — one of his side jobs is translating Woody Allen for Swedish audiences — gets handed the golden key that unlocks the Bergman vault. Told almost exclusively in her own words — from diary pages the actress first began filling at age 14, to …
Even if you had been predisposed to toast Woody Allen for his courage in striking off in a new direction (namely, the comedian's traditional secret desire to do Hamlet), you will probably feel not much like celebrating after you have viewed the results of his labor. This deadly serious movie …
The case of fifteen-year-old Sonny Wisecarver, alias The Woo Woo Kid, who created a small scandal in the last years of World War II by running off with two older married women (aged twenty-one and twenty-five) in succession -- a true story, told with the oleaginous inflections of a blue …