Didactic illustration, by Woody Allen, of the role of luck in human affairs, taking as its central metaphor a ball clipping the top of the net in a game of tennis, freeze-framed indecisively in midair. The story traces the progress of a lowborn Irish tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), not quite …
Woody Allen throws his two cents into the alternative-reality forum. Two playwrights, one tragic and the other comic, are sitting in a New York bistro arguing their respective Weltanschauungs, when a tablemate proposes to tell a true story, and let the playwrights decide whether it's a tragedy or a comedy. …
One of Woody Allen’s mostly smoothly enjoyable entertainments. Like Stanley Donen’s Funny Face and Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, it is a devotional candle of the American love of La Belle Paris. The blond wick who lights up for joy is Owen Wilson as Gil, a “Hollywood hack,” aspiring novelist, and …
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 …
Light diversion from Woody Allen. The topic of adoption might momentarily quicken the pulses of critics of a biographical-psychological bent. (Mia Farrow reference. ) But the movie doesn't really hit its stride till it ventures outside the family nucleus, as the distinctly unathletic New York sportswriter (Allen), fretting about the …
The funniest "bit" has to do with a restaurant that serves conversations to its customers (fixed menu with daily specials) and a middle-aged and (to be generous about it) middle-brow couple who are talked into trying the Philosophy. But despite that "bit," and despite the title, this scatterbrained rumination is …
Conversation is served up, along with apéritifs, soup and pattée;, roast quail entrée, and after-dinner drinks, as a spectator sport rather than as a participatory one. (As spectator sports go, neither conversation nor food consumption is to be ranked among the leaders.) This two-hour tête-à-tête between playwright Wallace Shawn and …
Three of them, directed at low intensity by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. No one would accuse Scorsese, for his part, of holding anything back in the way of technical virtuosity: you get slow motion and fast cuts; you get low angles and high ones; you get a …
With a depressive bipolar mother (Cynthia Nixon) and a father who stands gelid and forever unconfronted (Pierce Brosnan), it’s no wonder their recently spurned, curly-haired nebbish of a son (Callum Turner) rebounds with the old man’s mistress (Kate Beckinsale). It’s a New York-based romance told in reverse-angles from Marc Webb …
Low-budget independent film, produced in Minneapolis, with pretty professional standards. The central figure is the Twin Cities' answer to Woody Allen: thinning hair, owlish spectacles (contact lenses for special occasions), wry wit, even a Bogart imitation. His pursuit of romance through the classified ads is milked for a couple of …
Woody Allen's conservative (i. e., written for Broadway) comedy about a movie buff and social bumbler, played by Allen, whose emulations of Humphrey Bogart yield a predictable run of jokes about botched seductions. Some sappy excerpts from Casablanca further remove the worshipful Allen character from respectability. (Director Herbert Ross's half-blind …
Not the best film of its year to deal with the subject of magic and to feature both Scarlett Johansson and Hugh Jackman. That distinction would belong to Woody Allen's Scoop, which was unchallenged as well (except insofar as the air pressure in Jessica Biel's lips may have challenged Scarlett …
A movie by, but not with, Woody Allen. And the inevitable question to ask with any Woody Allen movie -- who's the inspiration this time, Fellini or Bergman? -- can be answered as follows: Fellini, specifically The White Sheik, the one about the provincial honeymooner who gets to meet in …
Woody Allen back in his Woody Fellini mode, after the Woody Bergman mode of Hannah and Her Sisters (after the Woody Fellini mode of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and so on), with an Italian production designer and an Italian cinematographer -- Santo Loquasto and Carlo Di Palma -- to …
She may look like a sparrow going dressed as Woody Allen for Halloween, but when Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaks, she has the power to change the world. Currently the only serving female Supreme Court justice, her accomplishments are too abundant for one feature, perhaps especially this one. Once looked upon …