The first obvious point of reference would be Stardust Memories, Woody Allen's career-derailing capper to a financially successful run that saw such hits as Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and Annie Hall. Set in large part at a Felliniesque film festival, it was the first time Allen …
It's Nick and Deborah Fifer's sixteenth anniversary; it's Los Angeles; it's Christmastime, 1990. The documentary evidence of the time and place mounts up to a tidy pile: the blanket of smog in the Valley; the Beverly Center shopping complex; car phones; waistband beepers; psych-speak ("Your needs were not being met," …
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 …
A movie by, but not with, Woody Allen. (Mia Farrow? Here. Sam Waterston? Here. Dianne Wiest? Here.) The next most essential thing to say about it is that this is his turn again to be Bergman-esque instead of Fellini-esque. An evenly coeducational sextet of friends, relatives, lovers, and would-be lovers …
Woody Allen doing a takeoff on F.W. Murnau and the German Expressionists in general, with shades of the "white" horror of Dreyer's Vampyr, plus his more customary dashes of Bergman (a travelling circus with a Swedish-accented magician). The black-and-white photography by Carlo di Palma is highly (if also drily, academically, …
Multi-character cross-pollination romantic comedy, widely described as Woody Allenesque. This seems to signify that (a) it takes place in New York City; (b) the line, "What are you talking about?," is spoken frequently and disingenuously when the speaker knows full well what's being talked about; and (c) the writer-director is …
Five government-funded think-tank scientists, actually conducting themselves more like gag writers for a TV variety show, set in motion a whopping practical joke whereby an assistant professor at Columbia University is brainwashed into believing himself an extraterrestrial and is passed off as such onto the gullible world. This poor patsy …
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 …
Small-time Woody Allen, but that's not such a bad thing. Less pretension, lower pressure. It is of course impossible, after everything that has happened in the interim, both on screen and off it, for Allen to revert to the carefree spirit of his first directing effort, Take the Money and …
James Ivory's adaptation of the autobiographical roman à clef of Kaylie Jones, daughter of novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity), who in the course of the story returns with his family -- wife, daughter, and adopted son -- from his self-imposed exile in France in the Sixties and Seventies, …
A startling change of pace, so we're told, for the director and star, Nanni Moretti: "the Italian Woody Allen." That's hard to gauge, however, much less appreciate, when only one of his nine features and numerous shorts, 1993's Caro Diario, has been granted distribution. Not much pace can be built …
The feature-film debut of writer-director Larry David, co-creator of TV's Seinfeld. Its jumping-off point provides a bona fide crisis of etiquette if not ethics: a couple of close cousins are playing side-by-side slot machines in Atlantic City when one of them, down to his last quarter, solicits two quarters from …
As almost all critics have said, and have trouble thinking of anything else to say, this is Woody Allen's 8 1/2 (actually his 9 unless you want to give him half credit for What's Up Tiger Lily? and make it his 9 1/2). It is the same style applied to …
Writer-director Woody Allen here makes only token appearances on screen, as himself, in talking-head interview segments, together with jazz writer Nat Hentoff and others, to lend a documentary touch to the made-up story of Emmet Ray, a "little-known" American jazz guitarist of the Thirties ("I was a huge fan of …
Woody Allen's kidding of crime movies of all types -- the prison break type, the stick-em-up type, the semi-documentary type, the newsreel type. The marital comedy, with Janet Margolin, is more consistent, especially in earning laughs. Altogether, it's what Johnny Carson might describe as "wild."