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 coffee beans. But what about the twin cemetery plots the grieving widower had supposedly purchased? The next-door wife's husband (Woody Allen), a mind-your-own-business New Yorker through and through, proves to be a less receptive sounding board for her theories than does the attractive divorcé; (Alan Alda) with whom she is currently negotiating a business partnership. And at the same time that the husband is becoming more and more convinced of his wife's lunacy, he is the object of discreet advances from an unattached novelist (Anjelica Huston) under contract to his publishing firm. The extracurricular flirtations and jealousies add some useful complication to the snooping and sleuthing. The latter activities are worked out reasonably well, not to the standards of a straight detective case out of the files of, say, Ellery Queen (pre-eminent Manhattan murder solver), but to those of low comedy. The unapologetic hommage to Bob Hope near the beginning of the movie sets the sights just about right. The life-imitating-art finale (hommage to Orson Welles), while shooting higher, falls shorter: a broken bowstring. Directed and co-written by Allen. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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