Woody Allen back in England, plugging away in the manner of his endless autumn: unpretentious, unpressured, unpolished, just a kernel of an idea, thin on jokes and one-liners, fortunate still to find funding, free to do and to be. With little deliberation, he choreographs a dance of discontent and delusion for seven (or eight, nine, ten) featured dancers, the new divorcée who after a forty-year marriage falls under the spell of a fake fortune-teller, the liberated lonely old ex-husband who tumbles for a paid escort, the blocked novelist who gazes longingly past his wife at the Boccherini-playing guitarist in the window across the way, the wife who in her new job at a posh art gallery gazes longingly at her unhappily married boss. The immutable pattern overrides the arbitrary details, although Lucy Punch, the gaudiest detail, with a racehorse’s flaring nostrils, steals the show in the same way that Mira Sorvino in a similar role stole Mighty Aphrodite. The occultism, taken with utmost unseriousness, adds perhaps a new dimension of discontent and delusion, or a new angle on them, but it could have added, with a little extra effort, a lot more. And yet the familiarity of the entire enterprise, beginning and ending with the changeless typeface of the opening and closing credits, brings a level of comfort that can only come with time, a level of expectation easily met and not likely exceeded. Somewhere the grass is sure to be greener, and Allen, as his film makes perfectly plain, is serenely resigned to it. Wander if you will. Gemma Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts, Freida Pinto, Antonio Banderas, Pauline Collins. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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