With this, Woody Allen looks like he has overextended his stay in England. The refreshment is gone. Less engrossing than Match Point, less engaging than Scoop, it spins a yarn of working-class brothers (Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, working their thespian tails off) who, in exchange for financial favors from a …
Negligible Woody Allen effort. The fact that Allen the actor is nowhere in the cast is no doubt part of the problem, but chiefly because his substitute, Kenneth Branagh, is a problem unto himself. (The Purple Rose of Cairo managed to become one of Allen's best films without his on-screen …
Neil Simon's Bogart parody gets underway with a verbose prologue which reads more like Woody Allen and which brings a smile to one's lips only by misspelling the Philippines. Simon's unnatural marriage of medium-good, cutie-pie Bogart (The Maltese Falcon) and medium-bad, bleeding-heart Bogart (Casablanca) is necessitated not because Simon has …
Fanny (Lou de Laâge) and Jean (Melvil Poupaud) look like the ideal married couple. They’re both professionally accomplished, they live in a gorgeous apartment in an exclusive neighborhood of Paris, and they seem to be in love just as much as they were when they first met. But when Fanny …
Breck Eisner’s remake of a lesser-known George Romero horror show from 1973, a therefore more defensible remake than those of the Dead series, for which we can hope that Romero (credited as executive producer) received decent compensation. The no-nonsense line of action to do with a contagion of homicidal lunacy …
Woody Allen's serio-tragi-quasi-semi-comedy switches between two concurrent plotlines, one about an eminent ophthalmologist with romantic problems (for one, horrible, heart-stopping moment, when the opening awards dinner is interrupted by flashback, we fear that this could turn into a knockoff of Bergman's Wild Strawberries), the other about an obscure documentary filmmaker …
Low-gear Woody Allen crime comedy, down a couple of notches from Small-Time Crooks, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Take the Money and Run. It concerns an ace insurance investigator who falls under the spell of a nightclub hypnotist and has no clue that the serial jewel thief he is looking for is …
Writer and director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Last Days of Disco) fumbles in his renewed quest to be our WASP Woody Allen. On a generic college campus, prim coeds at a suicide-prevention center exchange snippy witticisms and contend with fraternity boors. Attitude prevails, and the almost private gags (about men, depression, …
Dark Horse is Todd Solondz’s most watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Come to think of it, it’s his only watchable film since Welcome to the Dollhouse. Solondz has long positioned himself as the heir to the Woody Allen throne. One look at his first feature, Fear, Anxiety, and …
The trail of a cop killer leads from L.A. via Oklahoma to a White Supremacist enclave in Colorado. The sketchy policework is padded out and burdened down with moral righteousness about the mission itself and Wambaugh-esque bathos about the hero (divorce, drinking, overdue bills). Some odd bits of casting: William …
Not a title to mobilize the masses, although the proper name would seem to be widely and warmly regarded as audience-friendly: When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Harry, The Trouble with Harry, Harry and Tonto, Harry and Son, Harry and the Hendersons, etc., etc. One of Woody Allen's better efforts in …
Spike Lee voiced displeasure at being branded after his first film "the black Woody Allen," and in truth his ambitions, though no less large, run in a quite different direction (and at even a faster clip) than those of the maker of Interiors and September and such. Lee's third feature …
“Everybody’s just loving everybody too much for my money,” growls Elaine Stritch, one of the last honest voices in show business and arguably the only virgin ever to prevail against JFK’s sexual advances. For her first film as a director, documentary producer Chiemi Karasawa follows the storied, sassy, 86-year-old Broadway …
In the fresh footprints of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, another Jane Austen adaptation. And in a word, it "delivers," in every bit as predictable a way as a Schwarzenegger action thriller. Or in a few other words, it meets but never exceeds expectations -- with the solitary exception of …
Woody Allen's excavation of the musical genre -- not the backstage variety, which is still extant and needs no excavation, but the average-people variety. He does not take naturally to the conventions of the genre. He takes academically to them. Philosophically to them. Archaeologically to them. And the butterscotch candy …