The fully mature Woody Allen in one of his playful moods. Certainly the subject-matter in itself could not be found to be too light. Loss of self in a relationship, loss of values, complacency, idleness -- these are topics which no Argus-eyed moralist would want to sneeze at. It's the …

Woody Allen's approximately autobiographical movie tells of the short-lived romance between a New York Jewish intellectual (Allen himself, accoutered in a thrift-shop wardrobe) and a kooky Midwestern WASP (Diane Keaton). It can usefully be thought of as a movie tailored to the critics. It is Allen's most "personal" movie (no …

Woody Allen's followup to September: more of the same, but a bit better. It's true that Allen still isn't on screen in it. And his dialogue continues to be overly declarative and explanatory, so that characters' utterances sound more like psychological profiles and biographical backgrounds from the author's Preliminary Notes: …

The second fully computer-animated feature, and a significant advance. The illusion of three-dimensionality, with finely sculpted and shaded bodies in cavernous and engulfing space, is quite remarkable. And the nuanced facial expressions, to say nothing of the perfect synchronization of mouth movement and spoken word, suggest an evolutionary leap that …

Although centered around Jason Biggs, this is still, inimitably, a Woody Allen film. Billie Holiday on the soundtrack. Diana Krall right up there on screen (flatteringly shot against a backdrop of molten red). Allusions to Camus, Sartre, Dostoevski, Auden, Fitzgerald, etc. Usages of "polymath," "paucity," "porcine," "homunculus" (in reference here …

From French writer-director Daniéle Thompson, a comedy of discontent, a comedy of attempted self-transformation, a light entertainment with darker undertones. The way station for three principal intertwined plotlines, on the titular swanky boulevard in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris, is the Bar des Théâtres, a "microcosm" composed of the coming-and-going …

Woody Allen's movie humor tends to be not very visual, nor even very verbal, but very conceptual ("Wouldn't it be a scream if....?"). He must be terrific at the coffee table. To this point, he has not been the happiest director of his own material, but this giddy mix of …

Youth comedy, slightly loonier than most: teenage suicide as a running gag, anthropomorphized hamburger buns, a Living Dead horde of paperboys. And, with a couple of direct lifts from Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, loftier in artistic aspirations, too. But no funnier, for all that. And there is still the …

In Annie Hall, Woody Allen wrote a zingy throwaway line ridiculing a saliva dribbling, shopping bag-schlepping lunatic who wanders screaming into a cafeteria. We mock the things we are to be. Thirty-six years (and just as many films) later finds him crafting an entire feature around a more upscale version …

One hundred and fifty-nine minutes are a very long sit when it takes only one or two to turn against a movie. The floating, bobbing, yawing camera, intermittently going woozily out of focus, is as immediately irritating as the one in Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. And the mud-in-your-eye monochrome …

Defensible perhaps as a Runyonesque (as everyone seems to have agreed to call it) portrait of show people at the lowliest level, a fraternal salute from an established star (Woody Allen) to all his brethren who never struck a spark, an effusive valentine from "Never Too Big" to "Never Say …

Almodóvar, as is his wont, gives you splatters and splashes, swatches and swaths, of vibrant color, and he gives you the occasional rock-you-on-your-heels image (a teardrop on a ripe tomato, lovers writhing within a white-sheet cocoon), and he gives you deliberately over-the-top domestic melodrama played steadfastly straight: a blind filmmaker …

Jim Jarmusch's mainstreamiest film to date has a lot of laughs in it, despite the pretentiousness of the cinéma d'ennui pacing and deliberately dissatisfying ending. Laughs are laughs, nonetheless, and once they've fought through the pretentiousness, they cannot be wiped off the scoreboard. (Another impediment to be fought through, another …

Woody Allen's continued exploration of his beloved New York: the mythical past of Roaring Twenties speakeasies, the Broadway of Ziegfeld and O'Neill, the chorus girls, the Lost Generation café intellectuals, all that. New territory, for him. Once over lightly. For all its frothiness, though, it nonetheless gnaws on the Big …

Woody Allen gives a tour of Woody Allenland, complete with gentle and largely unnecessary narration. Unnecessary for the movie, that is. But it’s just possible that this is something else: a primer of sorts, a re-introduction of the old guy’s schtick to a generation that’s only ever read about him …