Three of them, directed at low intensity by Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and Woody Allen. No one would accuse Scorsese, for his part, of holding anything back in the way of technical virtuosity: you get slow motion and fast cuts; you get low angles and high ones; you get a blue-lit fantasy scene (blue, one supposes, as opposed to yellow or green, because the nature of the fantasy is erotic); you get an entire rumpus room of dollies and tracks; you even get a bouquet of old-fashioned irises. But you could still accuse him (since he clearly can't be allowed to get off scot-free) of overkill, of making a lot of fuss over nothing -- so much fuss, in fact, that the film begins to resemble an all-stops-out audition and this proven master seems reduced to the rank of a scholarship applicant. Coppola's segment -- even less than nothing -- is a spoiled brat's fairy tale co-written by the director and his teenage daughter, Sofia. If, before seeing it, you had tended to doubt the daughter's contribution -- if you had suspected instead that that was just a tactical ploy to disarm criticism -- the actual experience of seeing it removes all doubts, and indeed replaces them with the new suspicion that not only did Coppola's daughter truly write it, but that it was possibly fished up from an old cardboard box of Elementary School mementos (grade: B-minus). Finally, Allen's segment, a fantasy that fits with the collection in his Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex, will doubtless be greeted by never-say-die reactionaries as a happy return to the good old days of Witty Allen rather than Weighty Allen. But nothing more than this very congeniality is needed to prove Allen's low regard for the project. (Originally the movie was to be three segments by Allen alone, so he's in a unique position to feel he wound up with the worst of the deal.) With Nick Nolte, Rosanna Arquette, Heather McComb, Talia Shire, Mia Farrow, and Allen. (1989) — Duncan Shepherd