Woody Allen back in his Woody Fellini mode, after the Woody Bergman mode of Hannah and Her Sisters (after the Woody Fellini mode of The Purple Rose of Cairo, and so on), with an Italian production designer and an Italian cinematographer -- Santo Loquasto and Carlo Di Palma -- to help him with the fantasticality. The rooftop overlooking the Great White Way, for example, is a marvelous studio set, and the lobby of Radio City Music Hall is quite fully appreciated, while Macy's storefront and the Automat are just fleetingly so. Amarcord would be the nearest Fellini reference point for this one, a reminiscence of the filmmaker's green years in dreary Rockaway, episodic or anecdotal or sometimes only illustrational in design, and chopped up even finer by Allen's desultory narration (he doesn't appear on screen). The glamorous world of Golden Age Radio is not very interestingly integrated into the action (as compared, say, with the Manuel Puig novel, Heartbreak Tango), but it does broaden the scope of the mosaic, and the rambling informality of the presentation holds pretentiousness at bay. The whole, as they say, is somehow more than the sum of the parts -- though it's not a large sum either way. With Julie Kavner, Michael Tucker, Seth Green, Dianne Wiest, and Mia Farrow. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd