You can’t claim that Woody Allen’s rapid rate of production doesn’t show. Even the title of this one sounds more like brainstorming for a title than like a final decision: three names off the chalkboard of keywords. Vicky and Cristina, two separate people, are dissimilar American friends, the first pragmatic and steady, the second capricious and restless, together visiting Barcelona for the summer. (Allen’s British sojourn seems to be over, though he’s not ready to come home.) The young women are picked up in tandem by a brooding Catalan artist with a legendarily tempestuous love life, flown off to Oviedo, seduced in sequence, separated by choice. Then the artist’s ex-wife re-enters the scene after her attempted suicide, setting up a ménage. The film is almost more a sketch than a fully filled-in picture, a skeleton thin on flesh. (If Allen tends to hurry his ideas, it may be because he always has new ones waiting to join the queue. More than he can get to in a lifetime.) The dialogue, much of it in the writer’s laziest declarative vein — I’m this, you’re that, he or she’s the other — has not been polished anywhere near his brightest sparkle. And the dryasdust omniscient narrator spares him a heap of expository labor: “One evening Mark and Judy took them to the opening of a friend’s art gallery.” The half-baked aspect has its upside. In consequence of the cut corners and rushed development, a lot happens in only ninety minutes, and Allen can lay out on a broad canvas his vision of human discontentment and self-ignorance. He can lay it out as a pattern, not as an isolated instance. The complicating appearance of Penelope Cruz as the ex-wife, shrewdly put off till just past the halfway point, is a potent pick-me-up in a flagging narrative, a powerfully physical, sensual, passionate presence that deliciously shows up the callow blankness of Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall. With Javier Bardem, Patricia Clarkson, Kevin Dunn, Chris Messina. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd