Film Reviews by Steve

Curiously patchy Woody Allen comedy in which Larry David addresses the camera in the familiar style of the director, while delivering bitter, pessimistic soliloquies on modern life. He plays an intellectual misanthrope with zero coping mechanisms who, against his better judgement gives refuge to a young southern runaway (Evan Rachel Wood).

After much misogynistic kvetching, they marry... which draws in her conservative mother (Patricia Clarkson) who arrives at his flat like Blanche Dubois, but stays to transform herself into a free thinking/loving Manhattan artist. Then a similar thing happens to the girl's father (Ed Begley jr). So New York serves as a magical medium of transformation.

If it works at all it is by making us accept that David's brutal loathing of himself and the world is a kind of existential pain, which may arouse pity for his emotional need of his vulnerable but generous teenage wife. But Allen then shells that tenuous position by disastrously introducing Henry Cavill as a creepy, oleaginous (younger) rival.

Its conclusions are valid but it feels insubstantial, unfinished and commonplace. The theme of the irrationality of love is voiced much more succinctly and amusingly by Allen elsewhere. It's a career low point for the director. Rather than being titled Whatever Works, it might have been more appropriately named Will This Do? 

This is a screwball pastiche of film noir, set in the '40s. Woody Allen stars as an insurance claims detective who works by intuition, like Edward G. Robinson in Double Indemnity. He constantly clashes with the company's efficiency expert (Helen Hunt), newly appointed to bring the company in line with modern practices.

The bickering colleagues are programmed to steal jewels using their inside information at the suggestion of a hypnotist. And just for fun the crooked magician gets them to fall in love with each other on hearing the trigger word. Woody tried to get Jack Nicholson or Tom Hanks to star. It's hardly surprising they turned it down, so verminously is the lead character described.

Given that the period setting made this the most expensive of Allen's films, Woody elected to play the part himself. And he is great at the back-and-forth duel of smart-ass repartee. But he's clearly too old to be dallying with Helen Hunt, never mind Charlize Theron as the fast talking dames.

Even so, Woody and Theron's scenes are a blast, and clearly reference Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep. She is made-over magnificently into a forties femme fatale. The Chandler-esque dialogue rarely flags. It looks amazing and the period details are superb. Once again, the critics piled on and it flopped. But it deserves so much better.

Woody Allen plays a temperamental film maker fallen on hard times... As a favour,  his successful ex-wife ( Téa Leoni), throws a project his way. But just at that moment, the stressed director goes psychosomatically blind. Apparently this was inspired by Allen's collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose eyesight was failing.

Woody's agent (Mark Rydell) convinces him to make the film anyway as he's on an absolute last chance, so the blind director takes into his confidence a Chinese interpreter hired because the camera operator speaks no English... And there is a strong impression that this is all drawn from a lifetime making pictures.

There are problems consistent with Allen's other releases at the turn of the century. Some of the dialogue is familiar (Allen says he never rewatches his films, so maybe that's why) and as a screen couple, Woody and Leoni can't overcome not even being from adjoining generations.

But this is still funny, with inspired farce and a good story. There's even some slapstick. Not everything pays off. It's a touch long and the best lines are all in the first half. But the cast is well chosen as usual, and Leoni makes an appealing and skilled comic partner. And there's plenty of insider insight to enjoy. 

The final part of Woody Allen's London trilogy, and the third murder story. Working class brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell) are so desperately in need of money they agree to do a job for their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) and murder an associate (Phil Davis) who threatens to expose malpractice.

MacGregor wants cash to speculate on property development and facilitate his relationship with a needy, mercenary actor (Hayley Atwell). Farrell gambles on poker and horses and is in hock to loan sharks. It's a curious film which pretty much abandons all of the director's signature style.

 The dialogue carries no trace of its author's voice, being mostly set among the English working class. There's an original soundtrack- composed by Philip Glass in the manner of Bernard Herrmann-  which is Allen's first for over 30 years. So, no golden age jazz classics. There is nothing to link it to the director other than a preoccupation with the theme of crime and punishment.

This barely scratched the box office. It's a well made thriller and the excellent ensemble cast does good work. The story is diverting and it's interesting to see Woody stretch himself. But it's ultimately thwarted by a lack of suspense, which makes the story feel stretched. It's gloomy fatalism may appeal to fans of film noir.

Woody Allen now picks this as his favourite from all his films. And at over two hours it's also his longest. It was going to be another New York story, but funding from the BBC meant it was rewritten for London (the first of three consecutive films made there). Critics likened it to Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel, An American Tragedy, which is fair enough.

In terms of Woody's oeuvre, it takes the murder story from Crimes and Misdemeanours and sets it among a rich family of English financiers. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a former tennis pro from a working class background who marries into their money and finds his hard won acre of paradise threatened by his pregnant mistress (Scarlett Johannson).

 The move to the UK works well for a story about class and the familiar British cast do a great job of adapting Woody's dialogue into a different voice. The locations are well chosen and there is a strong visual impression of this country as well as its class privileges. Johannson and Meyers make a beautiful combination, though her screen charisma eclipses his.

Reflection on the indifference of fate is an over familiar Allen theme, but this is a stylistic departure, which wrong-footed critics who had tagged him as merely recycling old devises. The police investigation into Scarlett's murder is uninspired and the lack of suspense is a problem. It was a hit, though some of that box office is probably down to its star.

Slender, schematic exercise from Woody Allen which conveys an interesting idea that never quite comes to life. It was written for Winona Ryder, but she couldn't be insured following her recent shoplifting conviction. Maybe this diversion would have been bolstered by a little star charisma.

A group of friends in a restaurant are told a tale from life, and the pair of writers among them reinterpret this narrative in the styles of comedy and tragedy. The director then cuts the stories together until they are difficult to separate, which is probably the point of the enterprise.

The two plots have different casts apart from Radha Mitchell who plays both Melindas. She leaves her husband, suffers a mental collapse and then turns up unannounced to friends in New York, disturbing in turn the orbit of their comfortable lives in two different ways.

It's a technical experiment. But it is short of the inspiration and wit that Woody usually imparts so reliably. And none of the familiar cast is able to elevate the script. It's by no means a waste of time, and it has its advocates, but- for me- it's the least of his films since Everyone Says I Love You.

 This fascinating, garrulous comedy took an energetic critical beating and doesn't start well, with Woody Allen telling an anecdote he'd already shared a decade earlier. Jason Biggs plays a 21 year old surrogate Woody, a writer of stand up material troubled by a complicated (and celibate) relationship with a sexy, high maintenance actor expertly portrayed by Christina Ricci.

The plot is further tangled when her mother (Stockard Channing) moves in, and proves to be just as unstable and self absorbed. Biggs' mentor is Woody himself, a relentless pessimist with sociopathic tendencies, who is preparing for society's end of days, while also attempting to break into comedy...

 Biggs directly addresses the camera, like Woody did in Annie Hall. Which is still fun. It doesn't date the film because the devise is still so widely copied. The conversations between the two wannabe comedians at the opposite ends of life are funny and interesting. Ricci has a potent erotic presence which makes Biggs' obsession with this human incendiary believable.

It's essentially a conversation between Woody and his much younger self. Some may find that self indulgent, but there are many really howling comedy moments, such as when Biggs tries to break with his agent (Danny DeVito). Maybe the cynicism dismayed its critics , but this is so dense with fantastic lines that perhaps its time will come.

Woody Allen proved he could still do funny with this period comedy about a serious young playwright (John Cusack) who seeks to stage a drama on Broadway in the '20s. The play is backed by a mafia don on the condition the writer cast his ditsy gold-digging girlfriend (Jennifer Tilly). But the production is taken over the latent genius of the moll's bodyguard (Chazz Palminteri).

This is one of the funniest films ever made. Credit is due to Allen and Douglas McGrath's screwball script, but hard to imagine this cast could be bettered. Diane Wiest is fabulous as an ageing alcoholic diva and the queen of New York theatre. Jim Broadbent as a gluttonous English ham and Tracey Ullman as a perky ingenue mothering her yappy Pekinese are exceptional.

Tilly was nominated for the Oscar which Wiest actually won. They get superlative dialogue and ingenious plot complications. There is a theme of whether the true artist is so precious to mankind that s/he operates beyond the law, but it is presented in a comical way which doesn't obstruct the flow of priceless gags.

Broadway during the roaring twenties is richly evoked. The choreography is excellent. The conclusion when the gunman/chaperone utters the temperamental star's catchphrase after being shot down (thus revealing she had secretly uncovered and seduced the real artist) is inspired (and apparently ad-libbed). This joyous comedy is one of Woody's greatest ever films.

Gloriously entertaining comedy thriller from Woody Allen which conjures up those crazy screwball murder mysteries of the '30s when a glamorous pair of socialites would get involved in a wild adventure among the nightclubs and cocktail lounges of the big city. And drive the police chief nuts.

When Woody and Marshall Brickman wrote Annie Hall, they devised an unused subplot in which Allen and Diane Keaton gatecrash a whodunit. When the director went back to the idea, he cast Keaton as his wife many years on, and they investigate a murder in their apartment building.

Being Woody Allen, we don't get martinis and glamour; there are a love triangle and middle age/class anxiety. And it's sensational. The mystery is exciting and the jokes genuinely funny. It's so gratifying to have Woody and Diane back together and bickering again. I missed them. Alan Alda and Angelica Huston somehow enhance the leads' legendary rapport.

There are many references to classic Hollywood thrillers, like Vertigo and Rear Window. The film achieves film buff nirvana when the denouement plays out over Lady from Shanghai shown in a fleapit cinema. There are no reflections on the human condition, but there is wit, chemistry and ecstatic feel-good comedy.

This is one of many film noirs made after WWII that deals with psychotherapy, and a smaller sub-genre that employs the good twin/bad twin motif. The schematic plot begins with a murder of a doctor. One of a pair of identical sisters (both Olivia de Havilland) is a suspect. Because neither will confess which one doesn't have an alibi, the police are checkmated.

So twin expert psychologist (Lew Ayres) gets involved. He falls in love with one sister, and diagnoses the other as a dangerous... schizophrenic! It's a screwy story, but fabulous entertainment, expertly photographed by Milton Krasner, who places the twins in the same frame which keeps the outré concept as realistic as possible.

The shots of the disturbed twin in the (dark) mirror are very effective. There aren't many shadows, I guess because they would have been difficult to match if the frame was subject to multiple exposure. It's still an atmospheric film though, with an exciting score by Dimitri Tiomkin. And no one can assemble a scene with the precision of Robert Siodmak.

Olivia came out of the war transformed as an actor, and she's very subtle as the divided twins, and the divided killer. It's the first of a trio of films for her playing a psychologically disturbed woman, followed by The Snake Pit (1948), and The Heiress (1949). Scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson would later return to the field with The Three Faces of Eve (1957). All these are fine films.

This film noir is an overt critique of capitalism from the later blacklisted director Jules Dassin. It's set within the haulage business, which is exposed an unregulated and criminal racket. Richard Conte playes an ex-GI who comes home to find his wildcat haulier father has lost his legs after being violently gypped by a crooked wholesaler (Lee J. Cobb).

The son buys a truck and manipulates a confrontation. But Cobb pays a mercenary French immigrant and sex worker (Valentina Cortese) to distract the driver while his load is stolen. In Hollywood, Dassin made message films hidden in B productions more likely to get past the studio bosses and censors. But this work of dissent is less oblique than most.

Conte eventually orates an editorial calling for legislated and unionised working practice! Apart from the vengeful son, everyone in this world is corrupt, even the relatively decent people. The war hero's sweet childhood girlfriend drops him the second she finds he is broke. Money warps everything it touches.

The heart of the film is the slow burn romance between Conte and Cortese which contrasts his uncommon honesty, with her pragmatic cynicism. She knows that to live honestly is not possible and love is just another commodity to sell. Cortese has a powerful, emotive presence. It's reminiscent of prewar French poetic realism; American pulp fiction told with a European aesthetic. 

Through the '80s Woody Allen's films increasingly related to the experiences of middle age. They reflect on themes of nostalgia and regret.  Values are reviewed with an anxiety that last chances to change have slipped by. This is the one that most directly confronts that condition.

Gena Rowlands plays a self absorbed and sexually frozen professor in German philosophy who has turned 50 and remarried. She rents a room to write a book, and begins to hear speech from the room next door, where Mia Farrow is being treated for depression (she is called Hope!).

Of course the voice is the academic's interior monologue which is exploring her own past and present relationships. Woody's script inquires into her mid-life crisis with sensitivity, intelligence and wisdom. And Rowlands solemn performance is haunting. There is no comedy.

It's an imaginative and intense drama which utilises dreams, fantasy and flashback to sympathetically probe and resolve her state of emotionally paralysing apprehension. It eschews Allen's frequent enthusiasm for abstract philosophical ideas to focus purely on the condition and conflict of her heart in quite a forensic way.

Woody Allen filmed this on location in Vermont, but on completion he scrapped the lot, changed most of the cast and re-shot in a studio. It's an understated drama, set in a single location over two days in the lives of six characters caught inside an old house by a thunderstorm- which cuts the electricity.

So most of the illumination is by candles, which casts a strange, eerie, golden light. Mia Farrow plays a lonely spinster, who as a child, was charged with killing the lover of her glamorous model/celebrity mother (Elaine Stritch). The daughter's self-esteem is ceaselessly crushed under her parent's insensitive egotism.

And everyone is trapped by hostile nature within a violent, indifferent universe...  The performances of the six contrasting roles are exceptional. Dianne Wiest is such a great actor, and the conflict of her emotional need weighed against her desire to do the right thing is very affecting. 

It was savaged by the critics and is Woody's biggest box office flop. It didn't help that he had made it twice- he says he wants to do it again! His script covers familiar themes, but he approaches them a different way. It's not one of his best films, but enthusiasts of the director will find plenty of interest.

Woody Allen stars as a sportswriter who adopts a boy with his wife (Helena Bonham Carter) and is so captivated by him that he decides to track down the real parents. He discovers that the mother is a hardcore porn star/sex worker (Mira Sorvino) who was impregnated by an unknown client.

The reporter seeks to turn her life around on the assumption that one day his boy will want to meet his mum, but also because of a developing paternal interest in her problems. Woody adds some bulk to this slender premise by attaching a Greek chorus to comment on the action and assist plot development.

 But all of this is swallowed whole by Sorvino's superb comic performance, which deservedly won an Oscar. She is wonderful at releasing the comedy from her rather marginal understanding of the world she lives in (and she looks incredible). And she squeezes some understated poignancy out of her character.

Woody's Oscar nominated screenplay is quite sexually explicit in comparison with his earlier films. It's a funny, wistful comedy which probably draws from his own experiences. And if critics switched off because he has made so many of these, that doesn't make this one any less enjoyable. 

 This anthology film includes three stories only linked by their location. It begins with a Martin Scorsese short, which is worth seeing, and continues with one from Francis Coppola, which is terrible. By far the best episode is the concluding 40 minutes directed by Woody Allen.

Woody also leads as a Manhattan lawyer whose Jewish mother (Mae Questel) is constantly complaining about her son's choice of women. Mia Farrow plays his latest date. She has three children but... is of another faith. They all go to see a magic show but when mum is ushered onto the stage and into the magic box... she disappears.

The browbeaten middle aged lawyer  is ecstatic to be free at last and begins to enjoy life. Until mother takes up residence among the clouds above the skyscrapers and berates her son to the whole city. Showing photos of him as a baby... His humiliation is complete.

 Following a couple of heavy dramas, it was great to see Woody back doing straight comedy, and doing it so well. It's a short, funny shaggy dog story with a comical Freudian subtext. Mother only comes down from the Manhattan skyline when her boy finds a girl just like her (Julie Kavner). Everybody's happy.