Film Reviews by Steve

 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.

 This is one of Woody Allen's many attempts at magic realism, and a comic revision of his 1988 drama, Another Woman. A rich, materialistic wife and mother (Mia Farrow) enters middle age and begins to review her childhood, her past choices, and her present circumstances. Including her marriage to a very unfaithful high roller (William Hurt)

And she throws away all her privileges to work for charity in India. She is aided in her self discovery by the herbs of a wise Chinese doctor which allow her special gifts so she might mend her heart. She is able to become invisible, and fly high over Manhattan to meet the ghost of a former love...

Unfortunately, either Mia doesn't have the energy and charisma to carry the film, or Woody needed to write a more substantial lead character.  And this vacuum in the heart of the film exposes other flaws, like repetition from the director's earlier work. And a feeling that the poor of Kolkata are being exploited to illustrate the first world problems of a rich New Yorker.

Still, it's a cute idea and there are a few good laughs. And the film successfully sends up the vacuous privilege of  its assembly of super-rich trophy wives and their frivolous diversions. Though by the fade out I wondered if it might have been improved with Judy Davis in the lead rather than her eye-catching cameo as Mia's new squeeze's ex wife.

 Slight but clever experiment from Woody Allen and his technical crew- particular credit is due to cinematographer Gordon Willis- about a man who seeks to conform so completely that he actually takes on the physical characteristics of whoever is close him. It's a comedy which makes observations on celebrity and the dangers of wholesale public compliance

Leonard Zelig (Allen) becomes briefly famous as the chameleon man, a novelty of the roaring twenties. Mia Farrow is the psychiatrist who seeks to restore his individuality. Eventually the story takes a darker turn when his desire for anonymity among the acquiescent masses attracts him to Nazi Germany in the '30s.

 It feels like an extended sketch. There is a dusting of successful gags, but this is more philosophical than hilarious.. It really scores with the visual effects. Woody and Mia are inserted into old photographs and newsreel of famous figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Randolph Hurst. New scenes of psychoanalysis are aged to blend into the historical b&w footage.

The scene where Zelig spots his analyst in the crowd at Munich while on the stage with Adolf Hitler, is stunning. No digital technology back then. As a bonus there are a handful of songs about Zelig recorded in the swing style of the jazz age, composed by Dick Hyman. My favourite: Doin' the Chameleon. 

This has attracted considerable critical and popular acclaim and Woody Allen's script was nominated for an Oscar. It is a nostalgic reflection on New York in the late '30s, extending into the early '40s as the US joins WWII. Hard to imagine this isn't Woody's personal response to Federico Fellini's Amarcord.

It portrays an extended family, which Allen has described as a cartoonish version of his own. There's a creditable performance by Seth Green as the latest red haired child actor to play the director as a boy. It reflects on their relationship with the golden age of radio, its stars and the popular songs of the period.

There is a gentle magic. It provokes a smile rather than a laugh, and the reminiscences are familiar (though exaggerated) because they are based on well known radio events, like the panic caused by Orson Welles' famous broadcast of the War of the Worlds, or the coverage of the midwestern child trapped down a well.

The recreation of '30s Brooklyn is convincing, the music is wonderful and it's good to see Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts back in cameos. The dynamic of the family, and the love within it, is palpable. Woody evokes the persistent ache of the passing years, and the living memories of an era about to be consumed by the tide of time.

 This was released at the time of Woody Allen's separation from Mia Farrow and its raw, documentary style made it feel that some of the blows were landing close to home. It mimics fly on the wall reality tv with hand held cameras and jump cuts. The actors are interviewed in character about their emotional responses to the events.

A middle aged/middle class couple (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) visit Woody and Mia to inform them they are divorcing. This sets wheels in motion for the other marriage. By the fade out, all of them have been burned by the consequences of their inability to manage their ever evolving needs.

 It's relentless and brutal stuff and a lot of pain is condensed into its slender narrative. Woody writes about how hard it is to be married, how the manipulations that help make it work are the very things that will destroy it. There is little humour. A character says to Woody about his past work: 'All this suffering, you make it so funny'). But there's not much of that here.

Davis is magnificent as a sexy, middle aged ballbreaker. Juliette Lewis is interestingly ambiguous as Allen's young, high maintenance writing class student. At the end, Woody addresses the camera: 'Can I go now? Is this over?' As if the whole experience is too intense and destructive to endure. It's not typical, but it's one of Allen's greatest films. 

This slender horror film pastiche (loosely based on Woody Allen's own one act play called Death) disappeared without much trace, released between a pair major Allen classic dramas in Crimes and Misdemeanours and Husbands and Wives. Its main attraction is the photography and set design.

It sets a Kafka-esque nightmare inside the look of German Expressionism, which is a good fit. It looks great in inky, clinging black and white with the deep shadows swallowing up and releasing the characters. All this atmosphere is deepened by the music of Kurt Weill, performed in a variety of styles.

It feels like an extended sketch, with all the superficiality of character that implies. Woody is woken up in the night time (in an unspecified location in about the 1920s) and coerced to join a vigilante group seeking out a serial killer. And becomes suspected himself for vague, frivolous reasons.

There is an amazing cast of well known actors playing supporting roles and cameos, including genre great Donald Pleasence. And it's a blast to see Woody back in his old, neurotic stand up persona. It's a curiosity which is fun over its brief running time but it's not one that lingers long in the memory.

Following critical acclaim for Manhattan, Woody Allen experienced a backlash with his next release. The director was accused of narcissism and arrogance and patronising his audience. He responded that his character (an actor/writer/director) wasn't modelled on himself. Which feels disingenuous.

This is pure arthouse which employs dreams, visions, fantasies and flashback. Critics pointed out how much it borrows from Federico Fellini's 8 1/2.  But it owes as much to Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels. Woody goes to a festival of his films and is exposed to a surreal exaggeration of the celebrity experience of superfans, critics, groupies and rivals.

 The perspective continually jumps from being about a director's personal crisis, to the surreal films the character makes, in a really satisfying, and clever way. It's an experimental film although perhaps not as much as when Fellini first made it. It's too abstract to be a crowd pleaser. But it's more entertaining than most head-movies

It reflects on the value of being a maker of comedies within a variety of contexts. It's not as funny as the early spoofs, or as good a drama as Manhattan. But there are still some extraordinary moments: like the aliens who travel across space to tell Allen they prefer his early funny films; and a heartbreaking meeting with Charlotte Rampling in a psychiatric hospital.