Woody Allen's star-studded comedy (even Madonna appears), filmed in black and white and filled with visuals recalling Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, had critics calling it an homage to German Expressionist cinema, but to what end is not clear: when John Cusack's brothel patron sighs, with Nietzschean bleakness, "There's no point to anything," he seems less to be musing on existence than reviewing the film itself, especially after so much of the comedy proves only intermittently amusing and the plot - in which Allen's Kleinman is enlisted, Kafkaesque-style, into a disorganised vigilante street gang hunting a serial killer - feels like just another Woody Allen contrivance; the late turn to weighty talk of God and man and his volitional and unvolitional or natural and unnatural impulses lands as a sudden lofty flourish atop prolonged tedium.
★★☆☆☆
CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS
No comments:
Post a Comment