Coup de Chance (2023)

Woody Allen's so prolific, all his new movies just seem like his old movies again, or blends of them, or gender-reversed versions, or simply retold (wasn't Blue Jasmine just Allen trying again, more successfully as it turns out, to tell again the underwhelming Melinda and Melinda) - he's done this one before, too, you find yourself thinking, and so it is with his fiftieth movie, a charming comedy suspense and kind of Irrational Man repeat or Scoop revisitation that plays with the themes of chaos and chance again, but the one big difference here is this is a good one, because that's something Allen doesn't always do - this is sharp, extremely (but subtly) funny, and beautiful to look at in terms of the costume, scenery, and actors.

★★★★☆

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Melinda and Melinda (2004)

Like a failed first draft of Blue Jasmine, this middling Woody Allen movie (one also helmed by an Australian actress) splices together the same story told twice, once as a comedy and once as a tragedy, except the comedy is almost entirely laugh-free, the tragedy just a dreary tale of woe, and really, it is just a Sliding Doors movie about wishes made on magic lamps, not a movie about the cruel theatre of life and so it can be hard to remember at times which of the two versions of Melinda's life you are watching they are both so similar.

★★★☆☆

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A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

In Woody Allen's inconsequential, breezy romantic comedy - which I quite enjoyed - Timothée Chalamet's gloomy Gatsby Welles shuffles hunch-shouldered, arms in pockets around a rainy New York City, spending a day with sunny partner Ashleigh that doesn't go to plan, and just as you think it yourself about his slight and self-aware performance, Allen has Chalamet say - ostensibly about another character but far too applicable to his own performance to be coincidence - "[He's] a James Dean minus the acting chops".

★★★☆☆

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Shadows and Fog (1991)

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.

★★☆☆☆

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Another Woman (1988)

Woody Allen's terrific psychological drama concerns an austere philosophy professor and author played by a really wonderful Gena Rowlands, who starts to re-evaluate her life after she becomes privy to, via an airvent (like a synapse she can block or unblock) the therapy sessions of a sad young pregnant woman (Mia Farrow).

★★★★☆

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Wonder Wheel (2017)

When a gangster's wife on the run seeks refuge in her estranged father's home overlooking Coney Island's theme park amusements, a Tennessee Williams-style love triangle develops between her, her father's wife, and a lifeguard (a conspicuous, heavily made-up and eager-to-impress Justin Timberlake who is given the job of providing the voiceover narration and direct-to-camera monologues that are so often a tired, unnecessary feature of recent Woody Allen movies).

★★★☆☆

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Café Society (2016)

Anyone wondering why Woody Allen's 2017 Wonder Wheel about a love triangle on Coney Island in the 1950s is so underwhelming should watch 2016s Café Society, the same film but set in 1930s Hollywood - a far more satisfying movie on account of its jaunty pace, occasional wry humour and its being held together by an engaging theme: the characters, either gritty realists or dreamers of the high life, each find themselves whimsically contemplating Life's other path, whereas Wonder Wheel's Ginny was trapped going round and round on the same thoroughly unglamorous amusement park ride.

★★★★☆

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Scoop (2006)

A journalist, a magician, and a ghost investigate the possibility a killer-on-the-loose is well-to-do man-about-town Peter Lyman in this very minor Woody Allen comedy mystery that gives the distinct impression of having too quickly made the transition from Allen's notebook to the screen because none of the elements of the story hold together very tightly (and you feel with a bit more trouble things like tarot cards, fortunes, magic, death and careers would) and everyone is ad-libbing really badly.

★★☆☆☆

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Magic in the Moonlight (2014)

This is a breezy Woody Allen romantic comedy after Oscar Wilde about a cynical magician (Colin Firth) who, despite his scepticism about her claims, falls in love with a psychic (an always delightful Emma Stone).

★★★★☆

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You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Woody Allen movies, and perhaps especially his romantic comedies with their thrown-together ensemble casts, ad-libbed dialogue, seemingly made-up-on-the-spot characters, and voiceover narrations of questionnable value, can give the impression the director isn't even trying, and so it is here in this romantic comedy which in its first half rambles breezily on about the love lives of seven or eight Londoners, appears to jump the shark in the middle with a sudden 'plagiarist writer' development, but finally ties everything together with lots of belly laughs and the idea that the tall, dark stranger of the title is ourselves trying things on in desperate moments, and of course there is the renewed conviction that even though it can sometimes appear he is just churning them out, Woody Allen's movies are always worth a look.

★★★☆☆

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Husbands and Wives (1992)

From their apartments to their workplaces, and in cafes and at parties, a foursome of New Yorkers talk neurotically about sex, fidelity and marriage, men and women, but this is not Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, but Gabe and Judy, Sally and Jack, two couples in Woody Allen's hilarious 1992 comedy, who are all rocked by the latter pair's decision to separate.

★★★★★

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Irrational Man (2015)

Not only is this 2015 Woody Allen movie thematically similar to his 2005 Match Point - another of his movies that references Crime and Punishment -- but this movie's Joaquin Phoenix (a tormented philosophy professor who is reinvigorated by murder) very closely resembles that movie's Jonathan Rhys Meyers, which makes you wonder if Woody Allen hasn't churned out so many films so often that he has lost track of which ideas he has already committed to celluloid, but thankfully he casts Emma Stone as a college student in the murderous professor's thrall and she is a fresh element and is as always captivating.

★★★☆☆

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Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Vicky and Cristina, American friends on holiday in Spain, have a pleasant time exploring art galleries and historical sites but when they encounter handsome Spanish painter Juan Antonio and his fiery ex-lover played hilariously by Penelope Cruz, they also end up exploring their notions of love and sex and monogamy, in Woody Allen's riotous comedy drama that features not so much a love triangle as a love square or pentagon!

★★★★☆ 

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Match Point (2005)

A young man is offered financial security and social standing by one woman, passion and excitement by another, in a fairly conventional story of an affair that Woody Allen turns into a measured, mesmerising thriller that references Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.

★★★★☆

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