Here we are once again: another year, another Woody Allen film. The prolific director’s latest cinematic endeavor comes packed with the filmmaker’s trademarks: erudite intellectuals sit around conversing about philosophy and morality until an ill-conceived scheme (or two) comes along to shake up the snow-globe sized world they inhabit. But as in Allen’s past few […]
Woody Allen
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Film Review: “Magic in the Moonlight”
The experience of watching Woody Allen’s annual movie, “Magic in the Moonlight,” suggests that last year’s “Blue Jasmine” represents something of an anomaly in his long, prolific career. In that picture he abandoned a number of his perennial subjects — the upper West Side ambiance, the preoccupation with sexual inadequacy, the tendency to rely on […]
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Film Review: “Fading Gigolo”
Woody Allen’s presence in John Turturro’s new movie may represent something like an imprimatur, suggesting that his influence extends beyond the pictures he himself directs.ย Presumably filtered through Turturro’s imagination, “Fading Gigolo,” like it or not, seems very like one or another Woody Allen movie. The setting, the simple plot and situation, along with an […]
Posted inArts & Entertainment
“Relatively Speaking”
The JCC CenterStage’s new production is “Relatively Speaking,” a program of one-act plays, recently presented on Broadway, by writers better known for their work in the movies: Ethan Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen. Does anything tie them together? Well, each of them contains a generous sprinkling of wisecracks, as you might expect. And each […]
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Woody Allen’s annual picture
Although he dutifully releases something like a film a year, and despite the reflexive gushing of the reviewers, Woody Allen has actually not produced a genuinely good movie in years, perhaps even decades. A good deal of his work ranges from abysmal — “Alice,” “Mighty Aphrodite,” “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” — to the […]
