Film Reviews by Steve

Radio Days has received considerable critical and popular acclaim and Woody's script was yet again nominated for an Oscar. It is a nostalgic reflection on New York, and Brooklyn in particular, in the late thirties and extending into the early forties as the US joined WWII. Hard to imagine this wasn't Woody's personal response to Fellini's Amarcord.

It focuses on an extended family which Allen has described as a cartoonish version of his own, including 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 music of the period.

 I don't feel its magic as strongly as many. 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 Welles' famous broadcast of the War of the Worlds, or the coverage of the midwestern child trapped down a well.

 But there is still plenty to enjoy. The recreation of thirties Brooklyn is convincing, the music is wonderful and it's great to see Diane Keaton and Tony Roberts back in cameos. The dynamic of the family, and the love within it, is palpable. There is a persistent ache of the the passing of the years, and of the living memories of an era about to be consumed by the tide of time, and this gives the film ultimately a pleasing undertow of melancholy.

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

A middle aged, middle class couple (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) visit Woody and Mia and inform them they are separating. This sets wheels in motion for the latter pair. By the end of the film all of the characters have been badly burned by the consequences of their inability to manage their ever evolving needs.

 It's pretty 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 us 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.

The writing is bitter and desolate and pretty frank. Of the cast, Judy Davis is magnificent as a sexy, middle aged ballbreaker. Juliette Lewis is interestingly ambiguous as Allen's young, volatile, high maintenance writing class student. At the end of the film, Woody being interviewed (as Gabe), says to the camera: 'Can I go now? Is this over?' As if the whole experience was too intense and destructive to endure. This is one of Allen's greatest films. 

This slight horror film pastiche (loosely based on Woody's brief early one act play called Death) disappeared without much trace between two major Allen classic dramas in Crimes and Misdemeanours and Husbands and Wives.

It sets a Kafkaesque nightmare inside the look of German Expressionism, which is a good fit, but the film 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.

 The film looks great in inky, clinging black and white with the deep shadows swallowing up and releasing the searching townspeople. The music of Kurt Weill performed in a variety of styles deepens the atmosphere.

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

 One of Woody's attempts at magic realism is a comic revision of 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 (particularly the marriage to a very unfaithful high roller played by William Hurt) and throws away all the privilege to work for charity.

She is aided in her self discovery by the herbs of a wise Chinese doctor who enables her to transform her reality in order to mend her heart. So she  can become invisible, fly over Manhattan and meet the ghost of a former love.

 There is a problem at the heart of Alice. Either Mia doesn't have the energy and charisma to carry so much of the film's focus, or Woody needed to write a more substantial character at its core. With such a conspicuous vacuum its other weaknesses become apparent, like a couple of repetitions from earlier films and a nagging feeling that the suffering of the poor of Kolkata is exploited rather to illustrate the first world problems of a rich Manhattanite. And it feels a bit stretched.

Still, it has a few good laughs and it's a cute idea. The film successfully lampoons the vacuous privilege of  its cast of super-rich New Yorkers and their frivolous frippery. I finished the film however wondering if it might have been improved with Judy Davis in the lead rather than her insubstantial cameo as Mia's new squeeze's ex wife.

 This anthology film begins with a Scorsese short, which is good, and continues with a Coppola short which is unbelievably bad.

By far the best section is the concluding 40 minutes directed by Woody Allen about a Manhattan lawyer (the director as Sheldon Mills) whose mother is constantly complaining about her son's choices of women. Woody and Mia (his latest, with three children) take her to see a magic show and she is ushered onto the stage, gets in the magic box... and disappears. Woody is ecstatic and finally begins to enjoy life, until mum takes up residence among the clouds above the skyscrapers and berates her son to the whole city. Sheldon's humiliation is complete.

 After a couple of serious films, it was great to see Woody back doing straight comedy, and doing it so well. It's a very funny short, a well told gag, even if inevitably slight. Sheldon's's mother only comes down from the sky when he finds a girl just like her. Everybody's happy.

Through the eighties Woody's films increasingly became related to the experiences of middle age, with their nostalgia, strong theme of regret, a re-evaluation of values, and an anxiety that last chances to change have slipped away. Another Woman is the film that most directly confronts that condition.

Marion (Gena Rowlands) is a self absorbed and emotionally frozen professor in German philosophy who has turned fifty 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 Marion's own inner disquiet and it provokes a reaction to her past and present relationships. So, a mid-life crisis.

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

I don't know why I didn't recognise how great this film was before rewatching it today. Maybe it is because I'm now middle aged. But it's a shame I missed its sensitivity, intelligence and wisdom. I think this would work pretty well as a stage play.

Woody made September on location in Vermont, but on completion he discarded the film, changed most of the cast and shot it in a studio. It is an understated drama, filmed in a single location representing two days in the lives of six characters centring on Mia Farrow as Lane, who as a child, was charged with killing the lover of her glamorous model/celebrity mother, played by Elaine Stritch.

Trapped in the house by a thunderstorm which has blown the electricity, Mia's vulnerability is constantly crushed beneath her mother's insensitive egotism. Most of the film is in candlelight after the electricity fails which lends the film a golden hue and an unusual, ghostly atmosphere.

The six personalities trapped within an old house by nature's uproar (within a violent, indifferent universe) are all interesting, and the performances are exceptional. In particular Dianne Wiest as the woman who tempts the attention of Mia's last chance away from her. Wiest is such a great actor and the struggle of her emotional want weighed against her desire to do the right thing is very affecting and impressive. 

The film was savaged by the critics and was Woody's biggest box office calamity, particularly damaging as he had made it twice (he says he wants to make it again!). But, I really like it! OK, Woody's script covers familiar themes, but in quite a different way. It's not one that I'm going to watch that often, but it's still a strong film.

Woody plays a sports reporter who adopts a boy with his wife Helena Bonham Carter and is so enamoured by him that he decides to track down the real parents. He discovers that the mother is a porn actor/prostitute (played by Mira Sorvino) who was impregnated by an unknown client.

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

 The film is swallowed whole by Sorvino's superb comic performance which deservedly won an Oscar. It's a poignant characterisation, and she is wonderful at releasing the comedy from her rather marginal understanding of the world she lives in (and she looks incredible).

Woody's dialogue is quite explicit, certainly in comparison with the sexual modesty of his early films and it benefits him to shake up his vocabulary a little.  It's a successful, funny and warm comedy and if the critics were bored because he had made so many of these by now, that doesn't make the film any less of a pleasure. 

Woody proved he could still do comedy with this period film about a serious young writer (John Cusack as David Shayne) seeking to produce a drama on Broadway in the twenties, who is backed by a mafia don on the condition Shayne cast his ditsy gold-digger moll, Olive (hilariously played by Jennifer Tilly). Cusack also bags Helen Sinclair (Diane Wiest) an ageing alcoholic diva and the queen of New York theatre. The production runs into hilarious difficulties while secretly being taken over the latent genius of Chazz Palminteri (Cheech), the heavy assigned to keep an eye on Olive.

 This is one of the funniest films ever made. Naturally much of that is down to Allen and Douglas McGrath's incredible script, but it's hard to imagine that this cast could be bettered. Diane Wiest as the temperamental egomaniac manipulating the author to improve her role is extraordinary.  Jim Broadbent as a gluttonous English ham and Tracey Ullman as a perky ingenue mothering her yappy Pekinese, as well as Jennifer Tilly, are all exceptionally funny.

The plot complications are ingenious. There is a theme here 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 never obstructs the flow of gags.

Broadway in the 1920s is skilfully recreated. The choreography is excellent. The conclusion when Cheech utters Helen Sinclair's catchphrase after being gunned down (thus revealing she had secretly uncovered and seduced the real artist) is absolutely inspired (and apparently ad-libbed). This joyous comedy is one of Woody's best films and was subsequently transformed into a successful stage musical. 

An indecently entertaining comedy thriller which conjures up those crazy screwball murder stories of the thirties 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 hatched a subplot with Alvie and Annie gatecrashing a whodunit. But as various other themes began to prevail, it was left out. So Woody went back to the story, cast Diane Keaton as his wife many years on, and they investigate a neighbour in their apartment building who they think has murdered his wife. Being Woody Allen, we don't get martinis and William Powell and Myrna Loy, we get a love triangle, middle aged/class anxiety and the possibility of adultery.

 And it's sensational. The mystery is exciting, the script is out of this world, the jokes are laugh out loud, and it's so gratifying to have Woody and Diane Keaton back together and bickering again. I missed them. Alan Alda and Angelica Huston actually enhance the leads' legendary rapport.

The film continually drops references to great Hollywood thrillers, like Vertigo and Rear Window, and achieves film buff nirvana when the denouement plays out over Lady from Shanghai being shown in a fleapit cinema. There are no reflections on the human condition here, but wit, great acting chemistry, and ecstatic feelgood film making.

One of many film noirs after WWII that dealt with psychotherapy, and a smaller subgenre that used the good twin/bad twin motif as the subject for melodrama. The rather schematic plot begins with a murder of a doctor. Ruth Collins (both siblings are played by Olivia de Havilland) is suspected, but when her identical sister Terry also becomes known to the cops and neither will confess which one doesn't have an alibi, the police are checkmated. So twin expert Dr. Elliott (Lew Ayres) takes an interest. He falls in love with one sister, and diagnoses the other as a dangerous... schizophrenic!

 It's a screwy story, but fabulous entertainment, expertly assembled by Siodmak, and his cinematographer Milton R. Krasner, who photographs the twins together in the same frame magnificently and keeps the outré concept as realistic as possible.

Krasner was an auspicious noir photographer over many films. The shots of the disturbed twin in the (dark) mirror are very effective and the film is a technical tour de force. 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 music by celebrated composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

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

This is quite an overt critique of capitalism from the later blacklisted Dassin, set in the context of the haulage business, which is shown to be so unregulated and manifestly criminal as to be wholly dysfunctional. Richard Conte as Nick Garcos  returns home from the sea to find his wildcat haulier father has lost his legs after being violently gypped by wholesaler Mike Figlia played by Lee J. Cobb. Garcos buys a truck and manipulates a confrontation with Figlia who pays a mercenary French émigré and sex worker (Valentina Cortese as Rica) to distract Conte while he steals his load.  

  In Hollywood, Dassin made message films, but usually rendered oblique and hidden in B productions more likely to get past the studio bosses and censors. But this work of dissent was less distorted than most. At the conclusion of the film, Conte makes a case for legislated and unionised working practice. Apart from the outsider Garcos, everyone in this world is corrupt, even the relatively decent people. It's a reality where the sweet childhood girlfriend of Garcos drops him the second she finds he is broke. Money warps everything it touches.

Yet the heart of the film is lightened by a slowly developing unsentimental romance between Garcos and Rica. The film contrasts his uncommon honesty, with her  pragmatic cynicism. Their scenes together are quite adult and her lustfulness is unusually naked for a Hollywood film of the forties. Rica is a girl who has found that to live honestly is not possible and love is just another commodity to sell. Cortese is most convincing, Conte is a fine noir actor on any side of the law.

The film has a great noir atmosphere and fine, encroaching sets which evokes French poetic realism. It's a tough, realistic American story told with European aesthetics, and that's really what film noir is. 

The final part of Woody's London trilogy, and the third murder story. The working class Blaine 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 money to speculate on property development and facilitate his relationship with a needy, mercenary actor (Hayley Atwell). Farrell gambles on poker and horses and owes money to loan sharks.

 This is a curious film. Pretty much all signatures of the director are missing. The dialogue carries no trace of Allen's style. There's even an original soundtrack (composed by Philip Glass in the style of Bernard Herrmann), the first for over thirty years. No golden age jazz classics. It has nothing to link it to the director other than a preoccupation with the theme of crime and punishment. 

It's a decently made realistic thriller and everyone does good work. The story is fine and its interesting to see Woody working with in a working class narrative. It's just lacking in suspense which makes the film feel a touch too long. 

This is the film Woody now describes as his favourite. And at over two hours it's 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 shot there).

It takes the murder story strand from Crimes and Misdemeanours and sets it among a rich family of English financiers. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 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 mistress (Scarlett Johannson) who has become pregnant.

 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 to 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 an unusually beautiful combination, though her star charisma rather eclipses his.

The theme of the indifference of fate isn't particularly original, and the film lacks suspense, which makes it a qualified success. The police investigation into Scarlett's murder is very weak. It's a strange film in that I think it's the first he makes that isn't obviously a Woody Allen, which wrongfooted critics who by then had tagged him as merely recycling old devises. It became a box office hit.

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

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

It was written for Winona Ryder, but she couldn't be insured following her recent shoplifting conviction.

 It's a bit of technical exercise, which is interesting and as ever for an Allen film it is well cast and decently written. But it is short of the imaginative inspiration and wit that Woody usually imparts so reliably. It's by no means a waste of time, and it has its advocates, but I place it as the least of Woody's films since Everyone Says I Love You.