Film Reviews by Steve

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.

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. 

In terms of subverting expectation and critical orthodoxy this was Woody Allen's equivalent of Dylan goes electric. Anyone who wandered into a cinema to see this because they enjoyed Bananas, would be astonished, and probably felt let down. He wasn't even in it! But there was no going back.

This is an approximation of classic European theatre. It's more inspired by Henrik Ibsen than the Marx Brothers. Three sisters (ok, or Chekhov) are damaged by their oppressive, domineering mother. When their father remarries, each experiences the disturbance of past traumas. The pace is slowed right down to allow the actors time and space to capture their emotional frigidity.

The exhumation of the internal conflicts of upper middle class creatives or intellectuals became so woven into Allen's films that it eventually stereotyped him. That starts here.  As does his reputation as a great writer of dramatic roles for women. Maureen Stapleton won a deserved Oscar as the second wife.

And it would eventually become Woody's standard to write for an ensemble of actors. It's easy to accept that some were not ready for this, having already experienced the metamorphosis that was Annie Hall. But it works. There's a sombre and suffocating approach- without a musical score- but it is compelling, and emotionally authentic.

This is a revision by Woody Allen of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. It retains the same period setting, the dawn of the twentieth century, but is transferred to rural New York state. There is an impression of a society on the cusp of change; of liberation for women, and a wave of technology which will challenge the popular belief in spiritualism.

This is Allen's only entirely colour release in a run of four otherwise black and white productions. Gordon Willis cheerfully captures the golden sunlight flitting on the landscape of New England. It is a gorgeous, optimistic film nicely scored with classical pieces.  

It mostly reflects on themes related to sexual desire. Three couples meet at a country house, but change partners during a long night of enchantment as they experience the ethereal magic of the woods. The ensemble cast is wonderful. Julie Hagerty stands out as a sexually pragmatic nurse.

Woody also scores as Wall Street banker seeking to invent man powered flight. Great to see Tony Roberts back as his womanising pal.  This is one of the director's most purely uplifting experiences, brimming with wit and accessible philosophy. It really should be better known.

Cute fantasy set in New Jersey in the 1930s. Mia Farrow plays a bullied housewife so starved of love that she dreams, or wills, an explorer (Jeff Daniels) off the cinema screen and into her arms. As he is a celluloid character from a screwball comedy, the clean cut adventurer must learn to live in the real world of the depression.

Then, in a spellbinding echo of Buster Keaton's 1924 classic, Sherlock Jr, Mia ultimately enters  the screen herself, and experiences all the glamour of the Hollywood dream. This is a brilliant technical feat  from cinematographer Gordon Willis, in which characters enter/leave the screen, transforming from black and white to colour. The sets and  period detail are exceptional.

 Beyond the comic and romantic premise, this is a heartbreaking work of illusion in which cinema becomes the drug that palliates the horror of reality. Unfortunately, the misogynistic, violent and impoverished world that Mia inhabits is so appalling that it is difficult to reconcile this barbarity with such a sentimental diversion.

This conflict is mainly due to a most effective performance from Danny Aiello as the abusive husband. Still, the final scene in which his wife has been let down so badly she struggles to lose her heart to the magic one more time, while Fred and Ginger dance on the big screen, is a killer. If you don't shed actual tears, call for an ambulance.

Time has robbed Woody Allen's debut as director of its startling originality; this is what is now called a mockumentary.  It may be his most influential film. It also seeds the Naked Gun/Airplane franchises, and many others. And time has not filched its capacity to provoke laughter.

This is a phenomenal gag-fest with its distillation of Woody's stage act, an enjoyable send up of crime melodrama infused with inspired silliness, and some excellent visual slapstick. It relates the misfortunes of a useless career criminal- played by Woody- which pastiches prison/chain gang films, and Naked City style film noir. 

Woody's schtick in his early films, of the neurotic, bewildered misfit, was played out over a wide range of intellects. Often there was a creative mind, or an intellectual, but sometimes, as with this one, a complete idiot. An endearing, well meaning schmuck who barely functions in the world.

He hasn't yet merged Buster Keaton into Bob Hope as he would over the next few films.  There's a joke along every minute, and few of them miss. The bank robbery when Virgil hands over a note to the cashier announcing he has a gub and to abt natural is surely one of the most retold sketches among film fans ever.

All of Woody Allen's early comedies draw on the cinema for inspiration. This narrative is very close to the silent Harold Lloyd vehicle Why Worry; a US hypochondriac milquetoast travels to South America and becomes comically entangled in a revolution. And the visual style borrows from the hip underground docudrama, The Battle of Algiers (1966). 

This is less consistently funny than Woody's previous release, Take the Money and Run, but is more typical of his emerging motifs: some of the film is set in New York; Woody's role is foolish (and cowardly), but academic, having completed two days of college which enable him to make absurd observations on philosophy; he has a psychoanalyst and is troubled by his Jewish upbringing.

And his (now ex) wife, Louis Lasser, co-stars, as his partner often would. The gags are erratic, but when they come off, they are hilarious. Such as when Woody visits a deli to order lunch for the revolutionary army. Or when he seeks to inconspicuously buy a porno-mag. Though there are some misfires, as when he visits his parents in an operating theatre.

Woody's persona is an inspired comic construct that transfers brilliantly from stand up to screen. Sure there's some Bob Hope in there, but he's also very contemporary. The anarchic craziness made this a big hit with younger audiences, including many future film makers, and it would be hugely influential in '70s American comedy.

Uninvolving cold war thriller with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews as a pair of nuclear scientists/lovers feigning to defect in order to gather some scientific MacGuffin. At their back Alfred Hitchcock assembles a supporting team of West Germans and expat Russians, but is unable squeeze much trademark humour from these unfamiliar character actors.

The classic production crew Hitch assembled in the late '50s had drifted away, and the problems with dated effects are harder to overlook. He went on to make some excellent films, but this feels out of touch. It isn't just a misfire in comparison with peak Hitchcock. There were many better spy thrillers being made in the mid '60s by others.

The scene usually used to promote Torn Curtain is the death of a Stasi assassin in a gas oven. Was that supposed to make us think of the holocaust and the possibility that some of these German heavies are former Nazis? It's one of the few times the worn out narrative- by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse- actually stimulates. 

 There is an uncomfortable element of blunt US propaganda, and the plot diversion towards the end with Lila Kedrova is unfathomable. There are maybe three good scenes, but far too many bad ones. The most startling moment is seeing two Hitchcock stars in bed together, and not even married! Hollywood censorship sure was changing fast.

This is the film Woody Allen released after Sleeper, so arguably it is a slight backward step, being episodic and a little erratic. But it's still funny and entertaining, and benefits from superior photography and music borrowed from Sergei Prokofiev. This is the last of Woody's early funny ones.

It is a satire inspired by the giants of Russian literature, particularly Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, but visually this is very much a comic tribute to Ingmar Bergman (which Allen makes explicit at the end when he melts a face and a profile into one image in homage to Persona.

Woody style is to parody intellectualism and then puncture its pretentiousness with a low joke. There are long discussions about philosophy and the absurdity of Being in an indifferent cosmos: 'All men go eventually, but I go six o'clock tomorrow morning. I was supposed to go at five o'clock but I have a smart lawyer.

Woody and Diane Keaton suffer famine and existential trauma, fight a duel and plot to assassinate Napoleon. It's a series of sketches which deliver a blizzard of gags, and some hit and some don't, but the stars make it fun. Woody's schtick in his early films often drew on Bob Hope. Never more than this one.