But Allen’s star has faded: The type of films he created — observational dramedies — have gone out of vogue, relegated to festivals and streaming as a genre, and his own style and writing ossified. In 1992, authorities accused him of sexual assault of his adoptive daughter, a claim hotly debated and investigated to this day. Other problematic aspects of his personal life and storytelling have come to light, muddying a filmography tightly coupled to Allen’s own neurotic persona. Nonetheless, his lifetime output remains an astonishment, deep with brilliant filmmaking, big laughs, and incisive portraiture.

Podcast Episodes

• September (1987) and Introduction to Allen

Chronological

• Take the Money and Run (1969) (Very Good)
• Bananas (1971) (Good)
• Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) (Nearly Good) – (Short)
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Too Afraid to Ask) (1972) (Not Very Good)
• Play it Again, Sam (1972) (Good) – (Writer only)
• Sleeper (1973) (Nearly Good)
• Love and Death (1975) (Very Good)
• Annie Hall (1977) (Very Good)
• Interiors (1978) (Good)
• Manhattan (1979) (Very Good)
• Stardust Memories (1980) (Exceptionally Good)
• A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982) (Very Good)
• Zelig (1983) (Very Good)
• Broadway Danny Rose (1984) (Exceptionally Good)
• The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) (Exceptionally Good)
• Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (Very Good)
• Radio Days (1987) (Exceptionally Good)
• September (1987) (Good) – (Podcast)
• Another Woman (1988) (Very Good)
• New York Stories (1989) (Good) – Anthology contribution
• Midnight in Paris (2011) (Very Good)

By Rating

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

• Stardust Memories (1980)
• Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
• The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
• Radio Days (1987)

Very Good (6/8)

• Take the Money and Run (1969)
• Love and Death (1975)
• Annie Hall (1977)
• Manhattan (1979)
• A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982)
• Zelig (1983)
• Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
• Another Woman (1988)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)

Good (5/8)

• Bananas (1971)
• Play it Again, Sam (1972) – (Writer only)
• Interiors (1978)
• September (1987) – (Podcast)
• New York Stories (1989) – (Part of anthology)

Nearly Good (4/8)

• Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971) (Short)
• Sleeper (1973)

Not Very Good (3/8)

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Too Afraid to Ask) (1972)

Not Seen or Not Rated

• Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
• Alice (1990)
• Shadows and Fog (1991)
• Husbands and Wives (1992)
• Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)
• Bullets Over Broadway (1994)
• Don’t Drink the Water (1994)
• Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
• Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
• Deconstructing Harry (1997)
• Antz (1998) – Uncredited writer/actor only
• Celebrity (1998)
• Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
• Small Time Crooks (2000)
• The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
• Hollywood Ending (2002)
• Anything Else (2003)
• Melinda and Melinda (2004)
• Match Point (2005)
• Scoop (2006)
• Cassandra’s Dream (2007)
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
• Whatever Works (2009)
• You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
• To Rome with Love (2012)
• Blue Jasmine (2013)
• Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
• Irrational Man (2015)
• Cafe Society (2016)
• Wonder Wheel (2017)
• A Rainy Day in New York (2019)
• Rifkin’s Festival (2020)
• Coup de chance (2023)

Last Updated

• 9/26/2024

That’s Midnight in Paris, a remarkably infectious fantasy by Woody Allen, in a nutshell. Allen wraps the time-traveling premise in just barely enough story and thematic heft to give the thing shape, but this movie is all about a sense of romantic wonder distinctly felt when visiting Paris.

Darius Khondji shoots the film in enticing, golden hues that glow from streetlights and glimmer off canals. It’s a beautiful pastry of warm nostalgia in cinematographic form, almost Wes Andersonian in its devotion to color warmth.

The movie is excellently-cast, starting with the lead. Owen Wilson captures the blend of stammering exasperation and bewilderment that Woody Allen made famous, but with much less neurosis. It’s a wide-eyed puppy dog performance of a man totally enamored with the world around him.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is uniformly great. Michael Sheen is delightfully annoying as a pretentious academic, and Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy make great overbearing parents-in-law. But the real treat is the cameos of time-traveling celebrities; there are litany of great turns — and significant joy in being surprised by them — but Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali and Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald are absolute scene-stealers. Rachel McAdams is solid, too, even if she never should have been cast as a resentful fiancée — she’s too adorable.

It’s a fun movie, one of the Allen’s most charming, but ultimately a bit too slight to rank at the top of his pantheon. By leaning so hard into nostalgia, it compromises its ability to land its pathos with any sort of punch; but then if it was any less carefree, Midnight in Paris would be nowhere near as enjoyable.

The Scorsese short is terrific, especially Nick Nolte’s performance. It’s exactly what I look for in projects like this: A unique story that couldn’t fit a feature, but shines at 40 minutes. It has some spine-crushing needle drops and lots to say about the relationship between sex and art and psycho-sexual manipulation.

The Coppola short is a stinker. It feels like a bad TV episode from Nickelodeon in the ’90s. Other than a few cool shots, a total waste of time.

The Allen segment (the reason I pulled it up) is a solidly amusing throwback to his “early, funny” days, with a punchline rhythm that evokes his first few films. The bizarre fantasy element made me think of his Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex film.

1 terrific, 1 bad, 1 solid by three great directors… a worthwhile watch, but a slight disappointment in aggregate.

On the other hand, this a pretty marvelous art house drama. “Bergman-esque” is the term they use for this kind of morally complex retrospective style, I think. There’s also something almost spiritual about the central gimmick: a woman overhearing another woman’s confession in a nearby shrink’s office, but what she hears feels so personal that it almost reads as a reflexive hallucination. (The young psych patient’s name is “Hope” for crying out loud.)

Gena Rowlands is amazingly controlled throughout a movie that asks her to do a LOT. And Allen is, against all odds, a better director than a writer at this point, I think. The camera holds an intense gaze that amplifies the film’s themes.

It’s quite groggy in its pacing and energy, but the emotional threads teased out are remarkably sharp, especially Allen’s increasingly cynical view of marriage always dying a slow, wheezing death.

The story is a love pentagon with dark undercurrents of attempted suicide and domestic violence. It boils very slowly (occasionally profoundly, like the drunk Ouija board scene; but usually just inconsequentially). And then, all at once, the tension explodes for a couple of scenes, the only truly great stretch of the movie. The trouble is that Allen didn’t know quite how to end the story after the great climax, so the last ten minutes undercut that dramatic momentum.

The cast is mostly good, especially the women, and especially especially Elaine Stritch.

Most pre- and mid-World War 2 period pieces show the country in grayish, dusty tones, but this is absolutely vibrant and sentimental. The cast is huge and great; the thematic scope is a panorama. Showcasing both celebrities and lower-middle class gives some appealing upstairs-downstairs tension. And of course the radio music is masterpiece-level — the lovely, soothing 1940s tunes bring so many scenes alive.

I’m not sure I’m ready to say that this is my favorite Woody Allen movie, but I will say it’s the one I’m currently most excited to re-watch.

The cast is uniformly outstanding, with Michael Caine, Mia Farrow, and Dianne Wiest amazing as leads. I loved getting internal monologues from many of the characters — multi-character narration in general is underused in films.

Even Allen himself, usually a taxing presence as an actor, is enjoyable here in the film’s comic subplot of a man facing his fear of mortality.

It’s not as creative as Purple Rose of Cairo (let alone Zelig or Annie Hall), and it’s not nearly as gorgeous as Manhattan or Stardust Memories. But it might have the best tonal and narrative control of any of his films yet.

A movie character hops out of the screen and falls for a film-obsessed local girl, and the line between reality and cinema blur. Daniels and Farrow are great.

Kind of like Enchanted but for classic Hollywood instead of golden age Disney.

The movie’s poignancy snuck up on me. Portions of the film kept me at a distance given its bravura, restless presentation. But by the time I realized it’s just a romantic comedy with lots of window dressing, I was on board and excited to see where it would go. (And boy does it go places… there’s one shot staged during a key pre-WW2 event that left my jaw hanging open.)

This is a film about forming and changing identities in modern America, of course. But it’s also very much an introspective movie: Allen uses a mockumentary gimmick to reckon with his many on-screen personas and the many ways he uses cinema to tell his story.