Woody Allen

  • Woody Allen – Small Time Crooks (2000)

    1991-2000ComedyCrimeUSAWoody Allen


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    Plot:
    Ray Winkler is a “small time crook” with big dreams. Recruiting his wife and some fellow bumblers, he leaves his job as a dishwasher to open a cookie store next to a bank. And while his wife operates the cookie store, he and his cohorts work in the basement on breaking into the bank. Wealth comes from an unexpected direction, helping fulfill his dreams. But there is an ancient curse about getting everything you wish for.Read More »

  • Woody Allen – Sounds from a Town I Love (2001)

    2001-2010ComedyShort FilmWoody Allen


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    Description: Woody Allen’s contribution to the Concert for New York City. A cute little collage of snippets of overheard cell phone conversations, essentially a collection of one-liners. Funny.Read More »

  • Woody Allen – Hollywood Ending (2002)

    2001-2010ComedyCrimeUSAWoody Allen


    Description: A down-on-his luck auteur gets one more chance at the big time — provided his neuroses don’t swallow him whole — in Woody Allen’s 33rd feature release, Hollywood Ending. Allen plays Val Waxman, a one-time cinematic genius who’s resorted to taking advertisement work to pay the bills for himself and his airhead live-in girlfriend, Lori (Debra Messing). Val finds his luck is about to change, however, when he receives the script for The City Never Sleeps, a period noir set against the backdrop of 1940s New York City. It seems his ex-wife, Ellie (Tea Leoni), now an executive at Galaxy Pictures, has been pulling for him to direct the picture, claiming he’s the only man who can do justice to the script. She even manages to convince her boyfriend, Hal (Treat Williams), Galaxy’s high-powered studio head, to take a chance on Val’s “unique vision.” Just when the cameras are ready to roll, however, Val finds that unique vision in jeopardy — literally — as he’s struck with a psychosomatic case of blindness. When physicians and psychiatrists fail to cure him, Val contrives a scheme to forge ahead with the picture, for fear of blowing his one last chance at greatness. Hollywood Ending co-stars George Hamilton and Mark Rydell.Read More »

  • Woody Allen – Anything Else (2003)

    2001-2010ComedyRomanceUSAWoody Allen


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    A young artist struggling with his career and his muse is getting more than a little aggravation from Cupid in this romantic comedy written and directed by Woody Allen. Jerry Falk (Jason Biggs) is a promising 21-year-old comedy writer living in New York City. While Jerry has talent, he’s having a hard time getting his career off the ground, which might have something to do with the fact his agent Harvey (Danny DeVito) is a well-meaning, but ineffectual, blowhard, and his mentor David Dobel (Allen) is an increasingly paranoid eccentric whose twin careers as a teacher and standup comic are both floundering. Poised at the top of Jerry’s mountain of anxieties is his relationship with his girlfriend Amanda (Christina Ricci); from the first moment he saw her, Jerry has been in love with her, but Amanda’s multiple neuroses, fear of commitment, and frustrating intimacy issues make her all but impossible to be around. Jerry is approaching his breaking point when the small flat he shares with Amanda becomes home to a third roommate — Amanda’s mother Paula (Stockard Channing), who has decided to come to New York to chase her dream of becoming a cabaret singer. Anything Else also features supporting performances from Jimmy Fallon, William Hill, and jazz vocalist Diana Krall. — Mark Deming @ allmovie.comRead More »

  • Woody Allen – Melinda and Melinda (2004)

    2001-2010ComedyRomanceUSAWoody Allen

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    Description: Over a meal in a French restaurant, Sy poses a conundrum to his fellow diners: Is the essence of life comic or tragic? For the sake of argument, he tells a story, which the others then embellish to illustrate their takes on life. The story starts as follows: A young Manhattan couple, Park Avenue princess Laurel and tippling actor Lee, throw a dinner party to impress Lee’s would-be producer when their long-lost friend Melinda appears at their front door, bedraggled and woebegone. In the tragic version of what happens next, the beautiful intruder is a disturbed woman who got bored with her Midwestern doctor-husband and dumped him for a photographer. Her husband took the children away and she spiraled into a suicidal depression that landed her straight-jacketed in a mental ward. In the comic version, Melinda is childless and a downstairs neighbor to the dinner hosts, who are ambitious Indy filmmaker Susan and under-employed actor Hobie. Back and forth the stories go, contrasting the destinies of the two Melindas.Read More »

  • Woody Allen – You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

    USA2001-2010ComedyDramaWoody Allen

    Quote:
    The older Woody Allen gets, the more the nebbish-jester mask dissolves to reveal the pinched sneerer underneath. Can a longtime comedy writer really be this unwarmed by life? In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the writer-director’s London-set roundelay of neurotics, muses, and frauds, the mysterious stranger of the cumbersome title turns out to be not Antonio Banderas (who joins Freida Pinto in playing insultingly “exotic” objects of desire for the rest of the cast), but, as one character points out, the Grim Reaper himself. The fact that such moldy fatalism feels truer to Allen’s worldview than, say, the faux-sensualism of Vicky Cristina Barcelona doesn’t exactly ameliorate the sourness of this ensemble dramedy, which plays less as a critique of the characters’ willful delusions than as a jaundiced hymn to their necessity.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – Meeting Woody Allen (1986)

    1981-1990FranceJean-Luc GodardShort Film

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    Woody Allen – Jean-Luc Godard? This might seem an odd combination to many American film lovers, at least to much of Woody’s loyal audience, trying hard to be highbrow and intellectual, but not perhaps all that much interested in the challenges of a mischief-maker like JLG. As it happens this is a highly entertaining and somewhat informative look at both filmmakers as they are passing through middle age (Allen 51, Godard 56), lamenting the loss of cinematic and artistic innocence through the corruption of TV and at the same time celebrating their own longevity and continued relevance in the small world of art-cinema. I was especially intrigued by Godard’s use of title cards and the couple of shots of him playing around with videocassettes and books, and a still photo near the end of the film that I think was of Allen around the “Take the Money and Run” days but may have in fact been Godard; both are small, owlish men and the similarities both physical and intellectual are certainly played up here.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – King Lear (1987)

    1981-1990DramaJean-Luc GodardSci-FiThe Cannon GroupUSAWilliam Shakespeare

    A film about “no thing” and everything, as Shakespeare the Fifth (Peter Sellars) tries to reclaim humanity’s lost artworks after Chernobyl—but not before crossing paths with a gangster Don Learo (Burgess Meredith) and his Cordelia (Molly Ringwald). One of Godard’s most densely layered inquiries into the discord between sound and image. Featuring Woody Allen and Leos Carax.Read More »

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