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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 »