PLOT
Lane (Mia Farrow), who is recovering from a suicide attempt in her house in the country during the tail end of summer. Local widower Howard (Denholm Elliott) has befriended her. Her friend Stephanie (Dianne Wiest) is spending the month with her, and her mother, Diane (Elaine Stritch), and stepfather (Jack Warden) come to visit. It is a story of unrequited love, betrayal, selfishness, and loneliness.Read More »
Two girlfriends on a summer holiday in Spain become enamored with the same painter, unaware that his ex-wife, with whom he has a tempestuous relationship, is about to re-enter the picture.Read More »
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The real love film tells the story of the “real” man and the “real” woman. What is the real man in life? And the real woman? By recycling the celluloid heroes and heroines of 500 movies (the objects of so many dreams and desires) György Palfi’s collage film shows what they are like and also what happens when they meet.Read More »
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Lenny and Amanda have an adopted son Max who turns out to be brilliant. Lenny becomes obsessed with finding Max’s real parents because he believes that they too must be brilliant. When he finds that Linda Ash is Max’ real mother, Lenny is disappointed. Linda is a prostitute and porn star. On top of that, she is quite possibly the dumbest person Lenny has ever met. Interwoven is a Greek chorus linking the story with the story of Oedipus.Read More »
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As Wolcott Gibbs once said to Shakespeare: Kafka, here’s your hat.
That’s just one of the deliciously eccentric messages being sent out by Woody Allen in his rich, not easily categorized new black-and-white comedy, “Shadows and Fog.” Among other things, “Shadows and Fog” contemplates life, death, love, literature, movies, American humor in general, the gags of Bob Hope in particular, the music of Kurt Weill and the changing fashions in B.V.D.’s.
Kleinman (Mr. Allen) is a timid clerk in the kind of unidentified Middle European city once so beloved by Kafka, Kafka’s imitators, the masters of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920’s and their imitators. It is always night in this closed world of miasmic fog, cobbled alleys and street lamps that shed too little light but cast photogenically deep shadows.Read More »
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On the heels of Annie Hall, the Oscar-winning romantic comedy that rocketed Woody Allen to the front ranks of American filmmakers, Manhattan continued Allen’s romantic obsessions in a darker, more pessimistic vein.
Allen stars as Isaac Davis, a TV writer sick of the pap he is forced to churn out and harboring dreams of being the great American novelist. His love life is in barbed-wire territory: he is tormented by his ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep in one of her first screen roles), a lesbian who has written a tell-all book about their marriage, and he is dating teenager Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), who is disenchanted with his snobbish putdowns and refusal to commit himself.Read More »
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Released in 1983, Woody Allen’s mockumentary drama Zelig was in some quarters regarded as a one-joke technical novelty. But in 2011, it looks like a masterpiece: a brilliant, even passionate historical pastiche, a superbly pregnant meditation on American society and individuality, and an eerie fantasy that will live in your dreams. Most unsettling, somehow, for me, is the still image of Allen reconstituted as a speakeasy gangster, the “tough hombre” remembered by an elderly waiter decades after the event.Read More »
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Herbert Ross directed this adaptation of Woody Allen’s hit Broadway play concerning a shy film critic who has trouble with women. Woody Allen plays Allan Felix, a writer for Film Quarterly consumed by movies, particularly his favorite film of all time, Casablanca. At the start of the film, Allan’s wife Nancy (Susan Anspach) has just left him and is applying for a divorce. Unable to deal with this emotional turmoil, Allan seeks solace in the movies he loves, imagining Humphrey Bogart (Jerry Lacy) has dropped by his apartment to offer Allan advice on dealing with the ladies (“Dames are simple.Read More »
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Woody Allen’s 1969 crime comedy is a mockumentary telling the story of Virgil Starkwell, possibly the world’s worst criminal.
Narrated by Jackson Beck, we find Virgil started out life with petty crime, and never really became successful after that. He meets a pretty girl, Janet Margolin, and falls in love, but the call of easy money keeps drawing him into failed schemes to rob banks. As we see his plans go awry time after time, we also hear from psychiatrists and authority figures, all of whom think they know what is really wrong with Virgil. His parents, ashamed of their son, don disguises to hide their identities- Groucho Marx noses and glasses.Read More »