• “We are two different creatures, right? You like the sound of crickets and I like the rattle of the taxis. You blossom in the sun and me, I come into my own under grey skies.”

    It’s no longer a secret that Woody Allen owns New York, is it? With a passion that fuels his creativity, Allen has turned the city into a canvas that transcends time and space.  

    And when he examines the lives

  • 2016 is starting to shape up as the year of the love letter to Hollywood’s Golden Age. We started the year with the Coen Brothers's "Hail Caesar!," a kidnapping comedy set in a fictional fifties studio with million-dollar mermaids, crooning cowboys and blacklisted commie screenwriters. Still to come is Damien Chazelle’s musical "La La Land" with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone. Stuck in the middle is Woody Allen’s

  • CANNES, France – Seems like French actor and host of […]

  • The Cannes Festival opened today with the best possible film it could open with: the buoyant and lighthearted “Cafe Society,” directed by Woody Allen. I walked out of this morning’s screening with my spirits raised. But, then became quickly hungry for lunch. In Allen’s perfectly-told, jaunty tale a young man, played by Jesse Eisenberg, moves to L.A. from New York to find work. He meets the boss’s secretary and falls in love with her

  • Here is one of the best (and most discomfiting) scenes from "Annie Hall" (1977) in which the funny conversation isn't the one taking place between the two protagonists Alvy Singer and Annie Hall but rather the one that's overheard between some holier-than-thou faux-cinephile who spends the whole scene shooting down Fellini and his companion. Alvy and Annie are standing in line to go watch "The Sorrow and the Pity" at the New Yorker

  • “Blue Jasmine” is a perfect film, the first perfect film I’ve seen all year. It is smart, well-written, entertaining, beautifully filmed and the performances are unbelievably good. The film is also more remarkable for what it demonstrates of the faculties of Woody Allen. After his amusing but rather shallow exercises of the past years, not only with his European forays but even before (remember “Whatever Works”? I didn’t think so), he manages to completely renew himself

  • Woody Allen continues his European wandering, this time taking on four stories centered around love, infidelity and fame and set in beautiful Rome, la bella città. Only the narrative is so slight and the comedy so unfunny that "To Rome with love" quickly grows tiresome. This is the first time that Allen has gone in front of the camera in a while and it helps because he gives himself all the jokes that actually hit the mark. In "To Rome" he plays

  • For the first time since he was in his 2006 picture “Scoop,” Woody Allen has given himself a part in his next film, which has the working title of “The Bop Decameron” and is due to start filming in Rome in July. The Decameron is the name of Boccacio’s erotic 14th-century stories, often made into film, most famously by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1971 and also by Fellini/de Sica et al for the 1962 "Boccacio 70." Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Roberto Benigni star. Thus, year in, year out, the director pays his tithe to the gods of cinema, this time around surely especially buoyed by the resounding and well-deserved success of his multi-actored, multi-period “Midnight in Paris.”

  • Yes, you can believe what you’ve been reading – “Midnight […]