A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy ![]() Alice ![]() Annie Hall ![]() Another Woman ![]() Apropos of Nothing ![]() Bananas ![]() Broadway Danny Rose ![]() Cassandra's Dream ![]() Celebrity ![]() The Complete Prose of Woody Allen ![]() Crimes and Misdemeanors ![]() Everyone Says I Love You ![]() Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask ![]() Hannah and Her Sisters ![]() Hollywood Ending ![]() Husbands and Wives ![]() Interiors ![]() Love and Death ![]() Manhattan ![]() Manhattan Murder Mystery ![]() Match Point ![]() Melinda and Melinda ![]() Mere Anarchy ![]() Here, in his first collection since his three hilarious classics Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects, Woody Allen has managed to write a book that not only answers the most profound questions of human existence but is the perfect size to place under any short table leg to prevent wobbling. “I awoke Friday, and because the universe is expanding it took me longer than usual to find my robe,” he explains in a piece on physics called “Strung Out.” In other flights of inspirational sanity we are introduced to a cast of characters only Allen could imagine: Jasper Nutmeat, Flanders Mealworm, and the independent film mogul E. Coli Biggs, just to name a few. Whether he is writing about art, sex, food, or crime (“Pugh has been a policeman as far back as he can remember. His father was a notorious bank robber, and the only way Pugh could get to spend time with him was to apprehend him”) he is explosively funny. In “This Nib for Hire,” a Hollywood bigwig comes across an author’s book in a little country store and describes it in a way that aptly captures this magnificent volume: “Actually,” the producer says, “I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before.” Midnight in Paris ![]() New York Stories ![]() Radio Days ![]() Scoop ![]() September ![]() Shadows and Fog ![]() Sleeper ![]() Small Time Crooks ![]() Stardust Memories ![]() The Purple Rose of Cairo ![]() Three One-Act Plays: Riverside Drive Old Saybrook Central Park West ![]() Woody Allen’s first dramatic writing published in years, “Riverside Drive,” “Old Saybrook,” and “Central Park West” are humorous, insightful, and unusually readable plays about infidelity. The characters, archetypal New Yorkers all, start out talking innocently enough, but soon the most unexpected things arise—and the reader enjoys every minute of it (though not all the characters do). These plays (successfully produced on the New York stage and in regional theaters on the East Coast) dramatize Allen’s continuing preoccupation with people who rationalize their actions, hide what they’re doing, and inevitably slip into sexual deception—all of it revealed in Allen’s quintessentially pell-mell dialogue. Vicky Cristina Barcelona ![]() Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn't exactly a comedy, at least not in the manner of Allen's "early, funny ones," but it's informed by a rueful wit that finds its fullest expression in reflective voiceover commentary. Spoken by Christopher Evan Welch, but surely on behalf of the 73-year-old auteur, this element of the film is neither (as some have charged) patronizing nor uncinematic; rather, it's integral to the movie's participation in a venerable European literary tradition, the sentimental education. Instead of Bergman or Fellini, this time Allen is invoking the François Truffaut of Jules and Jim and Eric Rohmer in his many meditations on the game of love. The entire cast is terrific (both Hall and Johansson get to play "the Woody part" at different points), with Bardem and Cruz especially delightful as exemplars of Old Worldliness. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe honors every drop of Catalonian sunlight and glint of Gaudí architecture. —Richard T. Jameson Woody Allen on Woody Allen ![]() You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger ![]() You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger ![]() Zelig ![]() |