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 »
Writer and director Woody Allen returns to the Manhattan of the past with this romantic comedy set in 1940, the era of fedora hats and gumshoe detectives. Allen stars as C.W. Briggs, an insurance investigator whose razor-sharp instincts have just led to the successful conclusion of another case, the recovery of a stolen Picasso. While he’s a valued employee, Briggs is under fire from efficiency expert Betty Ann Fitzgerald (Helen Hunt) for his antiquated attitudes and refusal to accept modern crime-solving techniques such as fingerprinting. C.W. claims he puts himself directly into the criminal mind, a skill that will do him no good when he and Betty Ann are hypnotized at a Rainbow Room gathering one night by the magician Volton (David Ogden Stiers). As a parlor trick to entertain their co-workers, Volton makes C.W. and Betty Ann believe they’re a couple that’s deeply in love. But the performer secretly keeps up the ruse after the party’s over, calling C.W. to whisper a magic code word and ordering the detective to rob wealthy homes with security systems that C.W. himself has designed. With no memory of his thieving activities, a frustrated C.W. can’t solve the high-profile jewel burglaries, while he and Betty Ann struggle with their odd new attraction for each other, made more complicated by the fact that Betty Ann is romantically involved with their boss (Dan Aykroyd).
— Karl Williams @ allmovie.comRead More »
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 »
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.Read More »
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.Read More »
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 »
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 »
Description:
A screwball comedy centered on a Manhattan go-go dancing club, where a financial struggle between the owner, his accountant and his silent partner brother threatens the business’s future.Read More »
Synopsis:
While serving the cream of Prague society, humble waiter, Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) dreams of owning his own hotel and becoming a millionaire. Full of desire and ambition, he hustles his way towards his dream. But getting a fortune and keeping it are two different things. Directed by celebrated Czech director Jirí Menzel and set in German occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II, I served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) is a bitter-sweet comedy exploring the gradual maturing of an ambitious man who, suddenly in love and guided by stupidity rather than opportunism, finds himself on the side of the occupying power.Read More »