WOODY ALLEN - MOVIE REVIEWS WHATEVER WORKS

MOVIE REVIEWS WHATEVER WORKS

For the past two or three decades, reviews of Woody Allen movies -- he continues to turn out about one every year -- have tended to fall into two categories the ones that say that Allen has lost his comedic touch and the ones that say he is back in winning form. His last film, Vicky Christina Barcelona, fell into the latter category; his newest film, Whatever Works , which opens today (Friday) in New York and Los Angeles, falls into the former. " Whatever Works is one of the least engaging movies ever by the prolific Allen, a real disappointment after the charms of Vicky Christina Barcelona ," writes Claudia Puig in USA Today . "It's as distasteful as Barcelona is appealing." Indeed, Allen had been piling up considerable acclaim from critics for the movies he has been making abroad for the past several years. "But Mr. Allen's imagination has returned to Manhattan after that invigorating European sojourn afflicted by an extreme case of jet lag," writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times. Echoing Scott's remarks is Lou Lumenick in the New York Post , who writes "The Woodman's return to New York after a four-year European sojourn finds him working very familiar territory much less fruitfully than in the past." Part of the problem, say many critics is the performance of Larry David in the starring role as an old misanthropic intellectual. Rafer Guzmán in Newsday remarks that David's acting style "wipes away the vulnerability and sweetness that Allen wrote into the character." And Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times notes that Allen had originally written the script with the late Zero Mostel in mind to play the lead. However, he remarks, "It's not Mostel you will be imagining in this role when you see the film, but Allen himself. There's no doubt that the writer-director's presence would make the script's torrent of dyspeptic lines more palatable than David can." And in the Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern sums up the movie in three words " Whatever Works doesn't."

19/06/2009