Woody Allen’s late career post-2007

Allen makes films for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. He still writes his scripts on a typewriter.

I believe that, R1.

Last month I thought I'd watch Hannah and Her Sisters again after 30+ years. Ten minutes into the movie is the scene, supposed to be funny, of Allen in the role of TV writer arguing with the censor over his incest storyline. "Everybody's doing it!"

I had to turn it off.

Who gives a fuck about this pedophile?

Does anyone know of any stars who have refused to work for him? (Please don't say Mia Farrow.) I'm amazed at how many have no problem being in his movies.

I’m going to actually engage with the point of OP’s post and say that, while a lot of Allen’s post-2007 output is bad (with Wonder Wheel and Cassandra’s Dream as nadirs), there are some highlights.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is genuinely sexy thanks to that combustible cast. Midnight In Paris is delightful, beautifully mounted, and incisive about the human tendency toward nostalgia. Blue Jasmine has a rickety script but a must-see Blanchett. Cafe Society is lightly funny and beautiful to look at. Rifkin’s Festival has a few good lines. Coup De Chance grinds to a halt in the second half but is diverting for a while thanks to the autumnal Paris cinematography and two very charismatic French actors (Niels Schneider and Lou de Laage).

I like Cassandra's Dream and think Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor are believable as brothers.

He hasn’t made a decent arty film since Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Several of his recent films are streaming for free. I’ll watch the ones set in Europe.

Mia is bitch.

[quote]Does anyone know of any stars who have refused to work for him? (Please don't say Mia Farrow.) I'm amazed at how many have no problem being in his movies.

Angela Bassett has said that she wouldn't' work with him because he's a racist who doesn't cast black actors in his depictions of NYC.

Susan Sarandon

Greta Gerwig, Kate Winslet, Mira Sorvino, Elliott Page, Timothee Chalamet have all regretted working with him, though he's been a creep since the 90's.

I always thought he was overrated to begin with. Annie Hall isn't that good, and Manhattan is as creepy as fuck.

I think some of those actors eventually walked back their criticism of Allen. So many people claimed that they regretted working with Allen during the craziest excesses of the MeToo movement, when everyone was afraid of being canceled and it was easy for actors to disavow Allen once people realized he wasn't going to win them any more Oscars. Kate Winslet would never have criticized Allen had Wonder Wheel been as well received as Blue Jasmine, and we all know it.

Among current celebrities, Scarlett Johansson is probably the only who showed any real courage.

R4, Hi Mia!

R5, not to take the thread off track but back in 1998 he offered the part of the deaf mute in Sweet and Lowdown to Rosie O’Donnell and she talked about how she turned him down for years. Artie Lange said she’d do 15 minutes on what a creep he was in her act.

She’s friendly with you know who though.

R15, yet Rosie never had any personal interaction with Allen. She went after him during the Mia/Soon Yi scandal. She comes across like a self-righteous asshole.

As for the others, give me a break with these turncoat actors. So brave to speak out against him after you willingly signed on to one of his projects. It's interesting Sorvino's only shining moment was winning the AA for one of his films.

WOODY ALLEN FILMS: ACTRESSES NOMINATED FOR AN AA UNDER HIS DIRECTION.

Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine - won)

Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona - won)

Judy Davis (Husbands and Wives)

Sally Hawkins (Blue Jasmine)

Mariel Hemingway (Manhattan)

Diane Keaton (Annie Hall - won)

Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown)

Geraldine Page (Interiors)

Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite - won)

Maureen Stapleton (Interiors)

Jennifer Tilly (Bullets Over Broadway)

Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters - won and Bullets Over Broadway - won)

He has never been convicted of any crime against a child. He has never had an actress complain about his on-set behavior. If you think he's a creep, fine, don't watch his films but stop using nothing but hearsay as the basis for your hatred.

R1 is right. He writes for a world that no longer exists. Remember how Jasmine was able to get a job as a receptionist at the dentist office because they didn’t use a computer?

Maybe there are still computer classes out there at some learning annex somewhere, but it did seem unrealistic that Jasmine would meet anyone under 70 at one. Yet she meets a woman in her 30s that helps her navigate.

I think Irrational Man was the last one that worked and it was pretty clunky.

He’s always recycled characters and plots, but it’s gotten very repetitive and lazy since the late 90s. The last movie he did, the French one, was so predictable.

A Rainy Day in New York was downright creepy and ironically similar to Louis CK’s movie I Love you Daddy. I do think it’s funny that CK offered the role of the director to Allen himself and he said, “What are you, crazy? I can’t do this!”

I’d be very surprised if he ever made another one —was allowed to make another one.

R15 was in response to R14. Apologies.

R15, i’m a fan. I don’t believe he committed any crime against Mia or her children. In the 60 Minutes interview he was very clear about how he understood why some people might think him dating his ex-girlfriend’s daughter was weird, but he wasn’t a child molester.

If we’re talking about his movies post 2007 I think they leave a lot to be desired. I love the stuff from the 80s especially, but I think Allen it’s a good example of someone who said everything they had to say and just kept on working.

Someone above asked if anyone had turned him down flat and Rosie was the first example that came to mind.

Is a good example of*

R18, I enjoyed Midnight in Paris among others even though the supposed shift in his popularity (besides the scandals) occurred when he left the familiar backdrop of NYC to film mainly in Europe.

He also did a limited series called Crisis in Six Scenes in filmed in NY, 2016. It was not well received but I enjoyed it. Elaine May played his wife, so the pacing of the jokes reminded me of a throwback to his earlier efforts. It's on Amazon Prime if you care to check it out. I believe he said he could not wrap his head around writing 22-minute episodes, so he went old school and pretty much wrote a two-hour film then chopped it up into six segments.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything since Manhattan Murder Mystery. I think you have to really pay attention to his movies to get them and I rarely do that when they’re on streaming.

Like it or not, his best streak of movies almost completely corresponds with the time he was working with Mia—from Broadway Danny Rose up until the last fifteen minutes of Husbands and Wives, when he suddenly and rather viciously turns on her (who hasn’t even been a particularly strong presence in the movie before then). After that, nothing as good as The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors—except for maybe Deconstructing Harry, which I haven’t seen since it came out, and the admittedly nostalgic charm of Midnight in Paris. Still, it seems clear she brought out the best in him creatively (because personally??)

R22, I’d include “Zelig” on that.

R20, I was probably the only other person who saw Crisis in Six Scenes. It wasn't very good, but I remember thinking Elaine May was great and Miley Cyrus was surprisingly tolerable. I had forgotten that Rachel Brosnahan was in it before she did The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Imagine the type of role Allen could have written for Brosnahan at his creative peak. She's always had the right spark for a Woody Allen movie.

R22, I think Allen's streak of movies in the 1980s is mostly great in spite of Mia, not because of her. For me, only movies where she really shines are the two Roses, whereas she's overshadowed by most of the cast in many of his great ensemble pieces (Hannah, Crimes). I think Diane Keaton was his great creative partner, while Mia Farrow just benefitted from being around Woody at the right time. But apart from Rosemary's Baby, I've never really been that fond of Mia as an actress, which seems to be a minority opinion around here.

Agree that his later films are stuck in the timeframe of his earlier work. The John Cusack character in Midnight In Paris has a fixation with the Lost Generation writers, as if he were living in the 60s or 70s, where for 2011 the Beats would be more believable (but wouldn't mesh well with a Paris setting, I guess).

Scoop would have been a better movie without Woody acting in it.

VCB would have been better without the annoying narrator.

R24, Mia Farrow is amazing in Radio Days. Her character, Sally White, does a 180 change that is completely believable. I googled for clips from the film with her - "Hark I hear the canons roar" - but can't find.

R27, I should probably revisit that one. It's one of the Woody movies from that era that I've seen the least, apart from the truly forgotten ones like September.

Thank goodness for Kanopy and Hoopla. Several of his movies aren't available on streaming, even some of the more significant titles like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Zelig.

In 2002, I happened upon Allen filming a scene on the street in the Village. I saw Jason Biggs, Jimmy Fallon, Christina Ricci. The movie was “Anything Else” which really is not a very good film. They even have Ricci repeat Diane Keaton’s opening lines in “Annie Hall” as HER opening lines.

And of course Biggs ‘s character is a huge jazz fan who goes to the Village Vanguard.

It was still fun to see Allen on the street though.

Corey Stoll made for a sexy Hemingway in “Midnight in Paris”.

If he was less prolific he'd have a better reputation as an artist. He's probably directed and written more great movies than anyone, including Billy Wilder and Hitchcock.

Match point was very misogynistic. But, both Scarlett J and Jonathan Reys Meyers were at their peak of beauty. Also, Matthew Goode was very sexy

I'm thinking a lot of these commenters weren't around when Woody Allen was funny. In my generation (guess which one) his humor was what made him great. Starting with Interiors, I felt like E.G. Marshall in the scene where he says, 'and then, we fell into the abyss."

I'e watched a few of his serious movies and meh, sometimes yuck. So forgettable, so pointless. He moves actors around like props. The guy is rolling the camera just to be busy, he's said as much. Die already.

Starting at the year 2000, I loved the light comedies SMALL TIME CROOKS (unpretentious fun, with a brilliant turn by Elaine May) and SCOOP (he and ScarJo have real chemistry comedically), enjoyed the widely loathed CRISIS IN 6 SCENES and was weirdly intrigued by WONDER WHEEL (despite the Justin Timberlake problem).

MATCH POINT, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and BLUE JASMINE had their points but were wildly overpraised.

I was appalled by ANYTHING ELSE (Stockard Channing's character supports everyone who argues he's a misogynist), MELINDA AND MELINDA (somewhere I wrote down the most pretentious lines from that one), WHATEVER WORKS and A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK.

Everything else I didn't mind watching, but I couldn't summon any more enthusiasm than that in recalling them -- mostly pale excursions down paths he'd covered much more memorably before.

Found it! (That didn't take long.)

The Best Worst Lines from MELINDA AND MELINDA

“I saw you the other night -- listening to Mahler and crying.”

“I’m going back to my mother’s name. It’s French. She was Parisian.”

“I brought it on myself, because I was bored . . . I was bored being a doctor’s wife, just as my mother was bored being a doctor’s wife. Like Madame Bovary.”

“See, that’s why my film -- THE CASTRATION SONATA -- puts male sexuality in perspective.”

“I’m a very passionate person, so sex is very important to me. I need a lot of physical intimacy, very often and creatively.”

“Maybe sex is too predatory a message to send and elegance is a better opening gambit.”

“So are they tears of sorrow or tears of joy?” -- “Aren’t they the same thing?”

“It may seem lightly to you, but it was nothing but Hell. And if you’ve never been arrested and put on trial, well, that alone is sentence enough. The horror, the tension, the police, the journalists.”

“I remember just lying in my cell at night and thinking, ‘My God, you are Melinda Nash, from Park Avenue. What the Hell are you doing in a women’s prison in Illinois?’”

“Congratulate me: I just got canned. Well, my version differs from theirs. They would have you believe that I couldn’t hold my liquor, which anyone who knows me knows is a baseless canard.”

“You have a lovely touch of the keys. I can always see straight to a person’s soul by their intonation on an instrument.”

“Melinda had a reputation for being postmodern in bed.”

“I was determined not to ask you what you saw when you looked straight through to my soul, but I have to know.” -- “Something very clouded -- and protective, with lots of longing -- it was, wow, there was a great longing in the notes you played.”

HONORABLE MENTION: The beat when one character says that she knew a guy was lonely because he was checking out ads “in the personal columns" -- this in a film released in 2005.

I also have a note that reads "Radha Mitchell’s performance is ideal for those who thought Cate Blanchett was too restrained in BLUE JASMINE."

R35 There was a time when he was an automatic must-see for me, but you have reminded me of exactly why I started avoiding his movies.

“Melinda had a reputation for being postmodern in bed.”

R35 I haven't seen MELINDA AND MELINDA so not sure how this line was delivered, but it did make me chuckle.

There’s a moment in “Rifkin’s Festival” where Louis Garr puts his hand on Gina Gershon’s cheek and she says, “Oh you put your hand on my cheek!” in case we couldn’t tell what we were looking at.

Gershon just plays her character as a bitch the entire time and you long for her to fall off a cliff.

*Garrel

Stephen King wrote tons of novels, some more successful than others. In time, the best will remain and the lesser ones be all but forgotten. I feel the same way about Allen’s oeuvre.

Back in the 80s when I was in film school a prof critiqued Woody very succinctly, "If you make a movie a year, most of them won't be very good."

R31 is correct - the enormity of his output obscures his real achievements.

R27 "Who IS Pearl Harbor!?"

R31 I agree that his prolific output has probably damaged his reputation even more than the cultural conversation around his personal life. Though I don't think he's a visual filmmaker on the level of Hitchcock or even Wilder. I'd put him more in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's class - the film itself is always subordinate to the screenplay.

I'm 36 and Allen was well past his creative peak by the time I was making conscious choices about the movies I viewed. Woody Allen's 70s/80s/early 90s movies, however, became a staple for me on DVD. I'd be lying if I played down how formative they were for me. Of his "early funny" ones, Love and Death still causes me to laugh just thinking about its gags (Keaton's reaction when the old man to whom she proposes immediately collapses dead; the mother talking to the pile of ashes that was once their servant: "Old Nahamkin - you're not looking well"). Hannah and Her Sisters has one of the greatest screenplays ever written and is acted brilliantly by (almost) everyone in the cast. Radio Days has three or four moments that still deeply affect me: the scene with Dianne Wiest and the gay man grieving his dead lover is heartbreaking and shockingly tender.

Even setting aside the details of his personal life (though I think the Dylan Farrow accusations are horseshit), a good chunk of his oeuvre started to curdle for me in my late 20s/early 30s. His creepy misogyny and homophobia in Manhattan made it increasingly difficult to enjoy the movie's brilliant aesthetics. With every new Bergman movie I viewed, I realized that no amount of great acting, production design, and cinematography could make Interiors anything other than a film student-level pastiche.

In the first three decades of his career, his very specific geographical and cultural understanding of the world was a huge benefit to his movies. His subsequent work is either empty nostalgia or disastrous attempts to speak to the current moment. The best of his post-Deconstructing Harry movies, Midnight in Paris, is a Wikipedia article in search of a movie. Even as a huge fan of Blanchett and Hawkins, Blue Jasmine's passionless dry humping of Tennessee Williams was the final straw for me.

[quote] Though I don't think he's a visual filmmaker on the level of Hitchcock or even Wilder. I'd put him more in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's class - the film itself is always subordinate to the screenplay.

Well put, and I mostly agree with this, except that I don’t think of Wilder as a visual filmmaker.

A lot of his later films have this sepia filter on them. It can be distracting.

He isn't a visual filmmaker but he has impeccable taste in cinematographers and production designers.

R43 True. I meant that Wilder is on a much lower tier than Hitchcock. But I do think there are visual elements of Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd, and Ace in the Hole that surpass anything in Allen's filmography. Wilder is one of those filmmakers who seemed unable to adapt to widescreen cinematography. By the mid-50s, his movies look lazy. even when the screenplay and acting are still top-notch. The Apartment is a great movie but there's not a single notable composition in it.

His stans are as loony as the Michael Jackson Stan’s.

And better than Hitchcock? I want some of what you’re smoking.

R45 I guess just as sometimes happens with actors or directors, cinematographers can turn into self-parodies of what once made them great. Vittorio Storaro—Cafe Society or Wonder Wheel, all that gold flooding scene after scene.

R46 Not a single notable composition in The Apartment?—how about Jack Lemmon looking in the cracked compact mirror?

I think Allen's streak of movies in the 1980s is mostly great in spite of Mia, not because of her...I think Diane Keaton was his great creative partner

R24 I think Diane was good in comedy and Mia better in dramas.

I agree

R42, Woody's not homophobic. "Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night."

R11 - I think Rebecca Hall was another who regretted doing Woody films. She did two.

Then she backtracked.

R51 He and Keaton poke fun at a gay couple in Annie Hall—something like “look at these two, just back from Fire Island”—:but then they sit there in Central Park and make sarcastic cracks about everyone walking by. It’s unpleasant rather than funny.

R53, Rebecca is married to The Gilded Age's Morgan Spector aka George Russell.

R54, but that's Woody in a nutshell. He pokes fun at everyone including himself. If he targets anyone in his films, it's the pretentious intellectual know-it-all.

R54, in that scene when he makes fun of the “winner of the Truman Capote lookalike contest”, that actually is Truman Capote who was just walking by.

I highly recommend this take on the pearl-clutching around Woody Allen and his work.

I would put Billy Wilder on the same level as Hitchcock. Sunset Boulevard is right up there with Hitchcock’s best. Double Indemnity also.Wilder lost his touch while Hitchcock didn’t until the very end of his career. Allen kept repeating himself And that hurt his reputation (along with the other stuff.)

Have tried watching several of his more recent films. They weren't very good and didn't seem to be not very different from each other.

His work doesn't age well. Used to think Annie Hall was a very sweet movie. Watching it again a couple of years ago left me with the feeling that I wouldn't want anything to with either of the asshole self-involved lead characters.

R30 - God, Corey Stoll was beautful and masculine and oozed sex as Hemmingway. Just incredible.

And R42 - good thing I was not sipping coffee when I read, "Who IS Pearl Harbor?" - what a line so perfectly delivered. Thanks for the reminder. Also, I think Aunt Bea playing solitaire on NYE and Michael Tucker is particularly kind to her (really a casual line, just tossed off) is incredibly touching.

I don't like the narrators in e.g. Vicky Christina Barcelona (and why the asyndeton?) who summarize the backstory while good actors like Patricia Clarkson are given banal lines that basically just endorse the narration. If you want to narrate, write a novella; if you're making a movie, use the damn dialogue and characters for exposition! The "hot-blooded Mediterranean" stereotypes in that film were also ridiculous.

Does anyone like you will meet a tall dark stranger?

In Blue Jasmine - I agree it was the apartment that was miscast rather than any of the actors. It was far too tastefully decorated for someone so lacking in taste in men - both the ex husband was buffoon- ish and the boyfriend who was a TOTAL buffoon.

Mia’s autobiography is weird. She tells a lot of lurid stories about Allen but one really strange one is when she was leaving the hospital after giving birth and he refused to let her be wheeled out in a wheelchair and instead, made her go down stairs after having just had a baby.

Aren’t wheelchairs required? Would he really be able to do that?

I am sure he wasn’t a great guy but some of her stories make me pause.

All these people in his later films with their huge country homes, eating outside, swanky cocktail parties. Geez. When the main character in “Cafe Society” gets married and buys a home, it’s of course a gorgeous place with a view of the palisades on the Hudson.

He was born in 1935. He's directed one movie a year pretty much like clockwork for 49 years, from 1971-2020, missing only '74, '76, '81, and '18.

For a director in his 70s and 80s to have films as successful as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Midnight in Paris (his highest grossing film ever), Blue Jasmine, and even Cafe Society is remarkable.

The likes of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, A Day in New York, Whatever Works, To Rome with Love, Magic in the Moonlight - they pass the time pleasantly enough. Not everything is going to be a masterpiece. They're not badly made.

He stays on brand just as directors of other genres do. In fact, he's been so prolific, I think of a "Woody Allen movie" as its own genre.

The scene in “Love & Death” with “he left you his letters” is one of the funniest things I have seen.

What about Shadows and Fog? I vaguely remember enjoying that late one night on tv.

“Shadows and Fog” was the last film released before the scandal with Soon Yi.

What about "Alice?" What the fuck was that about?

“Alice” seemed to be inspired by Mia’s Catholic faith.

Society woman learns (through magic) that her life is not as secure as she had thought and moves on to a life of charity.

I found ALICE charming -- in part because this time it was Mia's turn to play Woody (like Michael Caine before her and Kenneth Branagh after her, among many others).

Alice is chocka full of actors - Mia, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Julie Kavner, Cybill Shepherd, Gwen Verdon, Bernadette Peters, Blythe Danner, Joe Mantegna, Judy Davis, and Keye Luke, among many others.

R72 is bitch.

I saw Alice when I was on holiday in Hawaii. The theatre was nearly empty.

As for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, I don’t think most women would really take up a stranger on his offer to fly them to another city and have sex with them.

Have you seen what Javier Bardem looks like?!

This man, me, might have r76. I will take your word that a woman such as her would not. It was a weak point.

[quote]Gershon just plays her character as a bitch the entire time and you long for her to fall off a cliff.

R67 Love and Death is genius.

Sonya: But, if there is no God, then life has no meaning. Why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?

Boris Gruschenko: Well, let's not get hysterical. I could be wrong. I'd hate to blow my brains out and then read in the paper that they found something.

Love to see the love for Love and Death and for Alice, two of my favorite lesser sung flicks of his.

Talking about how visually banal his movies often are — his late career work with the legend cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on Wonder Wheel and A Rainy Day in New York is honestly responsible for some of the most beautiful images he ever filmed. We can weigh their pros and cons of those movies otherwise but those are truly GORGEOUS movies

Stardust Memories is wonderfully composed.

^^^Yes, composed straight from Fellini’s 8-1/2.

Yep, R82. Stardust Memories is to Fellini what Interiors is to Bergman. Empty pastiche of filmmakers Allen pretends to admire but instead deeply envies.

Woody claimed the character was not autobiographical. He plays a celebrated film director who doesn't want to make comedies anymore.

I want to see Allen take on a Spike Lee homage for his next film set the Warsaw ghetto.