A glorious fairy tale

Rating: 9/10 (28 May 2011)

Woody Allen plugs along decade after decade, stolidly churning out films. Every once in a while, he catches lightning in a bottle. This film is beautiful to look at, beautifully paced, beautifully acted, and pure pleasure from beginning to end. The lead dresses like Woody, although he has a physicality that makes his attraction to women more plausible. Is it just me, or does he sound like Jimmy Stewart? The women are absolutely gorgeous; Woody has not lost his knack for bathing women in a transcendent light. The bad guys(a pompous professor, the fiancée and her parents) are brutally sketched with perfect telling details. And best of all is Paris itself, looking at least as beautiful and magical as the New York of Allen's classic films of generations past. It is a movie about nostalgia, idealism, and those of us who feel out of place in our own time, and it is nearly perfect.