moderately good, not a triumph

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2008)

This is a pleasant piece of Allen whimsy, not the dazzling triumph that some reviewers are talking about. It has little of the true emotional heft that Matchpoint or Crimes & Misdemeanors had due partly to the fact that it has a narrator distancing us from the characters whenever it threatens to get too close.
Performances are good all around, but the characters, with the exception of Allen's "Spanish" actors, are uninteresting, completely self-absorbed and seem to end up unchanged at their core.
To add insult I viewed it at our local multiplex. They are no longer able to adequately handle movies sent to them on 35mm (they only know digital) so consequently there were issues in starting the movie, and the masking was appalling. Shame on Carmike Cinemas. Needless to say I got a free movie out of it.