Movie Reviews: "Midnight in Paris"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Midnight in Paris


Unlike his contribution to last year’s Cannes Film Festival, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris received a mostly enthusiastic reception from the press when it was screened at Cannes.

It could not have been more appropriately tailored for the French festival — a film in which the character played by Owen Wilson travels back in time to the Paris of Hemingway, Dali, Bunuel, and Gertrude Stein.

A film in which the French First Lady, Carla Bruni, appears in a cameo role.





A film in which the star is Paris itself. And, judging from the laughter at the screening, reporters clearly enjoyed the goings-on, with several reporting that it was Allen’s best work in a decade or more.

(He makes a film about once a year.)






Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly calls it:

“Witty and magical.”





The London Evening Standard calls it:

“A lush, glowing love letter to the City of Light.”





Even Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune, who has scorned most of Allen’s recent work, allowed himself to be at least lukewarm about this one, writing:

“The film is good. Not a radical change in direction or form. But good.”





Peter Debruge in Daily Variety also parceled out praise sparingly, writing:

“Midnight in Paris is so baldly smitten with its rain-slicked environs you half expect to see Paris’ tourism office listed among its backers. Yet and still, there’s an undeniably populist appeal, light as meringue and twice as sweet, in the pic’s arm’s-reach sophistication.”





Reuters concluded that Allen’s film got this year’s festival off to a good start.

-IMDB News

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: Midnight in Paris


If critics have not fallen in love with Woody Allen again with his latest movie Midnight in Paris — which opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles — they have at least proposed a rapprochement.





Consider Kenneth Turan’s opening words in his review in the Los Angeles Times:

“Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again: Woody Allen has made a wonderful new picture, Midnight in Paris, and it’s his best, most enjoyable work in years.

If you’re surprised to be reading that, think how I feel writing it. I’ve been a tough sell on the past dozen or so Allen films.”






A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times:

“Mr. Allen has gracefully evaded the trap built by his grouchy admirers and unkind critics — I’m not alone in fitting both descriptions — who complain when he repeats himself and also when he experiments.

Not for the first time, but for the first time in a while, he has found a credible blend of whimsy and wisdom.”






Noting that Allen has said that he does not expect his films to have the lasting quality of great filmmakers, Scott remarks that Midnight in Paris:

“suggests otherwise: Not an ambition toward immortality so much as a willingness to leave something behind … that catches the attention and solicits the admiration of lonely wanderers in some future time.”






Rex Reed in the New York Observer notes that Allen remains:

“an artist brimming with vitality and imagination, always ready to explore new ideas. When they work, the screen lights up like a Yuletide tree in Rockefeller Center, and Midnight in Paris works in spades — diamonds, clubs and hearts, too.

It’s his best movie in years, and 94 minutes of total enchantment.”






Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal calls the movie:

“beguiling and then bedazzling. Allen inspires nonsense with the casual aplomb of an absurdist; it’s all so silly, and such wonderful fun.”

-IMDB News