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...again, we hear you groaning. Another Woody Allen movie that propagandizes crabby old guys attracting cute young women. This is not a comedy scenario; it's a criminal offense, right? Except that in Whatever Works, Allen has taken his usual ingredients--mismatched pairings, the collision of the bitter and the sweet, an abiding love for Dixieland jazz, classic Hollywood movies and his hometown--and somehow made his freshest film in ages. After four pictures abroad, two of which (Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona) were pretty good, the 73-year-old writer-director has found new vigor and warmth...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm | 6/29/2009 | See Source »

...good company. He's an artist of invective--and in this year's movie gallery of mean old men, a chattier cousin of the widower in Pixar's Up. Credit Boris' vitality to David, resident curmudgeon on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Boris isn't far from roles Allen has written for himself, yet sentiments that sound whiny when Allen articulates them have a robust manliness in David's voice. Rancor is the medicine that keeps Boris alive. It makes him the ideal foil for Melody's cheerful resilience (which Wood winningly captures) and gives him a tart appeal, even...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm | 6/29/2009 | See Source »

...Allen unabashedly loved the city in its grimy, dangerous years; his 1979 Manhattan opened with fireworks over Central Park, to the strains of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. That's when the script for Whatever Works first took shape. Today the city is spiffier, and Boris is mired in '70s disgust. But Allen isn't; he's a tour guide to local attractions, from the Statue of Liberty to Madame Tussauds on the Disneyfied 42nd Street. It's a vision of New York City as the welcomer and transformer of all lost souls, possibly including Boris the grouse...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm | 6/29/2009 | See Source »

...were wondering, the marriage of Boris and Melody is meant as a demonstration that opposites may attract, but they don't last. Taking a cue from Smiles of a Summer Night, one of Allen's favorite Ingmar Bergman films, Whatever Works liberates its characters from their conventional domestic alliances and finds new lovers: like with like, youth with youth, man with surprisingly congenial woman...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm | 6/29/2009 | See Source »

This movie, though, is more than the sum of the films it echoes, including Allen's own. It's common for reviewers of his recent work to cite an early triumph like Bananas or Annie Hall and find the new ones lacking. Whatever Works is different: it has that young-Woody fizz with a mature comic romanticism; it's been aged in wit. If Allen has a decade or two of films left in him and if he makes a really excellent one years from now, people will say, "It's terrific, but it's no Whatever Works...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Woody Allen's Latest: Works Like a Charm | 6/29/2009 | See Source »

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