New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

From his more recent work, I would be remiss if I did not mention the romantic Midnight in Paris, and the seductively dark Match Point. The former won him his third writing Oscar (a feat accomplished before only by Paddy Chayefsky) and is one of the rare movies in which Allen explores the soul of a city that is not New York. Midnight in Paris is an endearing movie that explores well an idea that may seem obvious but at the same time worth remembering: that nostalgia for the past, while comforting, is also pointless given that the past we revere itself views its present as decaying and romanticizes its own past.

And the latter movie, Match Point, stands out for being among the darkest that Woody has ever made. Here, the seductress also leads her prey into extremes, but the outcome is far from comedic. Although I’m not sure that I love Scarlett Johansson as Allen’s muse, she worked perfectly alongside an eerie and precise Jonathan Rhys-Myers, and becomes one of the few of Allen’s female leads to meet an unfortunate end as the price to be paid for her allure. The true testament to Allen’s mastery comes not only from the brilliant ideas he explores so well, but the many different ways in which he refurbishes his formula to get to a satisfying end.

On to the main event.

5. Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993)

Before things got really heavy with the film-noir-esque murder in Match Point, Allen explored murder in his more comfortable light-hearted fashion in this lesser-known Allen movie that is a personal favorite. In his last collaboration with Diane Keaton, Allen and Keaton are an Upper East Side couple that unwittingly finds itself embroiled in a confusing and potentially deadly situation. A day after meeting their elderly neighbors, the old woman in the couple dies of a heart attack. But when Keaton sees how cheery the husband is following the death, she becomes suspicious and begins snooping into her neighbor’s affairs. The plot later thickens when she and Allen accidentally come across a woman who is identical to the supposedly dead old lady.

Part caper and part slapstick, Manhattan Murder Mystery deftly features New York City in the background, and funnily weaves in another of Woody’s favorite topics: the frustration that a husband feels for a wife that seems to have become unhinged (Keaton’s suspicions about the neighbors at first border on the paranoid), and the extremes that other husbands (the neighbor himself) may in later life go to rid himself of that nagging wife. The younger couple, then, is investigating essentially what Allen believes could be a realistic future for himself, and it is only the complicit nature of the younger couple’s joint “investigation” that brings them together to stave off this unwanted result…

Continued:       1       2       3       4