Coup de Chance (2024)

Direction: Woody Allen
Country: USA

The prolific New Yorker Woody Allen returned to Paris for his 50th film, Coup de Chance, an anemic romance that morphs into an uninvolving detective comedy. With a fully French cast led  by Lou de Laâge and Melvil Poupaud as Fanny and Jean Fournier, respectively, the film follows them as a married couple whose relationship is suddenly thrown into turmoil when Fanny encounters Alain Aubert (Niels Schneider), a former high school friend and eternal admirer.

While the themes are recurrent in Allen’s filmography, the execution leaves much to be desired as the elements don’t quite mesh. Delivered without magic or brilliance, this is an ordinary masquerade superficially plotted, sloppily directed, unevenly acted, and whose attempting humor falls flat. While the conventional dialogue and mannered staging are quintessentially Allen-esque, they fail to elevate the film beyond its artificial Parisian backdrop, depicted with excessive sharpness and color. 

Coup de Chance is Woody Allen at his weakest, presenting every emotion and action as false, idiotic or frivolous. The film's saving grace lies in its incredibly groovy jazz soundtrack, featuring trumpeter Nat Adderley performing two of his own pieces: “Fortune’s Child” and “In the Bag”, along with a wonderful rendition of Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island”.

Rifkin's Festival (2020)

Direction: Woody Allen
Country: USA / Spain / Italy

Wallace Shawn, who stunned in Louis Malle’s 1981 masterpiece My Dinner With Andre, stars in Woody Allen’s Rifkin’s Festival, a comedy where there are incantations and personal supplications to be found. By comparison with Allen's recent work, I must admit this one presents something more to pull it slightly above the average. But that doesn't mean it's free of clichéd situations. 

The story is set in the Spanish city of San Sebastian during its film festival, and follows Mort Rifkin (Shawn in his sixth collaboration with Allen), a failed writer and pleased film teacher who is ignored by his wife, Sue (Gina Gershon), as she obsesses with a pretentious, narcissistic French filmmaker (Louis Garrel). The lonely Mort is assaulted by weird dreams, a wide range of anxieties and imaginary conversations with family and people from his past. His inner fears take the expression of uncomfortable chest pains that, all of a sudden, go away after he sees Doctor Jo Rojas (Elena Anaya).

Allen paints both dreams and flashbacks in black-and-white as well as some fragmented recreations of European classics - his homage to Bergman, Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Buñuel - which are artfully wrung into the plot. There can be little doubt that certain plot points don’t add up to a story that is very much Allen’s. Yet, he sort of gets away with this melting pot of contemporary and classic cinema that plays as inoffensive as warm-hearted.

A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Direction: Woody Allen
Country: USA

Once heralded as an inventive filmmaker, Woody Allen now definitely needs a break. It’s been a while since the prolific American director presented something original and fully consistent.

A Rainy Day in New York is another New York-inspired trifle, whose plot is not as shiny as its images. Made of coincidences, encounters, and imbroglios, the story is excessively fabricated to convince. Moreover, the film was discarded by its distributor, Amazon Studios, after Allen’s name has been involved in a sexual assault allegation and most of the actors had given their salaries to anti-harassment organizations.

Apart from the controversy, Allen pictured a young couple arriving in New York to spend an agitated weekend. He is Gatsby Wells (Timothée Chalamet), a clever New Yorker who wins at poker and smokes like a chimney. She is Ashleigh Enright (Elle Fanning), a not-very-bright journalism student from Tucson, Arizona, who gets hysterical with the opportunity to interview Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), an uninteresting indie filmmaker. While Gatsby ends up turning down the advances of a childhood friend, and now actress, Shannon Tyrell (Selena Gomez is just way out of line here), Ashleigh bumps into the celebrated actor Francisco Vega (Diego Luna), to whom she literally denies to have a boyfriend. 

The immature A Rainy in New York drags with boring developments that only make the film look duller and duller. Even if you’re into romantic comedies, you'll find a too contrived plot, incapable to provide a satisfying experience. The sharp and glowing cinematography by Italian Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now; Last Tango in Paris) seems to be one of the few things that escape banality.   

Wonder Wheel (2017)

Directed by Woody Allen
Country: USA

You might not believe it, but Woody Allen stumbles again with his latest drama “Wonder Wheel”, starring Kate Winslet, James Belushi, Juno Temple, and Justin Timberlake. Remaining faithful to his promise of releasing one film per year, Allen’s works have been a hit-and-miss case in the last decade. Hence, if last year’s “Cafe Society” was fairly acceptable, “Wonder Wheel” is a bland exercise and a disappointing ode to Coney Island, New York.

Love, both in its reciprocated and unrequited forms, and jealousy, are the main topics here, but they never achieved a real climax or even a sense of purpose, failing roundly to boost a film that started high-powered and ended crawling.

The story focuses on two married women, Ginny (Winslet), 39, and Carolina (Temple), 26, who dispute the same man. The former is a waitress and the wife of Humpty (Belushi), a Coney Island’s carousel operator with an alcohol problem, while the latter is Humpty’s daughter, recently returned home from a failed relationship with a gangster, who now wants her dead.
Carolina reconquers her father’s heart, starts working at the same bar as Ginny, and even attends school at night. She gets along pretty well with her stepmother, who gives her all the support she needs, but their relationship deteriorates abruptly when Ginny’s lover, Mickey (Timberlake), a young lifeguard, writer and poet, falls in love with Carolina on the first moment he sets eyes on her. Moreover, he is deeply intrigued by her personality and fascinated by the past that made her a marked woman for life.

It’s not the first time, and probably not the last, that Allen sticks to this dull narrative strategy that consists in having the characters talking directly to the camera as if they were talking to you. Although effective in other circumstances, especially comedies and heist films, this removes every bit of realness a drama might have, since they seem constantly reminding you that the persons you're seeing are just fictional characters.
Ginny starts eating her heart out when the innocent Carolina asks for advice about Mickey. The charming man first denies everything to his lover, but opens up with his new friend, whom he truly loves, about the complicated situation he is.

Adopting a bitchy pose, Ginny, who also has to deal with a pyromaniac child, shows signs of a breakdown, and yet, she’s capable of everything to recover her boy.
“Wonder Wheel” gets terribly melodramatic as the story proceeds and brutally stagey by the end. The last conversation between Ginny and Mickey is absolutely ridiculous and the depleted sequences continue until the credits roll. It’s the ending of our discontentment!
Plus, the Dixie jazz tune ‘Coney Island Washboard’ by the Mills Brothers runs too often, becoming more aggravating than bracing. This wheel is a blunder… not a wonder!