Cannes 2011: Woody Allen's Parisian Valentine

Watching a Woody Allen movie these days is like waiting for the other shoe to drop: When is the film going to stop being great and suddenly go bad? By the end of “Midnight in Paris,” which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, it was clear that Allen had made one of his best, probably without giving it too much thought. He wrote it lean.

Perhaps one of the reasons it works as well as it does has to do with the absence of the older man/younger woman paradigm that seems to have seized so much of Allen‚Äôs work of late. He’s taking a break from that, having this film be about a dissatisfied writer (Owen Wilson) and his unsatisfying marriage without the need to inject it with the obsessive Woody Allen clich√©s we‚Äôve seen so often.

Continue reading at The Wrap.

[Note: Some of Sasha’s reviews from Cannes will first appear on The Wrap’s Cannes festival platform before migrating back here. Today’s premiere of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris launches the series. ~ Ryan]