Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen is fantastic at staging dialogue passages that demand a lot from the actors, but when it works out, it's beautiful. The actors for this project were brilliantly chosen and the film is flawless in its formal style. Owen Wilson's Gill is perfect as a torn artist who is smarter in his mind than in spoken words, the superficial characters are detailed and iconic, just like Hermes Birkin, playing a supporting role, and the "golden age characters" are timeless and warming, supported by excellently fitting sets and period music. The outcome is not as cathartic as most of the audience would probably want, but I think Woody is just playing and teasing with the viewer in this case, there was no deeper intention here, Paris is enchanting even in this rendition. Perhaps slightly self-indulgent and unnecessary, but a refined and formally grandiose film that is intelligent enough to be liked. (01/27/2013)

Woody Allen is certainly an American, but he has always somewhat defied the idea of a typical American because he belongs to the circle of New York liberals who have always been culturally closer to Europe than to the American South or Midwest. In Europe, his intellectually-oriented work was also more embraced by audiences than in America. Woody makes fun of this in his film Hollywood Ending, where a blind director makes a film that, for understandable reasons, makes no sense, and when the American studio throws it overboard, the film receives recognition at a European film festival and also from European viewers. In the later stage of his career, Woody truly fell in love with Paris, and when he decided to leave his beloved New York, he began creating there. This film is nothing more than a tribute to Paris as a cultural center and a city with an amazing history, and the whole gimmick tries to sell the viewer as many famous figures of European culture that once passed through Paris in the 1920s. He chose this period so he could showcase his favorite musical melodies. Unfortunately, it had to happen one day - my favorite director Woody, to whom I usually give 4 stars, even in the weaker films that I forget about after a few days, managed to reliably entertain me only to the level of three stars this time. I am not surprised by Woody thematically or in the choice of actors, but somehow I didn't enjoy this panoply of characters, and in the first half, I was downright bored. The second half is a bit better, but even the few functioning jokes were not particularly original, and during Allen's overproduction, I remembered them from other films. It is a pleasant film, but I just could not get into it. Overall impression: 45%. (05/04/2014)

The picture has a certain vibration about it and I (it seems I alone of the watching ensemble) enjoyed listening to it. Maybe it was the magic of Paris, pulling me back into the past... I often think that I was born at the wrong moment in time... maybe I have an understanding for the indecisiveness of the main protagonist and his search for (women?) himself. Very well-cast. Wlison’s slightly dumbfounded expression is well-placed, Rachel McAdams is absolutely modern, Marion Cotillard beautifully period and the familiar faces of famous people were fine. And the final “decision"? I think I know what I would have done, but it would be a hard choice. (03/03/2012)

Like all Woody Allen films, Midnight in Paris has its own unmistakable charm. I became convinced of this with the initial montage of shots of Paris. Owen Wilson, whom I didn't find too convincing at first, pleasantly surprised me. The interweaving of today with the 1920s is fantastic and I think both eras were captured perfectly. I feel like I've returned from a lovely walk through Paris, which I hadn't experienced in this light before. Nice, 4 stars. (02/20/2012)

As Woody Allen sees it, walking and lounging around in Paris is mainly a pleasant experience. Fortunately without unbearable sweetness and with a willingness to admit that the appealing genre veneer merely provides refuge for a sabre-toothed bitch called life. A declaration of love for the former intellectual and artistic heart of Europe, Midnight in Paris begins with a picture-postcard prologue that inspires comparisons to Manhattan, which of course was filmed at a time when Allen’s jokes were more polished and the conclusions he arrived at were more sceptical. Together, the two films are able to make you take this idealised portrait of the big city as your own and, particularly in this case, declare “Paris, je t'aime“ after the closing credits have rolled. Owen Wilson “became” Allen unexpectedly smoothly; in line with the comedic potential of his face, he toned down the intellectualism and added some – reasonably subdued – grimaces. Unlike flowing romantic comedies, Midnight in Paris is more deliberate and restrained in terms of style (the actors walk nicely in long shots), only reinforcing my fears that Allen has either definitively given up on trying to make a more ambitious film with more layers of meaning and a more sophisticated narrative or he has simply run out of themes that could be developed beyond a pleasant anecdote. 80% Appendix: I most enjoyed the encounter with the surrealists (the charmingly excited Brody) and the affirmation that it took Buňuel just as long to digest the initial situation of The Exterminating Angel (roughly 30 years) as it will take an unprepared viewer to understand its satire. (09/29/2011)