Woody Allen Movie

Here's what I've learned

Like Ian Fleming and P.G. Wodehouse,returns compulsively to the same creative ground. In Allen's case, it's ground trod by anxious, well-to-do white people, who swap partners and drop cultural references in an empty, godless universe. The extent of the similarities from one film to the next is remarkable. It's not just that he recasts actors or that he revisits the themes of domestic boredom and cosmic insignificance. He reuses the same font,  for his titles and credits. He recycles character types: the neurotic Jewish New Yorker (the filmmaker's  the adulterous intellectual, the hypochondriac intellectual. He recycles plot lines. He even recycles punch lines. In  celebrity (1998), a model says she's "polymorphously perverse … meaning every part of my body gives me sexual pleasure." That should sound familiar: In Annie Hall (1977), Alvy tells Annie that she's "polymorphously perverse … you get pleasure in every part of your body when I touch it."
Because I've already invested so much time into Allen's films, I'll keep making my annual pilgrimage without regard to quality, holding out for the possibility of a swan song. At his latest, I saw a hint of a way forward in the plotlines dedicated to Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) and Helena (Gemma Jones), who worry about senescence and death not simply because these are facts of life, but because, like their creator, they've reached old age. A film that broaches the regular lot of preoccupations from the deathbed perspective rather than the needlessly-anxious-middle-age one could—here's hoping—bring poignancy back to the Woody Allen experience.