Blue Jasmine

Directed by Woody Allen

(PG-13)

***

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Blue Jasmine is “the strongest, most resonant movie Woody Allen has made in years,” said David Denby in The New Yorker. A story about a wealthy woman brought low by the downfall of her financier husband, it features a “mesmerizing” performance by Cate Blanchett while making dark comedy of the gulf that’s opened between America’s upper and lower classes. But it’s hard to view Blue Jasmine as anything more than “a vaguely topical reboot” of A Streetcar Named Desire, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. Blanchett’s Jasmine counts “among the most unpleasant of all Allen protagonists”—a snob who drowns her woes with alcohol and pills. When she moves to San Francisco to live with her working-class sister (Sally Hawkins), we watch with “horrified pity” as her insults and lies speed her free fall from queen bee to wretch. But the miracle of this film is how it encourages us to deplore Jasmine before we embrace her as “a tragic fool,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Like the rest of us, she’s a creature of her pretenses. And she’s turned hers into a trap.