Midnight in Paris

In Woody Allen's new film, a hack screenwriter visiting Paris is transported back to the 1920s, when the city teemed with artists and writers.

Directed by Woody Allen

(PG-13)

***

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Midnight in Paris is more than just Woody Allen’s “best film in more than a decade,” said David Edelstein in New York. It’s “the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny.” Owen Wilson is brilliant as Gil Pender, a hack screenwriter who, during a trip to Paris with his vapid fiancée, finds himself transported each night back to the 1920s—when the French capital teemed with artists and writers. There, he meets Picasso, Hemingway, and a “hilarious” Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. He also meets a woman (Marion Cotillard) who is “everything his fiancée isn’t.” Allen seems to be asking: “When was the golden age, and why didn’t we get to live it?” Mercifully, he doesn’t appear to take the question too seriously, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Mostly, he simply delights in the travails of a “contemporary neurotic” who’s been plunged into the company of “artists with seemingly dauntless strength.” It’s “a dream curated by the fan” in Allen, and as light as a dream should be.

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