Midnight in Paris

Directed by Woody Allen

(PG-13)

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

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.