Thursday, October 1, 2026
**1/2 out of *****
Running time: 102 minutes
MPAA rating: R - for some sexual references
Over the past decade, anticipating a new Woody Allen movie is like opening a Whitman's Sampler box of chocolates. There will be some tasty moments ahead, but, just as surely, there will be some pieces you'd just as soon take a bite out of and return to the box. Films, however, are not subject to the laws of snacking. Once you're in the theater, there is no way to spit out the bad-tasting moments while trying to savor the delicious ones.
Allen's new film, To Rome with Love, is a collection of 4 unrelated stories which share a common setting. 2 of the 4 are a pure Woody Allen delights. The first is the story of a misguided nebbish (Allen), who dreams of making an opera star out of an amateur. The second is a youthful triangle romance (between Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Greta Gerwig) with an over-the-shoulder kibitzer (Alec Baldwin) offering advice as events develop. A wise filmmaker would have released this picture as a short subject with just these two bits.
But no. The other two stories are banal at best and downright offensive at their worst. Number three involves an ordinary guy (Roberto Benigni) who suddenly, and without any apparent reason, becomes an overnight sensation in the style of a Kardashian or other nonentity whose fascination with the public is a creation of the media. This is dull, overlong and simply not funny.
Finally, there's a fourth story so dated in concept and execution that one would not be surprised to see it in a retrospective of Italian comedies of the 1960s. Two newlyweds have come to Rome so the boy's family can meet his bride and so that he might obtain a job with powerful friends of his family. When the bride gets lost in the streets of the city, a prostitute with a heart of gold is obliged to fill in for her at family and business functions. It gets worse from there and ends up being downright offensive.
Woody, Woody Woody. In a recent biography of Allen on PBS' American Masters series, he shows the audience the massive collection he maintains of plot ideas, scribbled hastily on napkins, scraps of paper and the like. He explains that when he's looking for a new project he goes through these notes and chooses a lucky winner. It's too bad that when he was looking the last time he was able to choose only two winners, while the third and fourth place finishers should have been sent to the glue factory.
