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Crimes and MisdemeanorsRating:
Release Date: 21 July, 1998 Retail Price: $29.99 Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Complete Cast (8 total) |
Crimes and Misdemeanors Reviews
One of Allen's best...
I'm a huge Allen fan, but I realize that he's the type of director that some people never appreciate no matter how much I try to convince them. This movie doesn't change that: you'll probably love it if you like Allen, but if he always annoys you, then you shouldn't expect anything different.
Like many of Allen's later day dramas, he's not playing the main character. Instead, the film tells the story of several people who are loosely connected. In this case, the main character is Martin Landau, a successful opthamologist who's having an affair with Anjelica Huston. When she threatens to blow the whistle, he's forced to do something sinister to protect his marriage.
The movie turns into an interesting study of right versus wrong and even asks a lot of questions about religion by focusing on Landau's story, as well as the individual stories of other characters, like a rabbi played by Sam Waterson, and a struggling documentary maker played by Allen himself.
For the most part, this movie is a drama, but that doesn't mean it's free of laughs. Allen provides plenty of comic relief through his own character. Mia Farrow and Alan Alda bring laughs, as well.
In closing, you'll probably love this if you like the cynical side that Allen shows in movies like "Husbands and Wives".
Woody Allen on the wrong tack
Another one of Woody Allen's multi-layered "studies" - in honor of his hero Ingmar Bergman. All the typical Allen themes are represented - love and faithfulness, death, religion, NYC life, etc. - but he deals with them in a tired sort of way. The mistress (Anjelica Huston) of a prominent ophthalmologist (Martin Landau) begins making demands, threatening to go to his wife, and rather than face up to this, he has her rubbed out. His guilt feelings wear off after a while. This is one of the movie's "studies."
A second one involves Allen, an "uncompromising" (and unknown) film documentarian, and Alan Alda, a big-mouthed, self-important filmmaker who has millions of dollars, but no class. It's the old art vs. selling-out-to-commercialism theme. Allen tries to make it seem like this is all new stuff, but that's preposterous. It's hardly funny at all, and soon begins to feel like a philosophical tract on the obvious. All of his filmmaking energies go into the structure of the movie and little else: the results are technically fine, but not very interesting narratively. It comes across as a pseudo-artsy mountain made out of a very familiar molehill.
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