You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – review

In this month's Sight and Sound magazine, Woody Allen declares that his London-set film Match Point is better than either Manhattan or Annie Hall, which is a bit like saying that Orson Welles's TV commercial for Paul Masson wine has a complexity and cinematic ambition lacking in Citizen Kane or   The Magnificent Ambersons. It is a characteristically toneless, enigmatic claim, placed before his followers on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. For some, it's more proof that the great man has lost it; for others, a transparent piece of bravado.

For me, it is evidence, not so much of his indifference to detractors but his ability to outlast them. For years and years now, reviewers (myself included, in the past) have ruefully, sorrowfully, insistently told Allen that his latest work is no good, and Allen has declined to oblige them by quitting. Like a spry veteran jockey, he goes on galloping round the course, not riding winners, but not falling off either, despite thousands of pundits out in the grandstand who have staked their reputation on the inevitability of his doing so.

His latest picture is a case in point. A low-key ensemble dramedy set in London, it has familiar late Allen flaws: it can be contrived, sometimes odd-sounding, like a New York script from his 70s/80s heyday uncertainly translated into what the author imagines to be a modern British idiom. Yet it is also inventive, persistently diverting, speckled with ideas. Line by line, scene by scene, I always found something there to hold the attention. It is never boring.

Anthony Hopkins and Gemma Jones play Alfie and Helena, an ageing couple who separate when Alfie has a late menopausal need to date younger women. Lonely, credulous Helena starts listening to an absurd fortune teller, played by Pauline Collins. Their art-dealer daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) becomes infatuated with her boss (Antonio Banderas), while her failed novelist husband (Josh Brolin) also begins to stray. Brolin has the best line, jeering at his mother-in-law's spiritualist fads, and pointing out that the only "tall dark stranger" she will meet is the same one that must eventually find us all – a reminder, maybe, of the Bergmanesque encounter in Love and Death.

There are, it must be said, no big laughs as such, and this is a gloomy movie, with a fiercely atheistic line. Helena's beliefs, so far from being harmless eccentricities, actually destroy her daughter's one chance at professional fulfilment. Again, this is not the longed-for comeback masterpiece. Perhaps Allen is too far out of time ever to give us that. But it's interesting and worthwhile, with creative vitamins that are absent in so much of what fills the cinemas.