Magic in the Moonlight (2014)
Directed by Woody Allen
Set in the 1920s French Riviera, a master magician is commissioned to try and expose a psychic as a fraud.
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What critics compared Magic in the Moonlight to
A sort of spiritual sequel to the wildly successful Midnight in Paris, Magic in the Moonlight represents everything that’s good and bad about late Woody Allen .
Those expecting a charming bonbon à la Midnight in Paris may wish to lower their expectations.
In the past decade alone, he's crafted such masterworks as Blue Jasmine, Match Point and Midnight in Paris.
The picture is beautifully shot by Darius Khondji, who also beautifully shot Allen's other French-set, supernaturally themed comedy, Midnight in Paris.
If you want to be mean, you can toss the OK but unremarkable "Cassandra's Dream" in with the bad entries, but that still leaves a 60 percent success rate, ranging from the great or near-great " Match Point ," "Midnight in Paris" and " Blue Jasmine " to the delightful "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," to the unambitious but perfectly pleasing "Scoop."
Like his 1999 film "Sweet and Lowdown" and the more amusing bits of "Midnight in Paris," Allen's latest is a period piece set in the '20s, which also returns Allen to the slightly cynical romantic comedies he's done so well, going back even further than his classic "Annie Hall."That's not to say that "Magic in the Moonlight" is breaking much new ground--its title being quite literal in that the story involves both magic and moonlight--but it does have a certain charm that's quite endearing, especially when compared to some of Allen's more recent duds.After watching him perform an oddly racist magical act as a Chinese magician, Firth's Stanley is called to the South of France, already cynical about spirituality and the occult, so he's not as swayed by Sophie's smile and personality as some of the others in the family, like Hamish Linklater's Brice who falls head over heels for her, serenading her with his ukulele.
Marcia Gay Harden (2014's " Magic in the Moonlight ") brings a welcome kindness to Christian's adopted mother Grace, but in a late scene where she discovers a terrible secret about her longtime best friend and her son, all is solved with a slap across the face.