Woody Allen directs Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Corey Stoll in this 1930s West Coast / East Coast romance.

Woody Allen’s most visually sumptuous (not two words you associate with the wordy master) movie since Manhattan. This is filled with great visual moments from back room dive jazz bars, New Year Eve parties in old school night clubs, golden age Hollywood mansions and none more so than the pictured frame where two friends become intimate silhouettes in Klimt-esque candlelight. As the bodies closen and darken we get maybe the most tender and charming cinematic shot filmed this year. You receive everything you expect from Woody – Jewish families with existential subplots, erudite humour and Eisenberg making a fine young stand-in as the nebbish ladies man lead. But two performances sing loudest. Stoll, as the gangster older brother, just pops in all his scenes with a loveable danger, and Stewart who here manages to marry her unmistakable movie star beauty and awkward style into something genuinely likeable rather than just wanly sexy. It is, all in all, a deftly fun, surprisingly and unpredictably involving film… but fans of shit 80s cinema might notice the plot is a near direct lift of Michael J Fox’s near forgotten yuppie comedy The Secret of My Success. Just as the previously strong Irrational Man was Allen’s take on Dostoevsky, it good to see the geriatric auteur now feels ready to put his unique spin on Marty McFly’s back catalogue too.

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