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The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen's finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau's affair with Anjelica Huston...

By Robert Wilonsky

January 26, 2006

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The critical consensus has Match Point as Woody Allen's finest film since Bullets over Broadway. It is not difficult to understand the accolades and affection: It resembles one of his very best movies, 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors, down to the plot point in which Martin Landau's affair with Anjelica Huston leads an unlikely suspect to do very bad things in order to keep his secret. Consider Match Point — bereft of those hoary old jazz standards on the soundtrack and a single intentional laugh — Allen's straight-faced do-over, his veddy English attempt at making right a movie done well the first time. Allen shouldn't be condemned for revising familiar themes or retracing familiar territory (he is nothing without his twin obsessions of lust and guilt), only for doing so in spectacularly dull fashion. And though it should go without saying, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (as tennis pro Chris Wilton) and Scarlett Johansson (as the American object of his affections) are no Martin Landau and Anjelica Huston.

Now playing at a handful of local theaters

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