Anything Else: Critic Reviews

With every recycled piece of business -- which is to say, every scene in Anything Else -- the distance widens between Allen and the elusive audience he pessimistically chases.

It feels oddly long for a Woody Allen picture, but its relaxed, casual air gives the humor room to breathe, and a gratifyingly high proportion of the piled-up one-liners actually raise a laugh.

Brutally overlong.

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives, being taken advantage of, furiously resenting the universe, which will not notice them until it decides to kill them . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

The movie doesn't have the energy to be truly horrible. It's too muted and enervated. But it's a somewhat tedious thing to sit through.

This movie is wretched, condescending, and sad, like watching an elderly man spend more than 100 minutes tapping his arm for the youth vein -- which he never finds.

Who knows what sense an American Pie-digging, Woodman-ignorant undergrad might make of the canned rhythms, the trilobite-era one-liners, the awkward declarative dialogue, the Catskills-resort frames of reference, the freshman philosophy.

Perhaps the worst of the 67-year-old auteur's 34 features.

A return to the Allen of old.

Anything Else should return Woody Allen to moviegoers' good graces.

At a time when so many American movies keep dialogue at a minimum so they can play better overseas, what a delight to listen to smart people whose conversation is like a kind of comic music.

It's one of the best, most smoothly executed Woody Allen movies in recent years.

I didn't laugh once.

This anxious comedy wobbles like a retread of Annie Hall.

Want to see an actor do a bad Woody Allen impression? Cast him in the Woody Allen part in a Woody Allen-written movie.

A low-key delight, a funny study in gullibility and dependence that wonders at the wimp in all of us.

Although Ricci holds up her side of the story, Biggs doesn't quite have the screen presence to pull off the other role.

None of this adds up to much of a movie; it's more like a filmed hodgepodge of not-fully- thought-out ideas and one-liners and small shards of jaundiced polemic.

Curiously, Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci come out better than I imagined after being compelled to play out the movie's sadomasochistic tag line.

The younger casting brings a freshness to the material and, with Allen as the weird mentor, there are plenty of laughs, even if the pacing's slow and the running time over-extended.

This relentlessly mediocre romantic comedy is basically a pretty arthritic third-generation Xerox of Annie Hall.

The movie rambles, sputters and repeats itself for 108 minutes before staggering to an unsatisfying conclusion.

It's as locked in ritual as Monday nights at Michael's Pub, Central Park walks or afternoons at Village record stores.