Match Point

out of 4. Woody Allen's best movie in years means to trip us up: Sexual sizzle. London instead of Manhattan. Brit actors. Dark humor with a sting that leaves welts. You bet it's a change. And it looks good on the Woodman, who doesn't act in the film but writes and directs with a bristling newfound energy. True Allenphiles, however, will have no trouble recognizing the subversive themes that coursed through his 1989 groundbreaker, Crimes and Misdemeanors...

out of 4. One reason for the fascination of Woody Allen's "Match Point" is that each and every character is rotten. This is a thriller not about od versus evil, but about various species of evil engaged in a struggle for survival of the fittest -- or, as the movie makes clear, the luckiest. "I'd rather be lucky than good," Chris, the tennis pro from Ireland, tells us as the movie opens, and we see a tennis ball striking the net it is pure luck which side it falls on. Chris' own good fortune depends on just such a lucky toss of a coin...

Woody Allen, comedian, was always a tragedian goofing around a bit. His characters' bedtime reading is Dostoevsky (a character in this movie asks another whether she's seen his copy of Strindberg) and in sassy one-liners or in bleak, uninflected pronouncements, he's made it plain that he sees the world through the nihilist's lens - as a place where virtue is rebuked and evil rewarded, though neither of those outcomes may be depended on...

In a recent interview, Woody Allen, who turns 70 this year, remarked that, "All that crap they tell you about getting joy and having a kind of wisdom in your golden years - it's all tripe." But if the advancing years have given Allen nothing in the way of wisdom, they have equipped him with a newly stoked fury at the randomness of life. Match Point is a pleasingly sour shaggy-dog tale about how almost no-one ever gets what they deserve, that plays like an episode of Tales Of The Unexpected directed by, well, Woody Allen...

Woody Allen revisits familiar themes in an unfamiliar setting in Match Point, which sees the veteran writer/director shoot London as lovingly as his native New York. Dismissed by some peculiarly class-obsessed critics because it makes the British capital look, well, nice, it is easily Allen's best film since Deconstructing Harry in 1997. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers stars as an ex-tennis pro who marries into Emily Mortimer's filthy rich family but is undone by his attraction to Scarlett Johansson's failing actress...