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Anything Else

EMAILPRINTDreamWorks Distribution LLC

Anything Else reviews
43
7.2 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 37 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 17 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Comedy  |  Romance

Written by: Woody Allen

Directed by: Woody Allen

Release Date:
Theatrical: September 19, 2003
DVD: December 23, 2003

Running Time: 96 minutes, Color

Origin: USA / France / Netherlands / UK

Summary

RATING: R for a scene of drug use and some sexual references

Starring Woody Allen, Jason Biggs, Stockard Channing, Danny DeVito, Jimmy Fallon, Diana Krall, Christina Ricci, and Carson Grant

Woody Allen's new romantic comedy is a lesson in the reality that loves at first sight isn't always 20/20. Jerry Falk (Biggs) learns that lesson the hard way when he falls head over heels in love with the beautiful but flighty Amanda (Ricci). (DreamWorks Pictures)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

88

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Has some of the wit, sass and sexual candor of an "Annie Hall." But it covers the same kind of territory with more bite and bile.

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75

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Because Allen hasn't lost his knack for slapstick with a sting, Anything Else hits its mark more often than not.

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75

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

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75

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Anything Else may not be the second coming of "Annie Hall," but it has more wit and substance than almost every post-college romance that sees the inside of a projection booth.

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75

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

With Anything Else, Woody Allen proves himself an old dog capable of thinking up some new tricks.

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70

Slate David Edelstein

Anything Else feels driven. It's like a rant from a therapist's couch--angry, unmediated, free-associational, unleavened by sentiment or compassion. And it's something else that Allen hasn't been lately: funny.

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70

Variety David Stratton

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.

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70

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

Feels newly hatched. Some of the laugh lines creak as loudly as grandma's rocker and the cultural references send up billows of dust.

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70

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Small-scale and loose. 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.

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60

Newsweek David Ansen

Relieved of his courting duties, Allen gives his funniest performance in ages.

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60

Empire Nick Dawson

Allen’s films have always had a feeling of melancholy to them, but this -- the first film Allen has written after the fall of the Twin Towers -- harbours a sense of dark unsettlement amid the neurotic romantic comedy.

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50

Austin Chronicle Steve Davis

A bittersweet experience. It leaves you asking for more, even knowing that nothing more is forthcoming.

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50

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

One reasonably dependable pleasure in Woody Allen's films is that he uses old-time songs, in moderately jazzed-up versions, on his soundtracks.

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50

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Biggs, in particular, seems positively frozen by his imitative efforts -- less Woody than wooden. Ricci is a bit looser, and has the added advantage of hiding behind those saucer-eyes.

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50

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

This is a quintessential Allen comedy: squirmy relationships, dark Jewish humor, an assumption that everybody in Manhattan has money and a touch of glamour, and -- as with most of Allen's movies since the first few years of his career -- not nearly as many laughs as it gamely tries for.

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50

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

Disappointingly mediocre.

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50

TV Guide Angel Cohn

The film founders during a series of uncomfortable scenes involving Biggs and DeVito, whose performance verges on painful caricature, but Ricci is adorable and delivers Allen's sharp dialogue with real flare.

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50

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Two Woody Allens, two kvetching, whining, neurotic incompetents bungling their lives . . . that's one too many Woody Allens.

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50

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

A pastiche so derivative and pointless, it leaves you wishing Allen had not bothered.

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50

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

On the plus side are engaging performances by Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci. On the minus side is . . . everything else.

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50

USA Today Mike Clark

It's asking a lot of audiences to spend nearly two hours with characters as screen-unfriendly as the ones played by Biggs and Ricci, though both actors (and especially Ricci) do what they're asked to do.

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42

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's so irrelevant, unambitious and lazy it almost seems to be thumbing its nose at the daring filmmaker Woody once was.

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42

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

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. He has never seemed less in touch with his own real, pulsing, 21st-century city.

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40

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Meant as a return to the form and substance of Allen's far superior early work satirizing the equivocations and betrayals with which we ruin our lives. In fact, the movie only comes alive as a hostile critique of psychoanalysis.

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40

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

I have a friend who insists Allen should make a western, if only because the demands of genre might force the birth of new ideas. His movies do create and service an innovation-free comfort zone that makes most TV sitcoms seem adventurous.

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38

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The worst performance in a film that diminishes even the talented Stockard Channing is given by Allen. He's never written a more unpleasant, vapid or irredeemable character for himself, and he makes it worse by overplaying.

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38

New York Post Lou Lumenick

This relentlessly mediocre romantic comedy is basically a pretty arthritic third-generation Xerox of "Annie Hall," with Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci in the old Allen and Keaton parts in a probably quixotic attempt to court the youth market.

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30

Washington Post Desson Thomson

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.

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30

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.

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30

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

The film's hatred of Ricci and Channing and its affectionate tolerance of the hero's mousy hypocrisy and his mentor's negativity are familiar Allen motifs, but the faint echoes of his best work only make this one seem grimmer.

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30

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Being a cultural icon is a time-limited occupation; after a while, the culture moves on, and if you don't move with it, you end up with a movie like Anything Else.

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30

The New Yorker David Denby

Feels like a pointlessly nagging play.

30

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

A joylessly plodding film that cannibalizes Allen's classics of the '70s and '80s while managing only a few decent one-liners.

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25

Premiere Alex Kranz

The dialogue itself is not interesting or funny. Ostensibly sophisticated remarks--lazy references to Freud or Dostoevsky or whatever--pack no dramatic or intellectual weight.

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25

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

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.

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25

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

This seemingly good idea results in disaster. Allen has no insight into the current generation of young people, and his film is just a jumbled rehash of themes and motifs that he's explored elsewhere.

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10

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Too labored to be romantic and too derivative to be funny.

What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Lou F. gave it an8:
Nice divertissement for dialogue, acting, coleur locale and your typical Allen uber-selfconsciousness as a scathing and absurd way of self-reflection. He takes himself so seriously he in fact ís two people in one. This is why I suspect William P. is right in suggesting that Dobel is Double - is his alter. Great point.

William P. gave it an8:
Did anybody pick up on the possibility that the Woody Allen character, David Dobel, exists only in Jerry's imationation? He usually talks with Jerry when they are alone. In a crowded restaurant, he shows up when Jerry is having a tete a tete with his manager, but everyone ignores him as if he isn't there. He's a school teacher who drives a Porsche. Come on!? And when Dobel drives Jerry to New Jersey, he says he wants to buy him a rifle. But later, Jerry tells his shrink that he, himself, bought the rifle. Yes, there is one single scene, where Jerry and Dobel are trying out the rifle in his apartment when Amanda and her mother walk in...and the mother asks Dobel to help her move the piano...but it doesn't budge. That's the only time that I could find any interaction with another character, and seems to me to underscore the fact that Dobel isn't really there. He's all of the things that Jerry fears he may be and wishes he were. (All of his reasons for seeing a shrink for so many years, without getting any visible results.) His very name--Doble--might be cryptic for "Double." And what do Jerry and Amanda talk about? Dostoyevsky's Notes From Underground---in which the notion of a doppelganger or Double, is raised. (Def. "A ghostly double of a living person, especially one that haunts its own fleshly counterpart.") Did anyone else get this? PS: I liked the movie, thought it played like Annie Hall redux.

Craig P gave it a10:
Underrated.

Josh S. gave it an 8:
Dreadfully underrated.

Bennie A. gave it a 10:
Funniest, sharpest, wisest, best-executed Woody Allen film in 15 years. A minor masterpiece.

Yoon min cho gave it an 8:
In some ways, this is Allen repeating his past successes with the younger crowd and might strike the viewer as unconvincing; do kids today talk and act like Allen and Keaton back in the late 70s? However, Allen has finally created a female character who's gutsy and smart no matter how much of a castrating bitch; his past women--weak, strong, vicious, etc--were all denuded by Allen's superior wit and humor. Ricci, despite her unsavory qualities, survives the entire movie as one formidable broad. So firstly, we have an Allen female character who weathers Allen's burrowing wit and scathing humor. Another interesting aspect concerns Allen's coming to terms with the reality of Jewish anxiety without reducing it into a joke. Yes, humor is one way to cope to with fears and anxiety but a punchline is useless against a real punch. Here, finally, Allen reveals a side of his anxiety as a geek and a Jew that can't be disarmed with a one-liner. This has by the far the most disturbing scene in an Allen movie, where his character succumbs to real anger. In the context of Allen's movies, it's shocking. Allen was kind of like the superhero of geekdom, who always outwitted those stronger and dumber than he; Anything Else is Allen's kryptonite; he's rendered helpless. Of course, Allen sensibly mocks this obsession, showing a Jew ironically becoming much like his enemy, the whacky paranoid rightwing militiaman. However, Allen is perhaps reacting to shifts in world politics and demographics. With rising Muslim populations in US and Europe and the fading away of the sense of guilt assoicated with the Holocaust, how safe are the Jews(and, by implication, any other minority for that matter)? And, an interesting contrast develops between Allen and Biggs. Allen always represented the Jew as outsider anxiously knocking to get in. He was accepted but always plagued, even tickled, by a certain insecurity. Biggs represents the Jew who takes his insider status for granted. He may have heard stories about persecution but the meaning of Jewishness as an identity of pride or self-loathing, of tribal security or ethnic vulnerability, is mostly a matter of theory. Unlike Allen who has wished to belong to Wasp society, Biggs is a Jew raised within Wasp society. Perhaps, Allen is a bit jealous. Perhaps, he's worried that the younger generation of Jews are amnesiac. Or, maybe a little of both. Anyway, this is one Allen movie that I couldn't just walk away laughing. Just like Allen's best film--Broadway Danny Rose--it genuinely made me a little sad, for A bitter film? But, perhaps it's a response to something like Godards's JLG/JLG where Zionism is equated with Nazism. If Allen has a political ideology, it might be called JewishAnxietyism, and we sense that Allen feels hostility from both the resurgent right and the radical Left.

Alice Z. gave it a 10:
I really liked this movie. Woody Allen never fails to make me laugh.

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