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88It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.
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75In thematic terms, Cassandra's Dream could be looked at as a rebuttal to "Crimes and Misdemeanors."
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75The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.
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75Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.
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70Woody Allen's latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn't just stop making comedies once and for all.
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70It is a talkative film, rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into lower-class life.
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70Ewan McGregor's bright-eyed Ian, following in the footsteps of characters in Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Match Point," is a study in guilt-free violence. But Colin Farrell's Terry is something new. Terry is a decent guy with many weaknesses, and, after the crime is committed, Farrell gives him a piteous self-loathing that is very touching.
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67It's not Allen's weakest work, not by far. But its impact is shockingly superficial.
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67This 38th Allen film (and third in a row to be set in London) is a drama about two brothers that's so heavy in tone it seems inspired by Greek tragedy and the grimmest '40s film noir.
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67What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.
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63Allen, who stays behind the camera, brings too little wit and too much contrivance to material that quickly dissolves into warmed-over Dostoevski.
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58Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he's made this movie before, but better.
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50The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.
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50Allen is obsessed with the notion of getting away with murder, mulling over which personalities can shoulder the psychological burden of killing without remorse, while others crumble under the pressure. The problem is, you don't feel the human sweat and strain in Cassandra's Dream, despite game work from Farrell and McGregor.
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50A psychological thriller in serious need of both psychology and thrills, Cassandra's Dream is a wan, exceedingly minor drama by Woody Allen, who has started to recycle himself in London the way he had long been recycling his New York City pictures.
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50The Coen brothers might have pulled this off, but it's out of Allen's faltering reach.
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50There's not a believable character, nor line of convincing dialogue to be found.
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50This is a lame psychological thriller with an obvious story trajectory. It's a wannabe film noir with no atmosphere whatsoever.
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Feels like one of Allen's laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype--marionettes in a miserablist puppet theater.
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50An uninspired if perfectly watchable drama.
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50Like a tragic overture played at the wrong tempo and slightly off-key, Woody Allen's London-set Cassandra's Dream sends out more mixed signals than an inebriated telegraphist.
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42Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.
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40As writer, Allen offers lazy plotting, poor characterization, dull scenes and flat dialogue.
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40Cassandra's Dream is not unredeemably bad. MacGregor and Farrell hack away at their implausible dialogue with admirable intensity (though when Terry starts to descend into mental illness, Farrell touches his limits as an actor).
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40After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score.
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38The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.
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38Farrell is quite good, though it's hard to buy the Scottish McGregor and the Irish Farrell as brothers. But mostly, the film feels rudderless, almost as if it's been directed on autopilot.
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At this point, I guess we should just applaud Allen for his work ethic. Even at the ripe, old age of 72, he's still making movies at the rate of one a year, come rain or come shine. The problem, of course, is that he doesn't make good movies at the rate of one a year. In fact, by my count, he hasn't made a good movie for almost a decade (1999's "Sweet & Lowdown").
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30Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.
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30Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.
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25Takes a long time to say nothing new, which is a shame because it wastes fine performances across the board (it's a nice reminder that Farrell, can, in fact, act), and, well, a really effective score by Philip Glass.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 10 out of 12
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Mixed: 0 out of 12
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Negative: 2 out of 12
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CraigG.1
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TomM.8