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75Not perfect, and neither are life or the movies. But you'd have to be blind yourself not to relish its qualities or laugh at its barbs.
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75The movie is Allen's most successful in years, even if you don't see it as a self-made commentary on his own career. Credit goes less to the comic dialogue than to the razor-sharp performances of an excellent cast.
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75A bouquet of snappy one-liners and disarming nuttiness.
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75A beautifully shot film with a funny French-twist ending.
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75This is an excellent comedy, and the fact that it's made by a filmmaker with even better movies on his resume is nothing to hold against it.
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75Woody Allen is good for his funniest screen romp in a while, thanks to a few evenly spaced standout scenes of laugh-out-loud intensity.
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75A small film, but its ease and grace are virtues that can't be overrated.
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75His persona clicks, the physical comedy amuses, and its comic vision is tantalizing enough to make us suspect the Old Master still may have at least one masterpiece in him trying to get out.
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70It's a brilliant concept, one of Allen's finest. Love the concept, baby. But the execution is, well, average.
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63I liked the movie without loving it. It's not great Woody Allen, like "Sweet and Lowdown" or "Bullets Over Broadway," but it's smart and sly, and the blindness is an audacious idea.
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63There's a mean little Hollywood satire squirreled away within Hollywood Ending, but you have to look hard to find it.
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63It might not be good enough to make you laugh consistently, but Hollywood Ending looks good enough to eat.
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60At one point, Val bemoans how stupid the country is, how dumbed-down everything has become. Allen's new movie is far from dumb, but it has an air of abdication about it.
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60The central conceit is Allen's most amusing since "Bullets Over Broadway."
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60Probably the worst thing you can say about Hollywood Ending is that it has one: it turns out that Mr. Allen wasn't being ironic after all, he just made a comedy that feels ironclad.
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58It has all the raw materials for greatness -- a brilliant concept, a sharp cast, the jokes -- and still doesn't come together. You could do a lot worse than Hollywood Ending, but you could also do better.
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50Offers slim pickings for viewers, regardless of whether they're fans of Woody Allen or not. And I'm sure the French will love it.
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50More than merely stale and dated, Hollywood Ending seems lazy and careless -- the structure is loose to the point of crumbling.
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50The overarching joke, of course, is that most movies are so lousy they might as well have been made by blind men anyway. Hollywood Ending is only mediocre, but you may leave wondering, what's Allen's excuse?
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50That's the ultimate cheat in this pleasant, but trifling affair: Allen has cheated himself out of an actress (Leoni) that could have been Diane Keaton's heir.
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50The best thing about the movie is its premise: It's a good idea, taken from before Allen's recent losing streak, but it's stretched too thin for its own good.
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50Is comedy a young man's game, like skateboarding or sex? Writing jokes, creating droll characters -- these take ambition, ingenuity and energy, and after decades of devotion to this voracious muse, a fellow can get pooped.
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50For those always on the lookout for the "funny" Allen, this one definitely has its moments, but too much of the picture is flat, dispiriting and frankly unbelievable in fundamental ways that defy the granting of poetic license.
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50It's thanks to her (Leoni) that we stay tuned to Mr. Allen's comic premise long after it has gone from delightfully outrageous to off-puttingly preposterous.
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42For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.
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40He (Allen) seems to have forgotten that comedy is all about timing, letting individual scenes meander -- often to accommodate his own stammering monologues -- and giving viewers far too much downtime in which to consider the staleness of many of the film's gags.
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40Serves as more proof, as if any were needed, that Allen desperately needs to devote more time to polishing his scripts, and less to heedlessly banging out one film a year, year in and year out.
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40Funny but perilously slight.
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40You can see the potential, and you can also see the places where Allen didn't (couldn't?) rise to the occasion.
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40It feels old, tired and given-up-on, maybe three drafts shy of minimal production level.
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40Has its satirical charms, but it repeats itself remorselessly, and it has no emotional center. We are so distant from Val that when he gets his sight back we don't feel a thing. [20 May 2002, p.114]
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30No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.
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30You know a romantic comedy is in trouble when you root for the hero not to get the girl.
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30What's particularly scary about Hollywood Ending, however, is that its flaws are exactly the sort of problems that often afflict aging directors, flaws that we've never seen in Allen before -- bad comic timing, slack pacing, an unsteady control of tone, a reliance on jokes that have long since become clichés.
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20It isn't only that there is a dearth of ideas in Hollywood Ending -- however hateful, "Deconstructing Harry" was at least about something -- it's that the whole thing is almost entirely devoid of pleasure.
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20It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.
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20I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie.