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100Sunnier and sillier than most of Allen's recent work, makes its belly laughs heartwarming. It's a most winning movie about losers.
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100A delicious comedy that starts out promisingly as a pleasant gag comedy but then turns unexpectedly into a bright social satire.
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90This is vintage Allen, his powers intact after a string of increasingly cranky, creaky films in the last few years.
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90Handsome as all Allen films are, and it proceeds with the brisk, sophisticated air of throwaway confidence and lack of pretense that we expect from the contemporary master of grown-up comedy.
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88The plot is lively and the dialogue packs many good laughs.
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80The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.
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80The Woodman has recovered his common touch. On him, it looks good.
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80Allen's funniest, least sour outing in nearly a decade is a small movie with a tidy payoff. The movie gives vulgarity a good name.
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80In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.
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80Breezy, enjoyable romp gratifyingly zigzags in directions that aren't apparent at the outset and features some intriguingly personal subtext for longtime Woody watchers.
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80Allen's movies specialize in contemplating the notion that money can somehow remove vulgarity or produce gentility. Small Time Crooks may conclude quite conventionally that money can't buy you everything, but most of it flirts even more conventionally with the opposite premise.
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75Dumb as they (allegedly) are, the characters in Small Time Crooks are smarter, edgier and more original than the dreary crowd in so many new comedies.
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75Stooge-filled farce offers low laughs but lacks a point.
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75Though this is a tough movie to dislike, it plays more like a second draft than a final product.
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75It's the kind of movie you can settle into, secure in the expectation that you can steal from it more than a little vintage Allen fun.
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75Allen has avoided his usual stable of jokes and one-liners, and the result is a film that feels and looks fresh from the maestro of urban angst.
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70Small Time Crooks is definitely minor Allen that, nevertheless, offers a welcome riposte to the current national obsession with getting rich.
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70Allen produces a lovable, relaxed--although not uproarious--comedy.
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70Feels like a first draft, in need of toning, pruning, and a little old-fashioned discipline. As an outline, the picture is full of possibilities.
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70Diverting and provides a satisfying alternative to teen-oriented summer comedy.
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67For all its wispy fun, Small Time Crooks still tilts, with little-guy stubbornness, at windmills in Allen's mind.
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67Ullman and May make something intermittently memorable of an otherwise minor film.
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63Allen's most amiable, breeziest comedy in years.
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63Petty larceny - but Allen's fans won't want to miss this lowbrow caper.
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63Can be recommended even if just for the presence of Elaine May, who turns in her most charmingly ditzy performance since "A New Leaf."
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54Only Elaine May shines, in a weird and wonderful turn. Her loopy character has such a struck-by-lightning demeanor that she's always delightfully off in her own comic orbit even in the tritest of scenes.
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It's a sweet little snack of a movie that leaves the heavier courses for some other outing.
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50Allen was out of his element in creating characters who feel like East Coast cousins of the Clampetts, and his dialogue has never been more banal or forced.
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50This thin, clichéd comedy of crime and social climbing contains some scattered laughs and whole lot of padding.
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50A pleasant frolic, but fairly inconsequential in terms of the overall Allen output.
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50Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.
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50It's a comedic caper with a slap-your-head-in-kookiness that ends up making Allen, at this age, seem like an old man desperately still trying to ham it up at the dinner table.