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90A quirky, tender, splendidly acted fable.
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90Allen's deadpan humor shines through every crevice of the film, keeping the pacing sharp, the dialogue snappy, and the situations feeling real.
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88Sean Penn('s) performances are master classes in the art of character development.
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88Penn's performance is easily the best ever seen in an Allen film.
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88(Penn)'s is a lovely, soulful performance in a movie that manages to imbue tragedy with just the right grace note of insouciance -- a movie worthy of Woody Allen himself.
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83Allen draws a snappy, loose-limbed performance from Penn.
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83Amazing as Penn is, Morton is his equal, creating a complete personality out of gestures, glances and unadorned bits of actorly business.
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80Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.
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80Funny and light, all the more potent for seeming so effortless.
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80It is engaging, touching, and frequently funny. Maybe because his hero is inarticulate and his heroine is mute, Allen relies far more than usual on physical comedy than on the verbal jokes that are his strongest comic suit.
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This is one very tuneful labor of love.
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80Unexpectedly delectable.
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80Samantha Morton, as Emmet's "mute orphan half-wit" of a girlfriend, is the sweet revelation. Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such simple materials: a smile, a shrug, an attentive winsomeness.
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80The almost wall-to-wall music is glorious, with solo guitarist Howard Alden doing a sock job. Penn, incidentally, utterly convinces in the scenes in which he's seen "playing" the guitar.
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80Penn's performance is the movie's ultimate grace note. As funny and ingenious as Allen's films can get, they are rarely known for depth of character.
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80Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.
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78A literate, sophisticated comedy whose humor and loss and hope linger in our hearts, like the jazz music it reveres, both sweet and lowdown.
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75Exquisitely designed, lovingly executed, beautifully scored and played, every hair and note in place, it's a movie full of irony, passion and bluesy riffs.
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75Penn hasn't attempted much comedy since "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," but he's masterful here.
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75Isn't Allen's finest work by a long shot, but an undeniable part of its fascination is trying to figure out what -- if anything, even unconsciously -- he's trying to say about how he treated Farrow.
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75The best reason in years to reconsider (Woody Allen).
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70It's a loving and comic tribute to a musical era Allen knows well.
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70Doesn't add up to any big deal. But it's a likable, lively little ditty -- one theme, some clever variations -- that never wears out its welcome.
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67A real showcase for Penn, who seems to positively delight in playing a slimy, hateful character that most stars would not go near.
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65A vapor trail of a comedy, comfortable as an old chair (and deliciously photographed in shades of melon and banana by Chinese vet Zhao Fei), but ultimately quaint and unchallenging.
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63Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.
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63Agreeable eye candy and ear candy, but it's too slight to reach as deep as it thinks it wants to reach.
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60Affectionate, melancholy and anchored by a well thought-out performance from Sean Penn.
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50Penn's excellent acting doesn't raise his character above the level of familiar clichés about woman-chasing jazzmen.
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50It's all very slight and only sporadically amusing, and it makes Allen's "Celebrity" from last year look even more underrated than it already is.
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40It's the prettiest movie of the year, maybe of Allen's career.
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40But the movie is so confused about where it wants to go, it suffers from the same identity crisis as its protagonist.
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30A dud. Neither sweet nor low-down enough by half.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 4
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Mixed: 0 out of 4
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Negative: 0 out of 4
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7
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PatC.7
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steves.10I loved the acting. I loved the music. I loved the aesthetic. I loved the feel. Simply sweet. This is one of my favorite movies ever.