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80No kidding: this is the feel-good movie of the year and a cinematic soul massage.
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75Yellnikoff, played with perfect pitch by Larry David.
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75What makes Whatever Works so enjoyable, aside from the unusually high number of effective one-liners the script contains (this is Allen's funniest movie since Mighty Aphrodite), are its supporting characters.
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75Easily one of the loosest, most satisfying comedies to hail from the prolific writer/director in a while.
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75It's a slight-but-enjoyable effort, and it features something a little on the surprising side: an optimistic ending.
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75Ends up being a pleasantly surprising blast from the past, a delightful and amusing touchstone to Allen's comedic prime.
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75At one and the same time it feels like a decent-but-not-great film of his '70s period and a perky and tart entry in his modestly successful revival in the last half-decade. Neat trick.
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67Though Clarkson acquits herself reasonably well in a terribly conceived role, her entrance interrupts David's hilariously twisted mentorship of Wood and sends the movie careening in a far less promising direction.
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63Whatever Works feels like something out of time and, worse, out of step. Hell, Allen wrote the script back in the 1970s for Zero Mostel.
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60Features enough genuine laughs to give it decent commercial traction.
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60There was always a dreaminess in his vision of the city, but now it feels as distant as the polished floors and the Deco furnishings of the Fred Astaire movies that Boris finds--of course--whenever he turns on the TV.
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50It isn't the laugh riot of the year.
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50The result is Allen's weakest film in years.
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50Woody, please: Go back to the European locales that so energized you of late.
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50Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.
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50As Whatever Works creaks along, the attention-getting nastiness of the first half dissipates and it turns into just another Woody Allen overacted sex farce. Of all the insults hurled about in the film, perhaps the worst is its pandering conclusion. What exactly does Allen take his audience for? A bunch of mindless zombies?
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50The fact that Allen wrote the script in the '70s explains something about why his newest movie feels so old.
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50It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen's fantasies.
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50This far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs -- in which mismatched characters encircle, attract and repel each other -- feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage.
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40While the film is slightly better than similar efforts Allen made between the '90s and his recent time in Europe, it's both too broad and too shallow.
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40A belabored trifle that's occasionally amusing but often just bewildering.
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40Blown opportunity.
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40A sour romantic comedy, only sporadically amusing.
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40None of it works. Or it works too hard. Whatever.
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40Most disheartening of all is that, after shooting four films in a row abroad, Allen seems to have lost his feel for New York locations.
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38How big a bastard can Woody Allen build a screenplay around and still generate a modicum of audience goodwill? The answer: not this big.
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30The movie on the whole is joyless. Whatever Works doesn't.
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30Whether you want to trace this romance back to "La Strada" or Allen's marriage to Soon-Yi Previn is your business, but on-screen it never registers as more than a writer's conceit.
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25"Hello, I Must Be Going," sings Groucho Marx in a clip from "Animal Crackers" at the start of the film. If I'd known what followed, I would have followed his advice.
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0This toxic, contemptuous, unforgivably unfunny bagatelle finds Allen at his most misanthropically one-note.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 26 out of 32
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Mixed: 0 out of 32
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Negative: 6 out of 32
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JamesH9