His 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, was a true return to top form, even at the box office.
His 2012 film, The Bop Decameron, sounds quite promising -- and he's in it. I say let's get our hopes up.
In October, his new one-act play Honeymoon Motel will premiere on Broadway, alongside works by Elaine May and Ethan Coen, under the title Relatively Speaking.
In November, the two-part, three-and-a-half-hour documentary Seriously Funny: The Comic Art of Woody Allen will premiere on PBS. Directed by the great Robert Weide (whose many credits include wonderful documentaries about the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields), this is a fairly unprecedented long-format profile, promising unseen early standup clips, extensive new interviews, and footage of Woody touring his old Brooklyn neighborhood.
And then, of course, there's the 2013 film to think about. Word has it the next stop on Allen's European filmmaking tour is Munich.
The European excursions have been interesting. Sometimes his imagination seems stimulated by the shifting backdrops. Match Point was elevated by its British milieu, but I think Scoop would have been better in Manhattan, and I know Cassandra's Dream would have been better in Brooklyn. I liked so little about You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger that it's hard to say whether England helped or hurt. Vicky Cristina Barcelona made perfect use of its setting, and certainly Midnight in Paris was filmed in the right city. (In the New York Times, Allen recently described himself as "an icon in France -- like snails.") The Bop Decameron is set in Rome, and its title suggests that we're going to have some fun with that city's mythos. I wonder what he'll do with Munich, and I do wish someone would just give him the money to make a movie in New York.
Maybe 2013...
The film (MIP) is one of the realized products of Woody Allen type of cinema-witty and wistful. Such films are generally a frantic description of a slice of time in the lives of the protagonists, who are perpetually bewildered and slightly dissatisfied practitioners of intellectual professions like writing, painting or acting. During that slice of time these protagonist undergo an even more heightened level of bewilderment and dissatisfaction. This makes a Woody Allen film a jaunty ride of gentle wit, fluent intellect and rising confusion.
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