Midnight in Paris Reviews
Top Critic
Midnight in Paris is a loving embrace of the city, of art and of life itself.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Our hero has found his groove among the Lost Generation and, for us, there's some amusement to be had in sharing Gil's thrills -- it's like stepping into a Classic Comics version of A Moveable Feast.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Midnight in Paris is charming and clever, at times wickedly astute and hopeful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Woody Allen attracts promising players and does nothing with them.
There is breezy comedy to be made of a YouTube-age writer meeting the icons and idols of a bygone, classical era, but Allen goes deeper, expanding on his time-travel device to make unexpected and unexpectedly generous observations.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
I find this upfront fantasy to be his funniest, most agreeable comedy in years.
Woody Allen's beleaguered heroes have never been reluctant to indulge in a little fantasy to get what they want.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
It makes us happily remember the movies we thought Allen wasn't able to make anymore, even while the filmmaker reaches into the past to add one more great one to the list.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It succeeds because Allen's muse is completely activated, unlike last year's time-waster You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which thought ran no deeper than the title joke.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What's Wilson doing in a Woody Allen movie about a B-list screenwriter who time-travels from the present to the Jazz Age? Disarming the audience with his wistful joie de vivre, that's what.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Midnight in Paris is a terrific picture -- an appealing, bubbly, intelligent fantasy made by a director in an unusually playful mood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Midnight in Paris" finds Allen in a larky, slightly tart and altogether bountiful mood, giving filmgoers a movie that, while unabashedly funny and playful, provides a profiterole or two for thought.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A movie that's loving and wistful and often hysterically funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
While Allen may not be reinventing any wheels, he still has it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A delicious trifle for anyone who has ever dreamt of bantering about the cinema with Luis Buñuel or lounging at the piano to hear Cole Porter sing "Let's Do It."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
"Midnight in Paris" makes you yearn for the time when brainy larks weren't a once-a-year occasion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Woody Allen must have had a great time writing this screenplay.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As a conceit, the visit with literary celebrities may be thin, and the episodes are brief and sketchy, but wish fulfillment is part of the movie's charm.
Smart, funny, whimsical--one of the best romantic comedies in recent years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
sweet, not altogether satisfying variation on the fantasy-becomes-reality conceit he used in his Depression-era The Purple Rose of Cairo.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A huge part of the charm of Midnight in Paris derives from the finely calibrated casting, long one of Allen's superpowers as a director.
A sweet and lively story, and a nicely packaged new outing from a past master who has done little more than repeat himself for at least two decades.
As a filmmaker, Allen has grappled with the temptations of repeating himself instead of forging a fresh path. You can feel that conflict here, and watching him work it out is exhilarating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
In Woody Allen's beguiling and then bedazzling new comedy, nostalgia isn't at all what it used to be -- it's smarter, sweeter, fizzier and ever so much funnier.
Allen's new "Midnight in Paris" is a lot like his earlier, funnier movies. And it's far and away his sunniest effort since "Mighty Aphrodite."
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Midnight in Paris is as light as a soufflé, and almost as sweet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Though it never ventures past the tourist quarters of Paris, this is one of Woody's most handsomely photographed movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The idea has likely been in Allen's head since forever, but it's arrived at the right moment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's an entertaining trifle that is at least as engaging as, and perhaps more likeable than, a majority of the filmmaker's recent excursions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Here's a sentence I never thought I'd write again: Woody Allen has made a wonderful new picture, "Midnight in Paris," and it's his best, most enjoyable work in years.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It is marvelously romantic, even though - or precisely because - it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Having sampled London and Barcelona in recent films, Woody Allen continues his grand tour of European cities with Midnight in Paris, an ingratiating, tourist-oriented exercise in nostalgia for a city that doesn't exist.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
This is prime Woody Allen -- insightful, philosophical and very funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
In a film so ripe with temptations for posturing, exaggeration and satirical overacting, nobody is anything less than natural, unpretentious and funny as hell.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A deceptively light time-travel romance, Midnight in Paris uses fairy-tale devices as a way to get to the filmmaker's familiar, real-life-sourced themes.
Woody Allen has found the right time and the right place with "Midnight in Paris," his lightest, funniest and most-satisfying movie in a long time.
Rather surprisingly... Midnight is an absolutely terrific film, fleet and brisk and as charming as it wants to be.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.
Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.
Pure Woody Allen. Which is not to say great or even good Woody, but a distillation of the filmmaker's passions and crotchets, and of his tendency to pass draconian judgment on characters the audience is not supposed to like.
Like a swoony lost chapter from Paris, je t'aime agreeably extended to feature length.
Woody's in good form and Paris looks glorious in this droll time-traveling fantasy.
Sweet, sentimental, and vibrant, Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" rightfully points out that yesterday's frolicking bar might be today's laundry mat ... but we can always visit the good times in our memories.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
