Film

Alice (1990)

Director: Woody Allen

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Allen's eponymous heroine (Farrow) - a devoted housewife burdened with existential angst and neuroses - is suddenly plunged into mid-life crisis when she falls for nice guy saxophonist Joe (Mantegna). Is he really a worthy rival to her successful but workaholic husband (Hurt)? How do her repressed rebellious impulses square with her Catholic roots and her family? And what of her Chinese acupuncturist -hypnotist's warning that it's her heart, not her back, that ails her, and his herbal prescription that renders her invisible so that she can spy on her lover, husband and friends? Allen's renewed semi-comic exploration of the upper-crust New York psyche displays many of his worst traits, and then some. It's hard to care much about the pallid Alice's anxieties, and the silly whimsy of the fantasy interludes sits uneasily within what remains, essentially, a naturalistic comic style. A scattering of fine one-liners , but one can't help wishing that Allen would investigate pastures new.

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