Crimes and misdemeanors

USA 1989

Dir: Woody Allen

104 mins

Cast: Martin Landau, Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Anjelica Huston, Alan Alda, Jerry Orbach

Rating: M

Woody Allen in  winning philosophical form … tackles life, death, truth, love, God,and all things Dostoyevskian in Crimes and misdemeanors.  A wonderful cast plays out a plot constructed like a set of Chinese boxes for a novel on film about close encounters of the Upper East Side kind.  Handsomely shot by … Sven Nykvist, with Allen making striking use of music by Schubert and Bach as well as the jazz and swing favourites we associate with him.  …  Allen in his familiar existentialist, angst-ridden Manhattan intellectual nebbish persona unsurprisingly delivers the best of these in the bittersweet comedic strand …  More unusually, weighty, realistic, tragic drama and comedy of manners mingle in a uniquely sophisticated, ambitious discussion of values, morality, and law.  Allen, firing on all cylinders, steers through pain, profundity, and outrageous humour with his inimitable signature style, addressing good and evil, guilt and retribution, movies versus reality, and swell cocktail parties with wit and penetration.  Crimes and misdemeanors is intricate and adult, dark and delightful, and right up there among his very best work.

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Crimes and Misdemeanors is not, properly speaking, a thriller, and yet it plays like one. In fact, it plays a little like those film noir classics of the 1940s, like Double Indemnity, in which a man thinks of himself as moral, but finds out otherwise. The movie generates the best kind of suspense, because it's not about what will happen to people - it's about what decisions they will reach. We have the same information they have. What would we do? How far would we go to protect our happiness and reputation? How selfish would we be? Is our comfort worth more than another person's life? Allen does not evade this question, and his answer seems to be, yes, for some people, it would be. Anyone who reads the crime reports in the daily papers would be hard put to disagree with him.

Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com