I remember enjoying this film immensely when I first saw it and surprisingly I didn't find it nearly as good upon a second viewing.

The good:

- Owen Wilson is someone that I never really cared for but he is perfectly cast here.
- The film is beautiful to look at.
- It's fun to imagine that these legends of the art world were real and as colorful as we hoped they would be.
- You can regularly hear Allen express his philosophy through his characters. In some movies it feels very forced, in this one it felt pretty natural. Having a strong and colorful character like Hemingway probably made this easier - he said this gem: "Nostalgia is the denial of the painful present".
- I recall Allen tackling the idea idea of tradition in other movies (Stardust Memories comes to mind) but not nostalgia. I think the twist with Marion Cotillard's character's feelings about nostalgia towards the end drives home his point.

The not-so-good:

- While the journeys to the past were fun they seemed like a long way to go thematically to get to his point about nostalgia. In some ways the middle of the movie was just a recurring sequence of him going to the past and meeting other famous legends and then returning to the present to be reminded of how much he dislikes it. Again, while this was fun on a superficial level it began to feel somewhat gimmicky. The entire middle section of the film (up until the final meeting with Marion Cotillard's character) could probably have been cut out and it still would have played the same.
- The end of the movie was quick and somewhat awkward.


See my ratings of other Allen movies: - https://ihatebadmovies.com/movie-reviews/?_wpmoly_movie_director=Woody+Allen&_orderby=wp_review_total%2Cdesc