The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded Read Online Free PDF Page B

with Beau Bridges, in Without Warning: The James Brady Story (91, Michael Toshiyuki Uno); Ethan Frome (93, John Madden); Searching for Bobby Fischer (93, Steven Zaillian); Mad Love (95, Antonia Bird); so good as Pat in Nixon (95, Oliver Stone) that she effortlessly revived our sense of those years and the emotion of newsreel, but thereby left Anthony Hopkins seeming all the more of an imposter; outstanding again in The Crucible (96, Nicholas Hytner); Face/Off (97, John Woo); The Ice Storm (97, Ang Lee); Pleasantville (98, Gary Ross); All the Rage (99, James D. Stein); Irish in When the Sky Falls (99, John Mackenzie).
    She had a big part, and a nomination, in The Contender (00, Rod Lurie), but that horribly rigged film left her whiny, prim, overly “nice” and archaic. She was Morgause, the femme fatale, in TV’s The Mists of Avalon (01, Uli Edel)—and she began to seem past prime; Off the Map (03, Campbell Scott); The Notebook (04, Nick Cassavetes).
    She got a thankless running part in the Bourne pictures (04 and 07, Paul Greengrass), and she was in Yes (04, Sally Potter); The Upside of Anger (05, Mike Binder); Bonneville (06, Christopher N. Rowley); Death Race (08, Paul W. S. Anderson); Hachiko: A Dog’s Story (09, Lasse Hallstrom); and sadly genteel as Georgia O’Keeffe (09, Bob Balaban).
    Woody Allen (Allen Stewart Konigsberg), b. New York, 1935
1969: Take the Money and Run . 1971: Bananas . 1972: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask . 1973: Sleeper . 1975: Love and Death . 1977: Annie Hall . 1978: Interiors . 1979: Manhattan . 1980: Stardust Memories . 1982: A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy . 1983: Zelig . 1984: Broadway Danny Rose . 1985: The Purple Rose of Cairo . 1986: Hannah and Her Sisters . 1987: Radio Days; September . 1988: Another Woman . 1989: Crimes and Misdemeanors; “Oedipus Wrecks,” an episode from New York Stories . 1990: Alice . 1991: Shadows and Fog . 1992: Husbands and Wives . 1993: Manhattan Murder Mystery . 1994: Bullets over Broadway; Don’t Drink the Water (TV). 1995: Mighty Aphrodite . 1996: Everyone Says I Love You . 1997: Deconstructing Harry . 1998: Celebrity . 1999: Sweet and Lowdown . 2000: Small Time Crooks . 2001: The Curse of the Jade Scorpion . 2002: Hollywood Ending . 2003: Anything Else . 2004: Melinda and Melinda . 2005: Match Point . 2006: Scoop . 2008: Cassandra’s Dream; Vicky Cristina Barcelona . 2009: Whatever Works . 2010: You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger .
    “Woody” was the most famous film director in America from the late 1970s onwards, and then a reluctant household name as his famed soul-searching took a banana-skin skid into public scandal. Can he maintain his way of working? Is there funding for films whose budgets have steadily risen, and whose audience has never been large? Can he be merely amusing when he has drawn so melodramatic a trail through the courts and the public prints? More important, can he develop as an artist? Has he ever shown that unmistakable promise?
    I am skeptical. In his films he seems so averse to acting yet so skittish about real confession that he risks dealing in self-glorification by neurosis. As an actor he stills momentum and betrays his films’ reach for reality. Moreover, some of his films are so inconsequential, so much a matter of habit, that they make his productivity seem artificial.
    But his sense of movie theatre and narrative intricacy soared in the eighties (along with the budgets and the photographic quality), and there are two films that even this sour spectator adores— The Purple Rose of Cairo and Radio Days . In neither does Allen figure as an actor (he is the narrator of Radio Days ). The first is a wonderfully clever, blithely light comedy about movies and dogged real life, while the latter is a new kind of film, a sort of imagined documentary montage, or a notebook of memories and scenes, utterly consistent in tone, a true portrait of a time. Yet Radio Days has not been a