Match Point

Romance novel material. Or maybe even lust novel. After many years of not such good movies, Woody really needed the ball to fall on the right side of the net, even if it meant a drop shot. Moving the acting to London giving it a hint of Hitchcock won him the entire match. And as his following movies show, this was no swan song or stroke of luck. Thank god. (26/12/2008)

When the main "hero" of Woody Allen's film (the supremely unsympathetic Jonathan Rhys Meyers) reads Dostoyevsky's ‘Crime and Punishment", it can't turn out particularly well for him... Or can it? Match Point is an excellent spectacle. It doesn't matter that almost nothing happens during the first hour that the viewer wouldn't expect, because what happens next and especially at the end makes up for it. However, I have to disagree with the opinions that there is no humor in the film. There is. It's black through and through, but it's there. (10/07/2015)

A brilliantly written and acted conversational drama, with an ending that, as you can see from the reviews here, many viewers will find hard to stomach. But it’s the denouement of the story, surprising, somewhat cynical, going against the established stereotypes, trampling on my idealistic soul, that gives the whole narrative the right poignancy (those for whom Columbo, Perry Mason or other detective stories are daily bread will probably be unpleasantly surprised). The only weakness I can see is the character of the detective, whose speech in the final five minutes (the way he suddenly gets up from bed or gesticulates comically when he reveals his theory) pushes the story to a kind of farce. But that's really just such a small blip on the beauty of the whole. (24/09/2006)

I like the love triangle according to Woody. I completely disagree that this isn’t a Woody Allen classic. It seems to me that it retains his style. And if he was improvising in a new direction, it was just an added bonus. What caught my attention was the Scarlett as a blackmailer and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as a man who is incapable of arranging his life rationally. But I don't mind at all that he did it irrationally... at least that meant there was more drama. Crazy, but good. 4 stars. (21/08/2011)

The "hard" cinematography and the narration going through an avalanche of dialogues with the absence of visual narration initially confuse the viewer, but the dream romance turns into a drama, then into a thriller, and the morality falls on its face into the mud. That’s quite an unorthodox way to go against the sunshine trend, which Allen does get to with a very shaggy insert from the detective office. However, it was probably all worth the feeling of Dostoyevsky turning uneasily in his grave a few times. (22/08/2014)