Shadows and Fog (1991)

Yes, it's old and I'm coming late to the party having just seen it but it's one of the few Woody Allen movies I hadn't yet seen.I'm normally very, very wary of writers/directors but there are a few exceptions and Woody Allen is one. I tend to think he's a love or hate type of writer/director but I come out on the side of love. He usually plays bumbling, nervous, self-depreciating characters which are very endearing and I love the Jewish humour.A couple of choice lines: "I've never paid for sex in my life" "Oh, honey, you just think you haven't!And so it goes...The cast is a list of A-list actors. Many queue to work in a Woody Allen movie. Ok, just to say I'm keeping his private life out of this. That may affect your perception of the man but it should not effect of your enjoyment of his movies. Some people don't want to make a distinction and many people are happy to assume an automatic presumption of 'guilty before proven innocent' which seems to be where we're heading with this but that's another argument altogether.The movie, like many of Allen's movies, is more an intellectual treat than belly laugh guffaws but his characters' responses and one-liners are classics, and hilarious, even if the laugh's in your brain rather than your gut!Like some of his movies, it's a delicious satire, particularly on society and religion. This, and the barbed pieces of irony which most Americans probably won't get, make it, to non-US viewers, all the more delicious. Sort of. Sorry American friends. Oy vey...Anyway, this is a superbly intellectually funny movie with more than enough digs at sociale mores to warrant any open-minded viewer to roll around the floor laughing, even mentally.Woody Allen fans and open-minded liberals will love it.

On first viewing I wasn't crazy about Shadows and Fog, while the film looked fantastic and was well-directed the characters left me cold, the film didn't seem to know what tone it wanted and the story seemed meandering and dull. On re-watch however Shadows and Fog fared much better(as was with almost all the Allen films that didn't impress at first apart from Anything Else), it is nowhere near among Woody Allen's best and is around the lower middle of his filmography but I found it a good film and not among Allen's worst that it's often said to be. Visually, Shadows and Fog looks fantastic with brilliant black and white cinematography and Expressionistic images that are as striking as they are haunting. Allen's films are always well-made, but Shadows and Fog visually like Zelig is quite unique from a visual standpoint. The music is very eerie and fits the atmosphere perfectly, in fact if anything it adds to it. While it was confusing of what tone the film was trying to go with on first viewing, on re-watch it was much clearer and that criticism seems unfair now. The dialogue is both subtle and hilarious(love the brothel scenes) with sharp homages and insight in characteristic Woody Allen vein, but even more impressive was the murder-mystery element while a really chilling atmosphere is created, helped by the visuals and music. Allen's directing is as always adept and his performance, the most memorable, is a lot of fun. John Cusack does nervous and angsty very nicely and Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates are remarkably good in against-type roles. Shadows and Fog has imperfections, Mia Farrow for me overdoes it and comes across as shrill, John Malkovich deserved much more to do and is a little wasted and Madonna is rather out of place. The story does have its drawn out and aimless patches with an ending that felt convoluted and hurried, and the characters are not very interesting, a lot of them barely in the film. To conclude however, a good film but considering how well the best assets come off it could have been more than good. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Many reviewer invoke "The Trial" when talking about this film. It also has a little bit of "The Lady Vanishes," Hitchcock's film. Suffice it to say, it's about an everyman (as much as Woody Allen's mensch can be an everyman) who finds himself in the middle of a series of serial killings. He is expected to do something about them, but no-one can tell him what to do. They don't even show up in the places they are supposed to and he is left holding the bag. There are encounters with circus people and prostitutes (Fellini) and a host of locals who are determined to punish the unknown killer. Of course, the protagonist eventually falls under suspicion. In these absurdist, existential motifs, Allen works pretty well. The criticism I have of it is that it doesn't have the tautness of the Anthony Perkins film. It wanders about so much and, hence, we lose an identification with Allen's character. When it was over, it left me cold and unfulfilled.

Another mid-career Allen film unfairly dismissed both by critics and (I must admit) myself at the time of it's release. Sometimes with great filmmakers, we get spoiled and anything flawed or less than pure genius gets maligned for being weaker than that filmmaker's very best work instead of being appreciated for being miles ahead of most of the films that get made.I was shocked at how much better I liked this on a recent re-viewing almost 20 years after seeing it in the theater. Yes, the super-star cameos still seem a bit distracting and self-serving, but nowhere near as much as in 1992. Yes, some plot elements work better than others, the ending is kind of clunky, etc. But this is still a great-looking, visually dense film, that manages to tread (most of the time) a very difficult tightrope of being funny and playful, while still exploring disturbing themes of paranoia, guilt, crowd mentality, religion, etc. Certainly not a great film, but a brave one more worthy of being enjoyed for it's strengths than attacked for its admitted shortcomings.