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Spain, United States, France · 2011
Rated PG-13 · 1h 34m
Director Woody Allen
Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy
Genre Comedy, Fantasy, Romance
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Gil and Inez are in love, but their future plans don’t align. Gil is an aspiring novelist dreaming of living in France, but Inez wants to live in an upper-class suburban neighborhood. One midnight in Paris, Gil is taken back in time to meet his beloved Jazz Age icons, which makes him question his future.
The latest in a long line of actors playing a "Woody Allen type" in a Woody Allen film, Wilson bends his own recognizably nasal Texan drawl into an exaggerated pattern of staccatos and glissandos that's obviously modeled on the writer/director's near-musical verbal cadences.
Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.
Midnight has one big problem: Allen hardly gives Gil a perceptive moment. He's awestruck and fumbling - he doesn't possess, to our eyes, the conviction of a writer. But who knows? He's young.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
This supernatural comedy isn't just Allen's best film in more than a decade; it's the only one that manages to rise above its tidy parable structure and be easy, graceful, and glancingly funny, as if buoyed by its befuddled hero's enchantment.
This is prime Woody Allen - insightful, philosophical and very funny.
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Allen has fun in his imaginary French capital, turning his star-studded cast loose to interpret their characters as they wish.
Boxoffice Magazine by Pete Hammond
Woody Allen's time-travelling comedy Midnight In Paris is a valentine to Paris and an absolute delight.
In a film so ripe with temptations for posturing, exaggeration and satirical overacting, nobody is anything less than natural, unpretentious and funny as hell.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
Darius Khondji's cinematography evokes to the hilt the gorgeously inviting Paris of so many people's imaginations (while conveniently ignoring the rest), and the film has the concision and snappy pace of Allen's best work.
An ambitious young tennis instructor becomes entangled in the dark world of British high society.
A whimsical love letter to contemporary Parisian life in the form of an eccentric romantic comedy.
Life is the ultimate work of art.
Who wouldn't want to wander through the city of love at night? As Gil meets wondrous figures of the past, navigating through the streets of Paris on his fantastical journey, I felt as if I was tagging along on the thrilling ride, unsure what the next night will hold. An intriguing concept plus beautiful cinematography, an absolute delight!
In interesting concept full of romanticism, but ruined, for me, by the fact that the 1920s writers and painters Owen Wilson's character, Gil, meets feel less like fully fleshed out characters, and more like cliches. Hemingway, for example, is an annoying braggart who speaks like a bad imitation of a Hemingway character with a bad imitation of his dialogue. He does nothing but challenge people to fights and spout off lines about courage and truth and grace under pressure.