What looked like a celebration of the life of the city was, rather, an aestheticizing glorification of the life of the mind—of Allen’s mind.

The jokes about mortality that run through his films become serious as he takes his aging seriously. but his later films trade the scintillating verbal intelligence and philosophical humor of his classic films of the seventies and eighties—as well as his own dominating presence—for a quickly traced realization of the ideas that have been his lifelong obsession.

daqui