Christian Lorentzen on Woody Allen
Critics for more than a decade have made an annual ritual of castrating Woody Allen. Don’t let him fuck again! the subtext invariably reads. Each new release occasions observations on Allen’s decline, reviews to be read either as obituaries or citizen’s arrests, as if his entire career were not marred by missteps and outright flops. Artists are resented for growing old in public, especially when they age beside Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, and Téa Leoni.