Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
Stardust Memories is one of Allen's most divisive and formally adventurous works, an 8½-influenced meta-meditation on celebrity, artistic identity, and the burden of adoring fans. Gordon Willis's black-and-white cinematography is breathtaking — among the finest work in any Allen film — with deeply considered compositions that give the film a stark, dreamlike grandeur. The film's novelty is genuine: its fractured, collage-like structure and willingness to bite the hand that feeds it (alienating audiences and critics alike) makes it singular and unmistakable in voice. The plot is deliberately elliptical and associative rather than dramatically propulsive, which works thematically but limits conventional engagement. The acting is solid across an ensemble of largely non-stars, though no single performance stands out as exceptional. The ending circles back on itself in a typically Allenesque ambiguous fashion — intellectually satisfying but emotionally cool. Overall a challenging, visually stunning, self-lacerating work that rewards patient viewers.