Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
When their best friends announce that they're separating, a professor and his wife discover the faults in their own marriage.
Woody Allen's most raw and confessional film uses handheld pseudo-documentary technique to excavate marital dysfunction with unusual honesty. The acting is extraordinary — Allen, Farrow, Davis, and Neeson all deliver uncommonly naked performances that blur fiction and autobiography. The handheld, jagged, Jean-Luc Godard-influenced cinematography was genuinely distinctive for mainstream American cinema at the time, though it can feel ostentatious. The novelty is high: the docudrama format, the breaking of the fourth wall with characters speaking directly to an unseen interviewer, and the confessional rawness give the film a singular texture among Allen's work and American romantic dramas generally. The plot itself is a bit conventional in its marital-dissatisfaction territory, and the ending, while emotionally honest, is somewhat deflating rather than resonant.