Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Four tales unfold in the Eternal City: While vacationing in Rome, architect John encounters a young man whose romantic woes remind him of a painful incident from his own youth; retired opera director Jerry discovers a mortician with an amazing voice, and he seizes the opportunity to rejuvenate his own flagging career; a young couple have separate romantic interludes; a spotlight shines on an ordinary man.
To Rome with Love is one of Woody Allen's weaker late-career anthology efforts. The four interlocking Roman vignettes are uneven in quality — the shower-singing mortician segment has charm, and Roberto Benigni's satirical arc on instant celebrity has a clever hook, but the stories feel thin and undercooked compared to Allen's best anthology work. The cast (Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Penélope Cruz, Ellen Page) is solid and game, but the material doesn't fully challenge them. Rome is captured pleasantly though not with particular visual ambition — it's postcard-pretty rather than cinematically inventive. Novelty is limited; the anthology format and Allen's familiar neurotic-romantic preoccupations feel recycled here rather than refreshed, and the film lacks the singular voice of Midnight in Paris (made just a year prior). The endings of the individual segments land with varying degrees of satisfaction, with most trailing off rather than concluding meaningfully, leaving the overall experience feeling slight and forgettable.