Wristcutters: A Love Story

Woody Allen has returned to New York, but does New York want him back? For the excruciating "Whatever Works," his first Gotham-set movie since 2004's "Melinda and Melinda," Allen dusted off a script written around the time of "Annie Hall," intended as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, who died a few months after that film was released in 1977. The replacement mouthpiece for Allen's borscht-y misanthropy is Larry David, who, playing Boris Yellnikoff, frequently breaks the fourth wall, to hector, lecture and obsess. "This is not a feel-good movie," Boris, addressing the camera, pontificates at the outset. Rather, it is a numbing movie, filled with creaky, wheezy shtick about sex, politics, religion and the city that even the Catskill comics in "Broadway Danny Rose" would have a hard time cracking a smile at.
Boris, who once tried to kill himself during an argument with his psychotherapist wife by throwing himself out of their Beekman Place apartment,
Melissa Anderson

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Popular Israeli author Etgar Keret (Wristcutters: A Love Story) is obsessed with weighty topics like the nature of life and death and the philosophies behind human connection, but his stories are rarely as heavy as his subjects; a keen sense of absurdity and a penchant for surrealism keep him out of deep waters. That formula carries through on $9.99, a stop-motion collection of his stories he co-scripted with young Israeli animator Tatia Rosenthal, making her feature-directing debut. In theory, the many interconnected characters in her all-puppet movie are linked by their search for the meaning of life, but as ...

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