Pictureland

Over forty years into his career as a film director, Woody Allen keeps going.  This has become both a kind of grim certainty and, only very rarely, a virtue.  Over the past 15 to 20 years, Allen has been like a man trying to mount a sumptuous feast who finds himself thrashing around in an empty pantry.  In lieu of something fresh, we get warmed-over dishes, whose recipes might not have been such a good idea in the first place. Since 2005, he has frequently done what had long seemed unthinkable, set and film several of his projects somewhere other than the island of Manhattan.  The first such effort, Match Point (2005), was his strongest in years, imbued with a gravity not seen in a Woody Allen film since Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Mixed results followed:   Vicki Christina Barcelona (2008), a shiny wet dream of a film; the vastly-overrated Midnight in Paris (2011), a lot of half-baked philosophy, self-indulgence and artistic name-dropping hid behind s...

A coming of age film, it would seem, according to the quickly hardening 21st-century mold, involves a precocious outsider who's able to tell his or her story with all fluidity and style of a novelist.   All of this backed up by a perfectly modulated soundtrack of indie rock or nuggets plucked with the utmost discretion from the rock and roll past.  Submarine  makes no bones about being anything else but a coming of age film.  The fact is practically announced in a title card of sorts in which protagonist Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) proclaims that what follows is his biopic.  He also reminds his American audience of the existence of Wales, notes a couple of famous countrymen and women - Tom Jones, of course; Katherine Zeta Jones - and thanks us for never invading his country.  Later, somewhere between first heartbreak and post-hearbreak, young Oliver even uses the term, saying, "I...

Sally Hawkins and her plucky overbite will not be denied.   This much, at least, we should know by now. Ms. Hawkins plays Rita O'Grady, one of  a very small minority (just 157 of 55,000)  of women working in the Ford Plant in Dagenham England.   The year is 1968, a fact partially announced by Desmond Dekker's "The Israelites," which we hear early on (the song went to #1 on the English charts that year), as male and female employees are seen riding their bikes to the plant, in something of a jolly, English, working class idyll.  Rita and her coworkers are sequestered in a sweaty workroom, where they are responsbible for sewing upholstery for Ford vehicles.   The warmth of the close workspace is attested to, as the first order of business for many of the women is to strip off overclothes down to slips, bras and articles of feminie dress that are a running source of embarassment for thei...