‘Coup de Chance’ Review: Woody Allen’s Drama of Upper-Middle-Class Murder Is His Best Movie Since ‘Blue Jasmine’ (or Maybe ‘Match Point’)
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re looking for an inviolable law of cinema, one that you can more or less can take to the bank, the Venice Film Festival just confirmed an ironically delightful one.
It is this: Murder agrees with Woody Allen. We already knew that, of course. We knew it from “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” a drama that was shocking when it came out in 1989 — and if you see it today, it’s still shocking, because the theme of the movie isn’t just that ordinary people commit murder (we see that in movies every day).
It’s that they seem disturbingly ordinary even as they’re doing it, which is a bit frightening. Martin Landau, as a mild bourgeois ophthalmologist who hires someone to kill off his mistress, seemed to be playing every squirmy amateur criminal, and the fact that he got away with it was the unsettling part.
It made you think: How many people like that are out there? “Match Point,” Allen’s 2005 romantic thriller, was a related but different sort of movie, one that brought off something even more subversive.
Read more on variety.com
