Wlecome Back Woody

REVIEWED - ANYTHING ELSE: Is there any more comforting feeling than that induced by a few words in Windsor E.F. Condensed font displayed on a black background to the accompaniment of pre-war jazz? Asks Donald Clarke.

Woody Allen is still making films at his usual rate of one a year, but, sadly, having drifted out of fashion on both sides of the Atlantic, those pictures now have some difficulty making it into our cinemas. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion hung around for two years awaiting a European release and 2002's Hollywood Ending seems doomed never to cross the pond. So it is a great pleasure to welcome Anything Else, which, like all of Woody's best films, begins in the manner described above. It may be only industry-standard Allen, but even that guarantees more civilised pleasures than most of us really deserve.

Jason Biggs, taking on the now familiar role of Woody surrogate, plays Jerry Falk, a struggling comedy writer troubled by the irrational and, he suspects, unfaithful habits of his unfocused, faintly pretentious girlfriend, Amanda (Christina Ricci). Their tense relationship deteriorates further when Amanda's mother, played with hilariously delusional self-confidence by Stockard Channing, arrives with a piano and dreams of becoming a torch singer.

It will come as no surprise to hear that Jerry retains an analyst, but, as the good doctor seems unwilling to make any comment on his misfortunes, he is driven to confide in his mad friend David Dobel. The paranoid, pessimistic Dobel is, in many ways, the same man Allen has been playing for 40 years. But he is now a little harder, a little more realistic and, thank goodness, no longer possessed of the magical power to seduce ladies young enough to be his granddaughter.

Familiar incidents and themes from earlier Allen films abound as Anything Else drifts amiably by without happening upon anything so radical as a plot. Like Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, Jerry is reduced to tailing his girlfriend. Later he feels driven to fire his terrible agent (Danny DeVito), who must surely have trained under Danny Rose. Dobel, taking another cue from Alvy, imagines that passers-by are making remarks about Jews. And, as we have come to expect, New York City, here photographed by Se7en's Darius Khondji, looks absolutely ravishing.

Anything else? Well nothing much new, but, as with Van Morrison albums and spaghetti hoops, the comfy familiarity is part of the pleasure.