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Chicago – After acknowledging that the rewards of reality are infinitely preferable to the shallow pleasures of a nostalgic dreamworld in his Oscar-winning crowd-pleaser, “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s tirelessly neurotic psyche appears to be more calm and serene than ever before. Perhaps his compulsion to make one picture a year has finally brought him some sort of therapeutic catharsis.

His eagerly anticipated follow-up, “To Rome with Love,” is an entertaining trifle that functions as little more than an absurdist travelogue, but it’s also his most relaxed, causally playful offering in many a moon. Considering the unfathomable potential of its powerhouse cast, the script’s hit-or-miss trajectory is a considerable letdown. The film wasn’t quite worth the full price of admission in theaters, but as a Friday night rental, cinephiles could do a whole lot worse. As for die-hard Allen fans (such as myself), there is plenty here to savor.

Fabio Armiliato's recent experience in itself reads almost like a Woody Allen film. The Italian tenor – who is about to make his London recital debut – was enjoying the full flow of his fine career, singing leading roles in opera houses all over the world, when Allen chose him to feature in a new movie. And one of its requirements was that from time to time he had to sing, please, just a little less well.

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Jan. 15, 2013

Price: DVD $30.99, Blu-ray $35.99

Studio: Sony

Woody Allen and Alison Pill have reason to cheer in From Rome With Love.

The comedy romance To Rome With Love is the 42nd feature film written and directed by Woody Allen (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) since 1966, which is damned near close to one a year. Whoa.

To Rome With Love offers a quartet of independent vignettes about four characters whose adventures change their lives forever: an average Roman (Roberto Benigni) wakes up one day to find himself a well-known celebrity; an American architect (Alec Baldwin) revisits the streets on which he used to live as a student; a young couple on their honeymoon are pulled into separate romantic encounters; and an American opera director (Woody Allen) tries to turn a singing mortician (Fabio Armiliato) into a star.

The expansive cast of the film includes Allen, Alec Baldwin...

Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love is set to his UK cinemas screens this Friday 14th September and we’ve got this new clip from the movie which gives a glimpse of what we can expect! Keep your eyes peeled for our review of this one and scroll down to view.

Well-known architect John (Alec Baldwin) is vacationing in Rome, where he once lived in his youth. Walking in his former neighbourhood he encounters Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a young man not unlike himself. As he watches Jack fall head-over-heels for Monica (Ellen Page), his girlfriend Sally’s (Greta Gerwig) dazzling and flirtatious friend, John relives one of the most romantically painful episodes of his own life.

At the same moment, retired opera director Jerry (Woody Allen) flies to Rome with his wife Phyllis (Judy Davis), to meet their daughter Hayley’s (Alison Pill) Italian fiancée, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti). Jerry...

Following something as successful as Midnight in Paris — which became both a Best Picture nominee as well as the highest-grossing picture of Woody Allen’s career — was never going to be easy. Allen struck gold in that one, finding an ideal surrogate for himself in Owen Wilson and allowing everyone, for the time being, to repress the fact that his recent output has been so erratically scattershot. Unfortunately, his latest Eurotrip, To Rome with Love, brings those memories back in a hurry, with the narrative-vignette approach ultimately revealing a desert-dry uncertainty rather than a purposeful overriding agenda.

Let’s start with the strangest and, even if it doesn’t make good on its promise, most potentially illuminating of these threads. Ellen Page — in a role that makes her slight misplacement in Inception look like a stroke of casting genius — plays Monica, who, as we’re so bullheadedly told time and time again,...

Chicago – Writer/director Woody Allen continues his film travelogues in “To Rome with Love,” touring The Eternal City with four separate vignettes. An all-star cast – including Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Alec Baldwin, Penélope Cruz and Woody himself – hit and miss with this varying blend of stories.

Rating: 3.5/5.0

The four stories have Rome as their backdrop, and the city looks gorgeous under the cinematography of Darius Khondji. Gazing at such a film and its locations make up for the lesser story situations, and overall makes it worth seeing. Allen also mixes Italian actors with the familiar American cast, which gives it a credibility and yes, a touch of Federico Fellini, although he had explored that more overtly in “Stardust Memories” (1980). When this film works, it is familiar and funny Woody, and even when it’s not as good it generates some laughs that are worth experiencing.

There are four stories happening...

Woody Allen's To Rome with Love is great at moments, good in others and, at times, tedious. In all it's a testament to the lesson that less is more as he's loaded this thing with so many storylines, had the lesser of the bunch been excised he just might have had something to talk about as a solid follow-up to last year's hit and Best Picture nominee, Midnight in Paris.

As the film opens we're introduced to a series of characters beginning with an American tourist (Alison Pill) who falls in love with a Rome native (Flavio Parenti). The two spend a whirlwind summer together and decide to get married. Her parents (Allen and Judy Davis) fly in to meet him and his family and her father, an ex-music producer, takes an interest in his father's (Fabio Armiliato) singing voice.

Then there's John (Alec Baldwin), an architect who was...

Continuing the tone set by last year's Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's new film is relaxed, easy-to-digest, light entertainment—middle-brow fluff done right, in other words. Like a Bertrand Blier movie without the ambition or the mean smarts, it trades in narrative left turns, tricky structures, sustained Surrealist gags, caricature characters, and theatrical devices that have been transposed to filmmaking; it doesn't add up to much—some good laughs, a handful of basic observations about human behavior, and the same moral about being content with your place in the world that Allen's been preaching for the last 40 years—but there's no sense faulting a movie for slightness when it's slight by design.

To Rome with Love consists of four intercut stories. They aren't connected in any way except the setting, and though the film starts in the morning and ends in the evening, they don't share a timeframe. In ascending order of narrative complexity,...

Woody Allen has released a movie every year since 1982 (and 45 films total during his highly lauded career), but his latest feature, "To Rome With Love," might have the highest pre-release expectations of them all. It follows last summer's "Midnight in Paris," Allen's most financially successful offering yet. Is the director worried about living up to that success?

"To me, I try to make a good picture each time," Allen said during a press conference in New York on Tuesday. "Either I make it or I don't make it. ['Midnight in Paris'] was a happy accident."

The romantic comedy grossed just over $151 million around the globe, and earned Allen his third Best Original Screenplay Academy Award, and fourth Oscar overall. (He didn't attend the ceremony to accept the trophy, as is his custom.)

"I have no idea why everyone embraced the picture so enthusiastically," he said. "You make a movie and some pictures they like a little bit,...

In the recent PBS "American Masters" portrait of Woody Allen by director Robert Weide, Allen describes how he has a file folder filled with hundreds of loglines for movies he has come up with over the years; after completing each film, he sorts through them, finds one that speaks to him at the time and writes it up. To that end, "To Rome With Love" feels like four minor stories that Allen found in a pile and loosely stitched together in a narrative tied to Rome. That said, Rome is beautiful, and a mouthwatering set for any director. Unfortunately, you can't build a movie on a set alone.   The plot concerns four different storylines intercut throughout the film's running time, which, at 2 hours, is probably 30 minutes too long. With so many storylines going at once, it's hard to focus on all of them for an extended period of time. Without a clear narrative thrust,...