2000 and beyond

As a result of the erratic box-office performance of his films in the 1990s, Allen had found it necessary to seek independent financing for his projects. Small Time Crooks (2000) was a modest comedy starring Allen and Tracey Ullman as a married couple whose elaborate (but essentially absurd) bank robbery plan predictably goes off the rails. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), a B-movie tribute set in the New York City of the 1940s, was another slight film. Hollywood Ending (2002) was more ambitious, with Allen playing a washed-up Hollywood director who has to grovel to land a prestige assignment from the studio executive who also happens to be his ex-wife. The appropriately titled Anything Else (2003) was widely viewed as another misfire. More interesting though flawed was Melinda and Melinda (2004), in which Radha Mitchell starred in dual story lines as a homeless woman who suddenly appears on the stoop of an old New York friend requesting shelter. The film’s parallel story lines are woven in real time by two playwrights over a shared dinner, one giving the premise a comedic spin and the other fashioning it into a serious drama.

Match Point (2005) was a major departure and became Allen’s most celebrated film in years. A suspenseful Alfred Hitchcock-like meditation on the vagaries of desire and fate, by way of Theodore Dreiser, it starred Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as an upwardly mobile British tennis pro whose engagement to a wealthy aristocrat seems much less appealing once he gets involved with a voluptuous American actress (Scarlett Johansson). The primarily British cast and the deftly built suspense made this a most atypical Allen film.

Allen’s next two films were also made in England. Scoop (2006) found him working again with Johansson, but this time on a much lighter tale of skullduggery. The less well-realized thriller Cassandra’s Dream (2007) followed. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) reestablished Allen’s momentum. It functioned simultaneously as a compelling romantic drama, a magnificent travelogue, and a deft comedy of manners. Javier Bardem played a supremely confident Barcelona-based artist and ladies’ man who seduces a pair of tourists (Johansson and Rebecca Hall); Penélope Cruz’s splendid performance as his combustible ex-wife earned her an Academy Award as best supporting actress. The film became one of Allen’s biggest hits ever, grossing nearly $100 million worldwide.

Whatever Works (2009) returned to the New York City setting of so many of Allen’s films. Larry David was magnificently irascible in a role that Allen might normally have played himself, a cranky Manhattanite who takes in a homeless teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) whose Southern roots soon begin to melt his granite heart. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) had a far more high-profile cast—Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Gemma Jones, and Frieda Pinto—but the multiple romantic roundelays here never seem to add up to anything of substance, despite an offbeat plot involving astrology and psychic consultations.

Critics had long seen Allen’s focus on upper-middle- and upper-class characters, often involved in the media, as limiting. Moreover, from at least the beginning of the 21st century, there were also critics who felt that Allen had simply lost touch with contemporary mainstream America. Midnight in Paris (2011) may not have shown Allen to be any more aware of life in middle-class America, but, as the biggest commercial success of his lengthy career to that time, it did demonstrate that he still knew how to appeal to the average filmgoer. It was a triumph with the critics too. Owen Wilson was perfectly cast as Gil, a bohemian screenwriter who, while visiting Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her insufferable parents, is magically transported back to the 1920s, when the Lost Generation reigned in the French capital. Gil has amusing philosophical conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dalí, but he becomes fixated on Pablo Picasso’s mistress (Marion Cotillard). The film earned Allen his first Academy Award nomination for best director in 25 years, and he won the award for his screenplay. (As usual, he did not attend the ceremony to accept it.)

The next installment in Allen’s informal series of paeans to the world’s great cities was To Rome with Love (2012). With a star-studded cast that included Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis, and Ellen (later Elliot) Page, as well as cinematography by Darius Khondji, it showed Rome to beautiful advantage, always recalling Fellini while presenting it through Allen’s uncynical gaze.

San Francisco was the locale for Allen’s next film, Blue Jasmine (2013), which starred Cate Blanchett as the wife of an unscrupulous investment banker (Baldwin). After her wealth disappears, she moves in with her blue-collar sister. Reminiscent of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Blue Jasmine took Allen’s work in a new direction as it confronted contemporary class-related issues. His script for the film earned him an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. It was his 16th nod for writing.

Allen appeared as a bookseller who becomes a pimp for his younger friend—played by John Turturro, who was also the film’s director—in the comedy Fading Gigolo (2013). Allen then wrote the book for a stage musical adaption of his 1994 movie Bullets over Broadway. The musical, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, premiered on Broadway in 2014. He next directed the film Magic in the Moonlight (2014), a romantic farce about a magician (Colin Firth) who attempts to prove that a psychic (Emma Stone) is a fraud. Irrational Man (2015), an existentially comic thriller set in a New England university town, featured Joaquin Phoenix as a disillusioned and dissipated philosophy professor who decides to kill a family court judge after overhearing that he is likely to award parental custody rights to an undeserving father.

In Allen’s Café Society (2016), Jesse Eisenberg portrayed a young New Yorker who goes to work for his talent-agent uncle (Steve Carell) in Los Angeles, where he becomes entangled with a secretary (Kristen Stewart) before returning to the Bronx to assist his gangster brother with running a nightclub. The film, Allen’s first to be shot in digital, was praised for its beautiful depictions of Los Angeles but was otherwise considered a somewhat minor effort. In 2016 Allen also ventured into television by writing, directing, and starring in the Amazon series Crisis in Six Scenes. He portrayed an elderly TV writer living in upstate New York who must contend with the social revolutions taking place around him during the 1960s. Allen returned to the big screen with Wonder Wheel (2017), which starred Kate Winslet as a bored waitress on Coney Island in the 1950s who has an affair with a younger man, a lifeguard studying to be a playwright (Justin Timberlake).

The rise of the Me Too movement in 2017 revived accusations against Allen and delayed the release of his next movie, A Rainy Day in New York (2019). The romantic comedy, which featured Timothée Chalamet and Elle Fanning as film students in New York City, was not released in the United States. Similarly, an intense backlash resulted in his autobiography, Apropos of Nothing, being dropped by its original publisher in 2020 though it did appear soon thereafter. The following year the TV documentary Allen v. Farrow examined the molestation charges against Allen. The four-part series portrayed him as having “intense affection” for Dylan, and it raised questions about the investigation undertaken at the Yale-New Haven Hospital, while also presenting testimony and documents that lent support to Farrow’s claims. Allen called the program a “shoddy hit piece.”

Allen received the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement) in 2014.