A Rainy Day in New York (2019)

Directed by Woody Allen. Starring Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Liev Schreiber, Diego Luna, Will Rogers, Kelly Rohrbach, Cherry Jones, Griffin Newman, Annaleigh Ashford, Rebecca Hall. [PG-13]

A young couple (Chalamet, Fanning) attending an upstate New York liberal arts college visits the Big Apple for a romantic weekend, but they’re separated by contrived coincidences, and while Chalamet (playing a “quaint” pseudo-intellectual hipster whose first name is Gatsby) runs into the younger sister (Gomez) of an ex-girlfriend, Fanning interviews a self-approving film director (Schreiber) and gets picked up by a flaky movie star heartthrob (Luna). Allen’s latest ensemble rom-com shows the filmmaker spinning his wheels, orchestrating a series of unlikely chance meetings between inaccessible and unlikable characters, and generating only three or four real laughs alongside a lot of pretentious babbling and shallow philosophy in between. It was a mistake to focus so much attention on youngsters, since the dialogue and characterizations make the writer/director seem horribly out of touch, and the actors struggle to sell their line readings. It’s difficult to gauge the level of chemistry between Chalamet and Fanning since they spend so little time together, but it couldn’t be any worse than what exists between he and Gomez, the latter being grievously miscast as someone who’s supposed to be tart and sardonic, but instead pushes all sense of irony into monotony. Bring an umbrella—it can be used to block the screen, at the very least.

33/100