Woody Allen is an anomaly in the film industry. While putting out a film every two or three years is enough for a director to be considered prolific, Woody Allen was putting out a film nearly every year between 1971. While some of his most highly regarded films came out in the 1970s and early 1980s, 2011's Midnight in Paris marked a mini-renaissance in Allen's long and storied career. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay for Allen (which it won), Best Picture, Best Directing, and Best Art Direction. The film received near-universal acclaim with famed film critic Roger Ebert calling Allen "a treasure of the cinema." Martin Tsai of Critic's Notebook, however, panned the film, writing that "Mr. Allen's habitual romanticizing of the wealthy has grown stale and is especially problematic in this recession." It was also an uncharacteristically large financial success for Allen. On a budget of only $17 million, the film made $151.1 million at the box office, as compared to the $16 million profit of Allen's 2010 film You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger.
Midnight in Paris is no doubt an interesting film. It tells the story of a nostalgic screenwriter named Gil (played in a charming turn by Owen Wilson) who travels to Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her boorish, but wealthy, parents. However, while wandering along the Seine at midnight (as the title suggests), he is magically transported into 1920s Paris. Suddenly rubbing elbows with his literary heroes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, Gil is inspired to finish the novel, his first, that he has been laboring on. Caught between two radically different worlds, Gil struggles to salvage his current relationship while being irresistibly drawn to a woman from a bygone era.
