Entourage Series 1 (2004, created by Doug Ellin)

Great to see the boys back: Kevin Connolly, Adrian Grenier, Kevin Dillon, Jerry Ferrara, Jeremy Piven.

Exec produced by Mark Wahlberg and loosely based on his own experience.

Inherent Vice (2014 Paul Thomas Anderson & scr)

Noirish turn of events in 1970 California making one think of Altman's The Long Goodbye and Chinatown, from novel by Thomas Pynchon. Joaquin is spellbindingly good as stoned PI (Q says 'River would have been proud of him'). With: Josh Brolin, Maya Rudolph, Hong Chau (Treme), Benicio del Toro, Owen Wilson and Reese Witherspoon (is it a coincidence she appears like Tippi Hedren in Marnie?).

Anderson's funniest film. Shot by regular Robert Elswitt with lots of great music by Neil Young and the like and (where orchestrated) Jonny Greenwood, edited by Leslie (The Master) Jones.

'The Golden Fang'. And has the week's best line: 'Doctor, the couch is broken, and bring that bottle with you'. (He then drops his trousers on the way in to her.)

Election (1999 Alexander Payne & co-scr)

Well, this was enormously bouncy and overdue, made very stylishly, e.g. those bedroom tracks that go up and up into an impossibly high ceiling. Rolfe Kent 's Morricone-western pastiche score also adds class, Kevin Tent is the editor who insisted on that very fast succession of cuts at the end.

Love the way nobody's voiceover matches up to their behaviour - good screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor (also Sideways and About Schmidt), based on novel by Tom Perrotta. Also love the girl's election speech - "Don't bother to vote at all!" - and the reaction she gets.

Reese Witherspoon, Matthew Broderick, Chris Klein (sympathetic as the dumb jock), Jessica Campbell (gay sister), Phil Reeves (head), Colleen Camp (didn't recognise her as Reese's mom).

Nice twists throughout.

September (1987 Woody Allen & scr)

Even more claustrophobic than Interiors, taking place entirely in Vermont home, and therefore like a filmed stage play (there isn't a single exterior shot - this film should have been called Interiors).

Ex good-time girl Elaine Stritch and new husband Jack Warden come to visit her daughter Mia Farrow, an unhappy creature who may have killed her mother's gangster boyfriend. Farrow fancies writer Sam Waterstone but he fancies her (married) friend Diane Wiest. Meanwhile widower Denholm Elliott wants to be more than Farrow's protector.

Nice low key lighting by Carlo di Palma; (jazz) music is all diegetic. Slight carp - the thunder and lightning are always together and that's not how thunder and lightning works. Unless things happen differently in Vermont, of course.

Um, I still think that Woody's 'dramas' (as opposed to 'comedies' like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Blue Jasmine) work better than this precisely because they do contain funny lines and irony (the latter especially) and this very straight-faced stuff simply does not bring out the best in Mr Allen (Husbands and Wives contains perhaps his most powerful moments).

Has a good ear for fractured, selfish people and situations.

I Capture the Castle (2003 Tim Fywell)

Though it feels autobiographical, there's nothing of Dodie Smith's real life in it. After writing many successful plays including 'Dear Octopus', it was her first novel, written in the US in 1948 ('One Hundred and One Dalmations' came eight years later). The screenplay is by Heidi Thomas.

The family is great, particularly Romola Garai and Bill Nighy but good too are Rose Byrne, Tara Fitzgerald and Joe Sowerbutts; with Henry Cavill as the faithful worker. Then the visiting Americans are Henry Thomas and Marc Blucas and Sinead Cusack.

It has a poignant feel to it, fuelled by a particularly good Dario Marianelli score; and shot by Richard Greatrex and edited by Roy Sharman. Fywell works almost exclusively on British TV.

The castle itself is on the Isle of Man; eagle-eyed Q correctly identifies the village as Turville.

Very successful. I can hear Romola though saying 'Christ I'm cold! I wish I'd never agreed to this sodding film now!'

Infamous (2006 Douglas McGrath & scr)

Toby Jones is brilliant as Capote in film based on the oral biography (or 'gossip' as it is also referred to) 'Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career' by George Plimpton. Though I'm not 100% convinced that the 'interviews' work that successfully and a linear tale might have progressed better. However overall we thought it very good.

Amazing cast - Daniel Craig as fantastic as ever, Sandra Bullock good as Harper Lee, plus Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich, Juliet Stevenson, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis and Lee Pace as the other murderer.

Shot by Bruno Delbonnel, editor Camilla Toniolo, music Rachel Portman, production design Judy Becker (American Hustle, Ruby Sparks).

Interiors (1978 Woody Allen & scr)

When Woody chose to follow Annie Hall with a serious film, he certainly succeeded - there isn't one funny line or irony in the film at all. Even Bergman had jokes (although I suppose if you want to put it this way, this is later Cries and Whispers Bergman: between you and me, not the best sort. Shh.)

Very well acted by Mary Beth Hurt, Diane Keaton and Kristin Griffith as the messed up sisters, Geraldine Page the extremely messed up mother (she is maddening - her fastidiousness and insecurity) and E.G. Marshall the understandably distancing father (though even he has issues and definitely favours the Hurt child). Husbands are Sam Waterstone and Richard Jordan and the new wife to be Maureen Stapleton is actually the sanest of the lot.

Beautifully shot by Gordon Willis (love that tracking shot through the church) and edited by Ralph Rosenblum. This is one of only two Woodys I think with no music (the other being Husbands and Wives.) No - Annie Hall doesn't either.*

So I'm not sure it's one we'd watch over and over again, but good to see.

* Yes it does.

Up In The Air (2009 Jason Reitman)

Here

Paris Je T'Aime

Absolutely wonderful; perfectly assembled; a moving experience.

Reviewed here.

Celebrity (1998 Woody Allen & scr)

Described sufficiently well here.

Everyone Says I Love You (1996 Woody Allen & scr)

For WA credits completists - they're at the end. Ha! Edward Norton singing begins it.

Most entertaining, intriguing comedy musical to Cole Porter set in Venice and Paris (and New York - shown in all four seasons and once again looking spectacular and unlike anyone else's New York - it's that Carlo di Palma again).

Julia Roberts, Drew Barrymore, Goldie Hawn, Alan Alda (these two have the best voices), Woody, Natalie Portman, Tim Roth, David Ogden Stiers.

Highlights include the great song 'Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think' performed by ghosts, a multitude of Groucho Marxes (Woody included) and a truly sensational one take dance number by the Seine with Goldie literally flying.

I did wonder though whether the beautifully choreographed and funny dance numbers might have worked better with a bit of cutting - the long takes sort of work against them somehow.

Deconstructing Harry (1997 Woody Allen & scr)

From the jump cut opening against the credits we know this is going to be something quite different - a rebuttal of those who say his films are all the same. As though the artist's one-off use of 'fuck' and 'cunt' isn't enough to make the Q blush, he is using a positively Godardian loose editing style which gives a beautiful fractured, messed up feel to the material, which artfully mixes the writer's stories and reality. A film we've ignored that will need to be revisited often; it's also very funny.

A stellar cast includes the always great Judy Davis, Richard Benjamin, Demi Moore, a totally out of focus Robin Williams (!), Bob Balaban, Tobey Maguire, Julia Louis Dreyfuss, Julie Kavner, Mariel Hemingway, Stanley Tucci, Billy Crystal, Paul Giamatti and Tony Sirico (The Sopranos' Paulie) again.

Loved ending where a fan says she's deconstructed Harry and finds he's really happy underneath - a commentary methinks on wrong-headed critics who are always assuming his films are autobiographical... Though of course there's always something of the auteur in all of them.

Shot by Carlo di Palma with Santo Loquasto's sets, including a Boschian Hell.

One thing to note though is that the Hollywood Pictures R2 DVD release is in 1.33:1 and that's not one of the director's innovations - it should be 1.85:1.

Evan Almighty (2007 Tom Shadyac)

'Who's this film targeted at?' I mused (it's a film that gives you time to muse). Bible belt families, I think. There's nothing at all subversive about it, Genesis 6:14 with a light comedic dusting. There might have been a veiled message about conservation, and even global warming, but no. The special effects are the whole show.

'Daddy, no one can grow a beard overnight'. It hasn't got that sort of dialogue in it.

To give a clue, there's an incredibly bastardised version of the originally cynical John Lennon / Beatles 'Revolution', which now sounds anodyne and jolly. The film's ending was clearly decided over a particularly thorough lunch.

It's awful, and quite fun for that reason. Steve Carrell, Morgan Freeman (I mean, this is actually offensive to God), Lauren Graham, some elephants, John Goodman, Jonah Hill.

Woody Allen: a Documentary

Part two.

Skips his allegedly 'fallow' period of the nineties, in which he made the great Hollywood Ending and the much maligned, underrated Anything Else, claiming his European pictures gave him a creative reboot... Woody is clearly no great fan of himself (not like our Will Boyd), not understanding that he has already made several great films. And as I've said before, if he really wants to make a dead serious Bergmanesque film, he should just put the work in and do it, none of this 'Got to knock off now, there's a Knicks game starting'.

Rushmore (1998 Wes Anderson & co-scr)

Yes, as previously mentioned, the school plays are brilliant. Is this where the young Wes started, as a novice director? He did - it seems - attend a public school, was an underachiever and fell for an older woman.

Bill Murray great value as always - love the moment where he looks like he's going to vault a fence, then clumsily falls down the other side; and when he's met Olivia and after the meeting he runs off like a schoolboy. And there's a touching relationship between Jason Schwartzman and smart young kid Mason Gamble.

Albert Nobbs (2011 Rodrigo Garcia)

Glenn Close looks so damn weird in this compared to everyone else, even Janet McTeer, the other cross-dressing woman, who also has make-up. (Glenn's face hardly moves; she looks like a burn victim who's had plastic surgery). It sinks it for me, they should have done it without the prosthetics and if Glenn didn't look enough like a man then called the whole thing off.

Also the plot, I just didn't understand it. If Nobbs is a lesbian it is not made clear, but whether she is or not, you can't just marry someone and suddenly declare you're the opposite sex (even to Mia Wasikowska). So that also sinks it for me.

It's sinking fast, this film, which is a shame as its great cast comprises Brendan Gleeson, Pauline Collins, Mark Williams, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brenda Fricker and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the bastard. And the editor is Steven Weisberg (early Cuarons).

Woody Allen: A Documentary (2012 Robert B Weide & scr, co-ed)

Part One:

Woody telling us how his nanny threatened to (and began) suffocating him; how some one drove his car at him through PS99 playground trying to run him over; that his parents were often rowing or not speaking.
Some of the great stand-up stuff: "This was my grandfather's watch. He sold it to me on his deathbed." "I have a great example of someone using oral contraception. I asked this girl to go to bed with me and she said no."
Woody trying not to laugh when Diane Keaton is improvising a scene from 'Sleeper'.
In performance on the clarinet.
How we always looked after his sister Letty who was eight years younger.
He doesn't say why he doesn't like Manhattan which is annoying, though I completely agreed with Mariel Hemingway that in that film he gives a great performance.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (2012 Donald Rice)

Begins with a beautiful montage of a 1930s printing press. Then spends the next 40 minutes with Felicity Jones shut in her bedroom. With its multi character country house real time setting it feels like an adapted stage play, though in fact the source is Julia Strachey's novel (1932).

Luke Treadaway is the ex lover, James Norton the new one. Feels like there isn't enough story for the material - the various goings on between the other guests are diverting but not overly interesting. Could have been done in an hour. Actually Hitch could probably have pulled it off in one of his 21 minute shows, which would be a great exercise in screen condensation.

You know, we did quite like it, it's just a bit flat. Elizabeth McGovern is the disapproving mother, Eve Traynor the essential maid, Ellie Kendrick the sister. Plus John Standing, Fennella Woolgar, Mackenzie Crook, Julian Wadham.

To Rome with Love (2012 Woody Allen & scr)

What did I tell you? We wanted to laugh. And it had been 18 months.

I think my favourite story is of the newly-weds: Alessandra Mastronardi is delightful as the wife who is propositioned first by a film star and then by an enterprising burglar, whilst Alessandro Tiberi is passing off Penelope Cruz as his wife! Begnini is so funny, great cast also includes Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page.

Small Time Crooks (2000 Woody Allen)

Well overdue, another uproarious story in which WA, Tony Darrow, Michael Rapaport and (latterly) Jon Lovitz plot to rob a bank under the cover of Tracey Ullman's cookie store, which becomes massively successful. That's just the first 30 minutes. Film turns into a sort of Born Yesterday with Ullman wanting to improve herself under the tutelage of untrustworthy Hugh Grant.

Considering the retrospective of hers we've been on recently we didn't even realise Elaine May is in it, and her scenes are hilarious.

Very funny and satisfying ending. Zhao Fei delivers a stunning rooftop dusk scene (then somewhat overlights a night river shot).

Ullman is absolutely fantastic in performance that was pretty much ignored by everybody (love the way she pronounces 'crudités'). Many, many very funny lines. And loved the way Woody tries to creep upstairs surreptitiously. And the video about the cookie company and their 'board meetings'.