beautifully lit and shot, and Storaro in particular gets a burnished gleam out of the characters' endless beige suits, wood-paneled rooms, and orange-hued surroundings. The visuals are as warm as the banter is cold. And the cast does what they can to heat up the screen through sheer personal energy. Eisenberg isn't doing anything new for him — Bobby is a humble kid, but he's nervous and yammering in a way that plays directly into both his and Allen's usual types. But Steve Carell is a draw as a Hollywood big-timer who's simultaneously a mensch and a schmuck. Stewart is surprisingly vibrant and energetic, and Allen, who often writes young-women characters as predatory, mechanical, or painfully naïve, actually seems to have some sympathy for her, if not aclear idea of what motivates her. Parker Posey, who keeps popping up randomly as a family friend, is breathy and mannered in a way that suggests a much wackier, broader, more forceful film.

Warm visuals and cold banter And Stoll steals his scenes with a broad, easygoing verbal muscularity that’s more comfortable and lived-in than anything else in the film. He's nearly as much fun here as he was in Midnight In Paris. Allen makes an odd choice with Stoll's character in Café Society by deciding to glamorize 1930s gangsters just as much as he glamorizes 1930s filmmaking; Ben's many killings are played for laughs, not horror. But in that sense, at least, Allen is just following Hollywood's own tendency to look at rich criminals as a kind of