Dylan Jones: 'Woody Allen’s 41st film turns into a glacial meditation on our futile love affair with the past'

I was in New York last week for a meeting, and through no fault of my own – honest, I'm popular, no, really, even now – I had nothing particular to do on Monday night. And so I asked the concierge to find me a ticket for Jerusalem, this I thought being the obvious way to spend an evening alone in Manhattan at this precise moment. But I had totally forgotten that Broadway is 'dark' on Mondays, meaning I had to slope off and see a film instead.

So I did what I hadn't done for a very long time. I sloped off to see a Woody Allen film. Until a few weeks ago, I thought I might never say those words again – in my not-so-humble opinion Woody hasn't made a good film in 20 years, but the reviews for Midnight in Paris had been so fulsome I thought it was worth the risk. His recent films might not be as bad as the ones pumped out by Robert De Niro – a man who, with the increasingly reductive Focker films, is steadily ruining his legacy – but they're damn close. Here – I thought, notionally – was someone who was living proof that talent was finite, and that it could run out, like oil, water, or good Take That singles.

So I traipsed off to the Angelika Film Centre on West Houston, which, along with that funny little place near the church in Chelsea whose name I can never remember, is one of the best cinemas in Lower Manhattan, and hoped for the best. And Woody Allen's 41st feature film?

Well – and you probably knew this was coming – having started off promisingly, taking us on a whiplash tour of Paris during the title sequence, it soon turns into an almost glacial meditation on our futile love affair with the past, and is no more than a B-minus at best. As usual, the most fun is to be had watching the protagonist's impersonation of Allen, and in this respect Owen Wilson does a pretty good job (maybe the best acting job of his career). As is the case with John Gardner, Kingsley Amis or Sebastian Faulks trying to imitate Ian Fleming, no one does Woody like Woody himself. Only problem is, not only can he no longer do it himself – he hasn't been able to do it for years.

Dylan Jones is the editor of 'GQ'