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Its official. The critics hate Woody Allen’s new film “Irrational Man.” Movie review site Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 44% rating.
Due out on Friday, the movie stars Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone. It features a romance between an older philosophy professor (Phoenix) at a small town college and his much younger student (Stone). The professor is suffering through some sort of life crisis and his young student helps him to somehow get through it.
Sound familiar? It should! An older man dating a younger woman has been a theme in many a Woody Allen movie like “Manhattan.” In fact, 1992’s “Husbands and Wives” had basically the same exact story only in that movie Allen played a married professor at Barnard College in New York who has an affair with one of his students played by Juliette Lewis.
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“Irrational Man” also stars Parker Posey and Ethan Phillips. It is the 50th movie that Allen has directed.
England’s The Times said, “Woody Allen seems to have relied rather heavily on a Philosophy for Dummies manual while scripting Irrational Man. As pretentious as it is absurd, the new movie relies on that tired Allen trope: intellectual older man falls in love with beautiful woman half his age, and farce ensues.”
BuzzFeed said that Emma Stone deserves better that this film. “Allen is remixing his past films as much as he’s making new ones, and Irrational Man is pieced together from familiar Allenesque elements: There’s a neurotic protagonist — Joaquin Phoenix as bad-boy philosophy professor Abe Lucas; there’s contemplation of the perfect murder in a way that is a lighter, less successful sibling to Match Point; and there’s a romance involving a younger woman — Emma Stone as Jill Pollard, one of Abe’s students, and the biggest waste of talent in this star-packed, dreary venture.”
