Heed my advice: save the $10 and rent Crimes & Misdemeanors instead of spending the cash on Match Point. It's not the worst Woody Allen film (Interiors and September -- those echo-chamber dramas with no jokes, directed by someone with a rudimentary grasp of the English language -- will always keep those honors) but it's the most misguided attempt at a comeback since Terence Malick's The Thin Red Line. I mean, Match Point is so bad that it's perversely fascinating: Woody tries to get back into critics' good graces by reminding us of the mistakes we thought he had matured enough to learn from. We get tin-eared literary allusions ("We had the most fascinating chat about Dostoyevsky," one character actually says), wasting great actors in roles that amount to generous cameos (Brian Cox, for one, who utters that Dostoyevsky line in a manner that suggests he was instructed to criticize his mom's breasts), hoary attempts at reviving shopworn theatrical conventions like foreshadowing, and having characters explain metaphors to his audience (here it's tennis) -- metaphors he thinks can support the rickety structure in which they're embedded.

The two leads are terrible. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' junkie-Garbo poses deserve tableaux as lurid as our suppressed fantasies about him (like, I dunno, mincing through Brian Eno's "Baby's On Fire" in the glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine); here he's just a mouth and a pair of cheekbones, the latter of which are exquisite but get dull after staring at'em for two hours. He doesn't project class envy: he's merely petulant, in the manner of Hayden Christensen in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of George Lucas. As for Scarlet Johansson, what does it mean that she gets the Angelica Huston harridan part in Crimes & Misdemeanors, and that Huston, shot in the most unflattering light and given nothing to do but act shrill, is infinintely better?

PS: If you're reading this, Woody, please remember that next time you film a drama, be sure to hire Alan Alda. And write him some jokes. Please.