A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy

Woody Allen's new movie, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, will not make you cry, as Annie Hall and Manhattan were capable of, and it won't make you cringe, as Stardust Memories almost demanded. It is not screamingly funny, romantically piquant, bitter or even, in most ways, unusual. With the exception of a single recurring image--that of Allen as an amateur inventor of the early 20th Century, flapping about in various homemade flying machines--there is not even anything of the absurd in this film. It's just an engaging Woody Allen movie, in which much of the humor is familiar and the tone is as moistly appealing as the title suggests. [18 July 1982, p.L3]

Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is a pleasant disappointment, pleasant because he gets all the laughs he goes for in a visually charming, sweetly paced picture, a disappointment because he doesn’t go for more. Read full review

Not Woody Allen at his best, this period piece has some clever writing but is not completely convincing. Read full review

Woody Allen is trying to please, but his heart isn't in it, and his talent isn't either. He is so much a man of our time that his comedy seems denatured in this classy, period setting

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy promises to take off every so often, but the material proves too slight for buoyant fancy. [16 July 1982, p.C1]

Its light classical manner and its happyish ending. Whatever Mr. Allen is doing in constructing this pretty, slight, gently entertaining movie, he isn't doing the thing he does best. A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy gives the impression of someone speaking fluently but formally in a language not his own. Read full review

Woody Allen is among a very few people in the history of film who have provided audiences with really intelligent humor. But even Homer nods, and never has Allen more obviously fallen down on the job than in A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, a trifle that owes much to Ingmar Bergman in style and to Groucho Marx in content. Read full review