Alice

It's a brilliant film, written tightly enough so that practically every word is important. Add a large cast that blends into a perfect ensemble, plus direction that gives every shot some meaning, and you can't ask much more. [25 Jan 1991, p.3F]

Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making. Read full review

Farrow is hilarious when she's aggressively pursuing Mantegna; amusingly dumbstruck when she's fighting off a group of male partygoers (one of the secret potions makes them fall in love with her); and touching when she's trying to reconcile with her sister (Blythe Danner) or sell her lame script ideas to an old friend who works for the networks (Cybill Shepherd). The performance is a triumph of sensitivity to rapid mood swings that stops just short of turning the movie into The Three Faces of Alice. [25 Jan 1991, p.22]

It's a strange, magical film, in which Allen uses the arts of the ancient Chinese healer as a shortcut to psychoanalysis; at the end of the film, which covers only a few days, Alice has learned truths about her husband, her parents, her marriage, her family and herself, and has undergone a profound conversion in values. Because this is a Woody Allen film, a lot of that metaphysical process is very funny. Read full review

Alice may be a minor work in the Allen canon, but when its grace notes manage to be heard above the whimsy, they ring true. Read full review

Watchable and sometimes funny, but ever so thin. Read full review

Alice isn't one of the best Allen films, but it's one of the better ones, generating more than enough whimsical fantasy to surmount its tacked-on moral. We're talking choice fluff here. [25 Jan 1991, p.29P]

Allen's sensibility is so engaging, his perspective so intelligent and his cast so resourceful that the sum of the movie's parts is greater than its whole. You might say that Alice is like Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters crossed with Gremlins - or like a lesser version of the filmmaker's wonderful comic fantasy of 1985, The Purple Rose of Cairo. [25 Jan 1991, p.4]

Alice Tate seems at first to be no more than a grimly sweet nothing, but she evolves into a giddily sweet something. So does her movie. [25 Jan 1991]

Allen may consider Alice to be a minor jest before his next Big One, but there are pleasures in its small-time ambitions that sometime elude him on his more ambitious projects. Read full review

Alice, which seems like child's play after last year's sober Crimes and Misdemeanors, finds Allen at his most optimistic and sentimental since Radio Days. His pen is not as sharp nor his wit as keen as it has been, but he has become accessible to a broader audience in this whimsical entertainment. Read full review

Performances are strong all around, with a succession of top actors making the most of their brief turns. But the center of the pic is Farrow, who’s funny and touching. Read full review

This is lesser Woody Allen -- nothing horrible, but nothing to recommend except to his particular fans. [25 Jan 1991, p.C1]

A scattering of fine one-liners , but one can't help wishing that Allen would investigate pastures new. Read full review

The role fits Farrow like a silk slip, but its kooky premise doesn’t quite shake up the by-now familiar narrative concerns. Read full review

At its best the movie displays a vital playfulness. But at its worst -- and there's far too much of that -- Alice continues Allen's endless, banal quest for the Big Answers. All, of course, at the mild-mannered elbow of Farrow. Read full review

A mildly diverting, mostly forgettable variation on themes the writer-director has treated with more depth and vigor on several past occasions. It's a tentative, tiny film, every bit as inconspicuous as its recessive, occasionally invisible heroine. [25 Dec 1990, p.10C]

When it isn't funny, it's embarrassingly obvious - and it's almost never funny. [24 Dec 1990, p.1D]

Alice is certainly handsome to look at, and as usual Allen's camera is placed impeccably -- if he's overrated as a screenwriter, Woody Allen has yet to receive his due as a director. Still, what's wrong with Alice is in the script, and Allen wrote that, too. [25 Jan 1991, p.G5]