Café Society
Lionsgate | Release Date: July 15, 2016 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews
Positive:
22
Mixed:
14
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ObserverRex ReedJul 13, 2016
Romantic, bittersweet and funny as hell, Café Society turns Hollywood inside out, rooting through the superficial tinsel to find the real tinsel. You go away gobsmacked, beaming and happy to be both. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonJul 28, 2016
In his best performance since “The Social Network,” Eisenberg is perfectly cast as the neurotic Bobby. But the film truly belongs to Stewart, who brings to Vonnie a haunting luminousness. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJul 20, 2016
Café Society is a gorgeous and lightweight confection, a love letter to the Hollywood of the mid-1930s, as well as the New York of the same era. Read full review
80
Screen DailyJonathan RomneyMay 11, 2016
A bittersweet comedy of manners that sees Allen pushing the boat out stylistically and in narrative ambition, even as he treads familiar ground. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 11, 2016
Café Society isn’t Vonnie’s story, but it’s Stewart’s film. Read full review
75
ConsequenceNico LangJul 18, 2016
a great deal of Café Society is shaggy and unfocused, it’s at least pleasing in its shapelessness. Café Society is not quite one of Woody Allen’s best, but it’s good enough to make you hope that he never leaves old Hollywood. The era suits him. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyJul 14, 2016
It’s the filmmaking around the writing that casts a particular spell. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter TraversJul 13, 2016
Café Society isn't peak Allen, in the manner of such recent high points as "Midnight in Paris" (2011) and "Blue Jasmine" (2013), but the film — which could be helpfully subtitled Manhattan v Hollywood — feels lively, lived-in and fallibly human. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineCarson LundJul 11, 2016
As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance. Read full review
75
IndieWireEric KohnMay 11, 2016
Cafe Society works about as a well as a decent-but-not-great Allen movie can. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 11, 2016
What little shock of the new the film can provide us with comes from the honeyed cinematography by Vittorio Storaro which uses silhouettes, graphic compositions and glowing closeups in an often genuinely breathtaking manner. But it also comes from the performances. Read full review
72
TheWrapBen CrollMay 11, 2016
It’s a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly forgettable nostalgi-comedy that will be taken to task for not being anything more. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJul 21, 2016
The movie isn’t particularly hard to figure out and doesn’t try to be. Its charms lie more in what the actors make of characters that could have been cliches (or, if you’re in a kinder mood, archetypes) and its gorgeous look. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJul 14, 2016
The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it’s meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner: “Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but the examined life is no bargain.” Read full review
70
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranJul 14, 2016
Cafe Society is of course funny, but it also ends up, almost without our realizing it, trafficking in memory, regret and the fate of relationships in a world of romantic melancholy where, as someone says, "in matters of the heart, people do foolish things." Read full review
70
New York Daily NewsJoe DziemianowiczJul 13, 2016
The rom-dram is wistful and wisecracking, boasts a polished ensemble and is such a period looker you wish you could time-travel to the Jazz Era. Read full review
70
Village VoiceBilge EbiriJul 12, 2016
Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Café Society to make it worth your while — and also to make you wish it were better. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJul 4, 2016
If this film has a secret, it dwells in the cinematography — by Vittorio Storaro, no less, who shot “The Conformist,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and “Apocalypse Now.” He worked with Allen on a segment of “New York Stories” (1989), but Café Society marks their first full-length collaboration, and the result is ravishing to behold. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 11, 2016
Wispy and familiar in its themes and humorous strokes, Café Society benefits from an exceptionally adept cast led by Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Steve Carell, as well as from a luminous glow that emphasizes both the old Hollywood nostalgia and the story’s basis in dreams and artifice. Read full review
67
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonJul 14, 2016
Café Society is a light-fingered, backstabbing trifle. Despite the occasional sour zinger, the film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Jul 13, 2016
Woody, now in his 80s, narrates the movie, which lends it a vaguely, symbolically autobiographical slant. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJul 7, 2016
Cafe Society is a good-looking nothing, but there are times — thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade — when "nothing" is sufficient. Read full review
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJul 14, 2016
It’s an unusually warm world, full of helpful wealthy people and friendly faces. That’s the conundrum. It’s too shallow to nourish the spirit of a man like Bobby. But it’s too rich to leave. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJul 14, 2016
It is, overall, an amusing little picture, with some inspired moments and some sour notes, a handful of interesting performances and the hint, now and then, of an idea. Read full review
60
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 11, 2016
Eisenberg avoids, for the most part, doing a Woody Allen impersonation, but his bumbling guilelessness is wearing and Stewart seems out of place, unable to ever quite get over being Kristen Stewart in a Woody Allen movie. In fact, both young leads seem nervous to have been invited and often appear simply pleased to be there. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 11, 2016
The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it’s a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 11, 2016
Woody Allen’s Café Society is a sweet, sad, insubstantial jeu d’ésprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro – yet always freighted by a pedantic nostalgia for the 1930s golden age in both Hollywood and New York, nostalgia which the title itself rather coercively announces. Read full review
58
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaMay 11, 2016
Café Society is a quintessential later-period Woody Allen film. That is to say, it’s utterly mediocre. Read full review
51
The VergeTasha RobinsonJul 22, 2016
Café Society is an incredibly pretty movie, and a generally unobjectionable one. But like so many Allen films, it feels like it was made primarily for his therapist, and letting the rest of the world in to see it and make their own diagnoses is an afterthought. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorJul 28, 2016
Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenJul 27, 2016
Come for the sophisticated charm and intoxicating wit suggested by the term “café society.” Stay for the rote charms and recycled bons mots offered up by Woody Allen’s umpteenth movie, a decidedly lesser entry in the director’s vast catalog but, as with all Allen movies, a cut above most everything else that passes for comedy these days. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJul 21, 2016
Café Society is a romantic comedy where the romance is lackluster and the comedy an afterthought. Read full review
50
Washington PostAnn HornadayJul 21, 2016
Its arresting visual design aside, Cafe Society is upper-middle-late-period Allen, a modestly diverting ditty that will never go down as one of his greats. (But, as most can agree, Allen at his most middling is still better than many hacks at their best.) Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithJul 15, 2016
A scrapbook of bits from better Allen films that builds up to a hearty shrug. Read full review
42
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJul 28, 2016
Vittorio Storaro's cinematography is superb, casting gauzy glows and sensual silhouettes against impressively designed sets. Allen drops a few philo-cynical lines worthy of his reputation but not nearly enough. Read full review
40
Time OutDave CalhounJul 14, 2016
The soundtrack offers the expected jazz, while Allen himself, now sounding mumbly, offers intermittent, awkward narration. In the pantheon of his films, it’s a pretty but minor distraction. Read full review
38
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 2, 2016
This is as decrepit and tone-deaf as any movie he’s ever made, a corpse of a period piece, production-designed to the hilt, distractedly directed, a failure that hints at The End of Woody. Read full review
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