Woody Allen

A lonely 'Stranger' Not many moviegoers are interested in meeting Woody Allen's "Tall Dark Stranger. " The veteran writer-director's latest film, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," starring Antonio Banderas and Josh Brolin, has turned out to be one of his least popular. After six weeks in theaters, including an expansion to more than 400 theaters across the country last weekend, Allen's latest has sold only $2.4-million worth of tickets. Receipts dropped a mild 17% this weekend, indicating some positive word-of-mouth, but the decline was from a weak base.

Perhaps it's her Welsh background that makes Gemma Jones "feel like a mountain person," but after nearly five decades of acting, she's still climbing. The 67-year-old veteran of British television and theater who confesses she has "never done an honest day's work" has really only explored film work since Ang Lee's "Sense and Sensibility" (1995): "I do feel I'm still a bit of a novice, and every one I do, I learn so much on the job. " Now she's enjoying one of her best roles to date in Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," which opened Wednesday.

Human foibles, in major and minor keys, are the chords that Woody Allen has been pounding for roughly 45 years. So it should come as no surprise that in his new frothy and fitful romantic black comedy, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," everyone must take a spin around the dance floor with the disillusionments, deceptions and dissatisfactions of life. Allen has put his latest morality and mortality tale in the hands of his usual complement of fine actors, who play interlocking couples each fraught in their own way. It starts with the dizzy delight of Gemma Jones as Helena, the matriarch in the meddling middle of it all. By the time we meet her, she's attempted suicide after being divorced by her wayward husband, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins)

Reporting from Toronto — Woody Allen will turn 75 this December, but the prolific clip at which he makes and releases films, roughly one every year for the last 30 years, would daunt many men half his age. "I don't sense it as a maintained pace," Allen said recently in Toronto, where he spent less than one full day to mark the screening of his latest project, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," at the Toronto International Film...

The notorious and formerly funny movie director Woody Allen is apparently frustrated with the cumbersome operations of American democracy too. The onetime-father-now-husband-of-his-daughter tells the Spanish-language magazine La Vanguardia that the United States' Democratic Smoker-in-Chief could accomplish a whole lot more from his White House if he didn't have so many disorderly, annoying people objecting, distracting and criticizing him all...

Lou Jacobi, an actor who was known for comic roles and won praise in dramatic ones over a long career in the theater and movies, including Woody Allen's "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" and Barry Levinson's "Avalon," has died. He was 95. The Canadian-born actor died Friday at his home in Manhattan. His death was confirmed by Leonie Nowitz, a social worker who had been overseeing his care. Jacobi made his Broadway debut in 1955 in "The Diary of Anne Frank," playing one of the occupants of the Amsterdam attic where the Franks were hiding.

Vicky Cristina . . . Rio de Janeiro? The Brazilian city has formed a new film commission, hired a longtime movie industry pro to head it and set an ambitious first goal: landing the next Woody Allen flick. Taking a cue from Barcelona, the Spanish city that was the principal setting for Allen's last film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," Rio is dangling $2 million in subsidies to attract the director's as-yet-untitled next movie. This month, Rio was named the site for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, and city fathers hope it's on a roll.

It's a seemingly innocuous question. "How are you?" Larry David is asked. But this being the man who stars on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" as a kind of professional curmudgeon, the man who co-authored "Seinfeld," the most testy and enigmatic sitcom in television history, the reply that comes firing back is, one might say, refreshingly candid. "I guess I'm OK, you know?"