Bananas

Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.

It is a funny picture—not too consistently, and certainly not too coherently, but when it hits, it hits.

Allen and Mickey Rose have written some funny stuff, and Allen, both as director and actor, knows what to do with it.

Allen's second feature, a tribute to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup, is a wonderfully incoherent series of one-liners centered around a puny New York Jew's unwitting and unwilling involvement in a South American revolution.

Effectively the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup with a Cuban spin. It looks cheap, which is funny in itself, and satire and spoofery are crammed in until it bulges at the seams.

Although some of the humor falls flat in this Allen comedy, his satire of revolutions and revolutionaries is perpetually topical.

Although there are fine homages to Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Eisenstein and Harold Lloyd here, this is a scattershot offering full of apolitical mockery.