Critic Reviews

The whole thing may seem patently ludicrous but it’s done with distinct artistic finesse, set to a furious, insidious visual rhythm in it’s bold, decisive, and intuitive editing.

Crisis is not Allen at his peak, nor at his most serious and contemplative as an artist. Crisis is a bauble, a light comedy that starts very slowly (consider that another caution) and builds to a satisfyingly funny conclusion.

Allen brings the whole TV-series self-consciousness bit home in the final minutes of the last episode, but he needn’t have worried. The fact that he hasn’t spent the past half-century trying to remake “My Mother the Car” enables him to simply adapt what he does best for the so-called small screen. And it’s a good fit. The performances are winning, with wonderful cameo contributions.

This isn’t Allen at his wittiest or wildest--his career is almost by definition a thing of peaks and valleys, and he can be satisfying and frustrating within a single film. But he has a voice, and he has not yet lost it. Anyone susceptible to that sensibility will find many familiar pleasures here.

It won’t stack up to the director’s better accomplishments, but it doesn’t want to be. It’s pure new Woody Allen entertainment.

Allen’s been doing this kind of humor for 50 years. It shows.

Some skillfully deployed, binge-enabling cliff-hangers notwithstanding, there’s not much here to differentiate Crisis In Six Scenes from any other late-period Allen trifle, slurped down in under 90 minutes and forgotten until the next round of cryptic casting announcements.

For fans of a certain earlier strain of his work, its shambling, amiable vibe may seem comfortingly familiar. But Crisis also seems inconsequential.

There are smiles, but also cringes. Cyrus is terrible, and even May can't do much with this. Allen is Allen.

The first few episodes meander by, full of too-long dialogue and not enough action, while all the best moments are precise. ... Crisis gets better as it goes on, perhaps because a climax is not so different in film and television.