Match Point

Woody Allen returns to one of his favorite themes (infidelity) in Match Point, but with a change of venue and accent, as it's set not in his usual upper-crust New York city haunts, but in London, with one of the characters devoted to opera (so we hear snippets of Italian arias rather than the jazzy stuff Allen ordinarily prefers). Still, the narrative itself is familiar, not only resembling Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (filmed as A Place in the Sun) but also featuring the Martin Landau thread from Allen's own Crimes and Misdemeanors. Here, a mediocre ex-tennis pro (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) marries the mousy sister (Emily Mortimer) of a rich client at the posh club where he works, but has an affair with his brother-in-law's voluptuous ex-fiancée (Scarlett Johansson). When the latter turns up pregnant, Meyers' character must rid himself of the troublesome mistress and the issue is whether he'll be able to pull off a murder and get away with it. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen used a similar scenario to raise profound issues of morality and guilt, but here his aim is much less ambitious, contenting himself with the observation that the way life goes is often just a matter of luck, and that's hardly a grand slam of an insight. Optional. (F. Swietek)