Broadway Danny Rose
I found another one I had ready access to...though I suppose this one has a cloud over it as well. A Bela Tarr film comes with preconceptions about style and how that will work for me. A Woody Allen comes with a conflicted feeling due to his personal being. It would be easier if his personal failings were not so clearly woven into his movies. Watching this I realized I was playing the game "how long until Allen does something creepy relating to a young girl." In this case, it was about 16 minutes in when he asks the 12-year-old daughter of one of his clients (Danny Rose being an agent) if she is married. Yes, just a playful joke of the sort that older people tell to young people, but given the context of Allen, it's one of those moments that pulls you out for a second.
There are two things with Allen that tend to be problems. My clear favorite of his films is Match Point, and I think a large part of that is the absence of Allen on screen. Even Whatever Works, which more clearly has a Allen stand-in played by Larry David, is a stronger entry for me. Allen is just a tiresome screen presence because of the sheer volume of words coming out of his mouth. At some point it just becomes noise and this film in particular feels noisy.
The second, and one that even Match Point ultimately has shadowing over it, is the treatment of women. A film like Match Point focuses on how women are a burden on men while in others women are the means for men to discover things about themselves. The significant chunk of story here involves Rose chasing after his client's mistress. So for starters we have Allen stalking a woman who has clearly told him no, until she relents. In spite ample screen time Tina (Mia Farrow) doesn't feel like a real character. Instead, she is a source of chaos and stress for all those men who cross her path, liable to cost them their success if not their life. The remarkable thing to me is the shell story, this is all a story being told between comics in a New York diner. I'd definitely make the person telling this story pay my check for wasting my time.