Working in Europe has both revitalized Woody Allen and made him more sour than ever—for him, it’s all one and the same. His latest, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, shot in London, may be his bleakest comedy since Crimes ancl Misdemeanors and also one of his wittiest and most entertaining. It’s a story of “Change partners and don’t dance,” with Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas, and Freida Pinto as members of interlocking, fracturing couples—there’s an almost Henry Jamesian symmetry to the film’s romantic longings and misbehaviors. Back in the 70s, with Annie Hal! in particular, Allen posited love, or at least its possibility, as a rare redeeming grace in an otherwise cruel, uncaring universe. Three and a half decades later, with a movie in which the only happy characters are literally delusional, he’s shucked that possibility. Art, another perennial pacifier in Allen’s films, is no help, either. Is that how he truly feels? Something gets him out of bed. To wit, he’s shooting his next movie in Paris, which should really bring out the beast in him.