Watch Crimes and Misdemeanors For Free

Wonderful character development!

From my favorite movies..

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

I think it's boring, it has no rhythm, it's not interesting. I have seen his film many times. But suddenly it takes us on a new path that is not the case and everything to finish as always. The film is repeated and repeated, we change course, start another movie and end in cross lives.Spoiler: Personally, I do not like anything Woody Allen, sorry, I apologize to everyone in the movies and this movie is not going to be different. I've never seen anything in his movies. Well yes, it makes dialogues better than anyone. I think he was born knowing to do dialogues, but the rest, neither know how to do nor care. I already say the director of photography of the film, Sven Nykvist, in an interview, does not spend time to the camera or the photo and so it comes out. One of his favorite directors is Ingmar Bergman but at least this one if he dedicated time to these sections.At least as happens in real life, the arrogant takes the girl. It's the only thing that has seemed logical and real in the movie. Cynicism on all sides, but selling it as a logical thing.I think that if he had dedicated himself to writing and someone else would have shot the movies he would have won a lot. All you have of genius of the paper, it has of not knowing to direct.

This is about as close as Woody Allen is likely to come to real tragedy. Martin Landau is having an affair but his paramour threatens to lower the boom on him by telling Landau's wife. Landau arranges to have his love murdered but is stunned by what he has gone, haunted by moral lessons learned from a rabbi when he was a child, and ends the movie thoroughly chastened but not in jail. He gives a subtle performance too.That's what is know as "the A story." The "B story" has Woody Allen as a documentary film maker in love with Mia Farrow, who is in love with Allan Alda, an egotistical, famous, rich nincompoop. The egotistical, famous, rich nincompoop gets the girl, while Allan's marriage dissolves, leaving him forlorn.Well, okay. It's not King Lear. But it's enjoyable and at times slyly thought provoking. (Is it really necessary to believe in God and an afterlife of punishment in order to feel guilt?) A rabbi, done to a turn by Sam Waterston, represents God and has gone blind. The symbolism is clear but the meaning is nebulous. The scenes of Jewish rituals are semi-real and heartwarming, like low-key versions of John Ford's weddings and dances.Allen's job is making a documentary film about Allan Alda, whom he loathes. Alda is foolish and, furthermore, he's got first dibs on the girl Allen loves. So the documentary, which is supposed to make a public icon out of Alda, turns out to be a disaster -- scenes of Alda shouting and bragging, intercut with shots of Mussolini on his balcony haranguing his fascist supporters, Alda copping a feel in a dark hallway. During the viewing of the film, we see Woody Allen seated in the theater and chuckling at his own cruel wit. Alda sits there aghast, his mouth open, and then fires Allen on the spot.Of course, the film is necessarily cluttered with Woody Allen's conversational tropes. "How AHHH you?" And, "I just feel, I don't know, unsettled. Y'know?" And Allen's compulsive wisecracks are up to par: "The last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty." Lots of dinner parties with guests, a wedding, a sentimental dance. The conversations are incredibly middle-class and banal -- the virtues of acupuncture and the center piece at Rockefeller Center. But the pace is deliberate, and the staging precise, as befits a tragedy.I preferred the B story to the A story. They weren't seamlessly blended. Yet it's watchable and diverting, and odd to see Woody Allen so seriously probing a concept like guilt.

In one candid moment of the hugely successful Lester's life, he is given a rather rousing and instructive speech to a room full of colleagues, who listen intently, and the camera pans across until it finally reveals Cliff, aiming a different camera at the proceedings. Woody, and therefore Cliff, shoots this way because for him, there is no difference between Lester's real and documentary life; they are both shallow, worthless and rubbish. This is a departure from the usual Woody character - still neurotic, still high-minded and cultured, but this particular one is rather needy, somewhat pathetic. He prides himself on staying away from the Hollywood-esque success that Lester has garnered, and prefers more personal, meaningful works. One he is working on about an elderly philosopher who spouts vague truths about love and life blows up embarrassingly in his face when this wise man commits suicide. Lester openly insults his career by admitting he is only asking him as a favour to his sister, Cliff's wife. At the end of the film, Cliff feels like he deserves the love of Halley, another like-minded, smart and attractive individual (and he has been vicariously substituting this hollow in his life, in the wake of his waning marriage, with his young niece), and cannot even think why she would choose Lester over him (who reminds him of Mussolini). And so it haunts him endlessly. Dually, there is another closely linked with the family who is being haunted. Judah's affair is catching up with him, threatening both his personal and financial life, and there remains no choice. Landau is the best of the cast, and shows it here; watch how he tries to convince himself that the idea of the murder is not his idea, watch how he rambles endlessly about morality but cannot seem to remember why he called his brother for assistance. But for a crime of this magnitude, four months later he is seemingly at peace, while Cliff mourns newly. Crimes and Misdemeanors is not about how he got away with it - this is irrelevant and happens with ease - but how he deals with the fact he got away with it.Allen employs a few significant techniques to both these characters in moments of strife. The first is the silence, save for maybe the hum of a car engine or the crackling of a telephone, as the character's mind wanders incessantly on their troubles. This makes the music so much more dreadful when it finally cues in; in a particularly creepy sequence which follows the murderer, the previous lovers who found themselves together in Schubert now become confronted with death with his String Quartet 15, a moment of wonderful agitation without ever showing any action or violence. Another is the slow zoom in to a character's face as they are hit with horrible news, which is frequently coupled with the use of visual flashbacks which contrast the now cold and frightening reality. Levey's suicide, the murder of Paley...In one case Judah even consciously argues at length about morality with his memories of a Jewish dinner (this scene is very Allen) and this represents his full conscious awareness of his sin, and his desperation to justify it. Meanwhile, in a blow of cruel symbolism, the rabbi, the one moral centre, is blind by the end of the film, while the ophthalmologist is seeing clearer than ever. Another theme is the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality. We saw this first with Cliff shooting Lester, and also in the many cuts from reality straight into a movie that Cliff might be watching, which closely mirror the events of the story. Allen manages to conjure some of his humour from this tale; the hilarious way in which Mussolini is compared to Lester, the voyeuristic and aggressive manner that he films Lester flirting with the women in the workplace, and in one scene, the darkness of Judah's story almost invades into Cliff's. His sister is recounting a horrifying date incident, and we curl up in revulsion, waiting for that fateful word, before it is suddenly replaced with another. If it was rape Cliff might react with a subtle horror and rage, but in this case he flies off the handles and reacts with much more indignation than necessary, and it is very funny. Allen seems to readily announce that this is not a Hollywood movie. The ending is entirely pessimistic; the rich and successful Judah discovers the shakiness of the construct of humanity, and God's eye no longer plagues him, much less no longer exists in his mind. Cliff has let love slip away (then again, I think he deserves it, being wholly unoriginal, having his pet projects fail and even plagiarising a declaration of love from James Joyce's Ulysses). At times it feels like two completely separate films that have been combined as per title. But when they come together, and seem to exhibit the opposite reactions that we would normally expect, Levey's message rings true. But I don't think Cliff ever seems to realise it.

This is a deftly made movie with parallel stories and portrayal of the world of Jewish New Yorkers. The angst over whether there is a true morality from an omnipotent God makes the film thought-provoking and, to some, disturbing. Allen has grappled now twice with this idea of getting away with murder and whether one can go on to live a good life without fear of retribution. He explored it in this film, and then again in Matchpoint. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, the issue was whether God was watching and if the guilty character could live well with his conscience. In Matchpoint, retribution is a matter of random luck.The conclusions of both films can seem brilliant to some, but quite troubling to others. The reason this is so, is because Allen's main question, "Can the murderer get away with it?" hinges on one important assumption: that all rewards and punishments occur in this life...and that moral behavior is subject to rewards and punishments. This is in fact a very Jewish point of view (hence the family debate in their Midwood, Brooklyn, home). Jews do not believe in Heaven or Hell, so all has to be achieved in this life. Within the logic that emerges from the above question is inevitably a morally confused universe and cynical point of view. What's worse is that the movie assumes the rewards are things like wealth, career success, love.If murderers do not get found out and do not suffer punishment, does that mean there is no moral God watching over us? No, their crime or misdemeanor is still wrong, because it caused harm to someone. If they have no conscience and they are not caught, it is still wrong. If there is not a God meting out rewards and punishments in this life or the afterlife, what makes it wrong? Does it not matter if one decides to murder for personal gain? Is not the rule to follow simply dog eat dog and every man for himself? Allen has not progressed in questioning the assumption, whether material rewards are the appropriate measure of morality.To get past his ongoing conundrum, the next time Allen takes on this theme, he needs to consider how society as a whole would break down if no one subscribed to any code of morality. There would not be anything to get away with, since everyone would subscribe to the law of the jungle: who ever eats, wins. Without a common code of morals, we would be reduced to a primitive state.Allen is very literary, but to address moral issues, he needs to go beyond the individual and consider social systems as a whole. Morality is a matter of relationships to our fellow human beings, not of individual success in life. One might argue that societies have a long history of sanctioning, through the law, behaviors we find abhorrent today, so morality is still all relative and there is no moral absolute. I think, rather, that human societies evolve as we learn from our mistakes, and we find out these mistakes because indeed there is a moral absolute that reveals them to be wrong: gradually it becomes recognized that it is not okay for women to be an underclass to men; that racism violates the rights of people; that lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering result in a breakdown of the trust required to engage in transactions and the economic health of a society; that crime is a symptom of a lot of social ills, from economic inequities to mental illness to social pressures that sway the individual's moral compass. Obviously, there are sociopaths and criminals who have no empathy for their victims and no conscience about gaining at the expense of others, including murder -- we now have clinical terms for them, and even can link aberrant, deficient behaviors to parts of the brain. Judah's brother is such a one with no twinges of conscience. Judah enjoys the trappings of success very much because those around subscribe to a moral code to which he must pretend.Criminals are put in jail to punish them, to protect society from them, and to reform them. Society's sense of morality evolves in the effort to achieve some social order that is sustainable. If someone gets away with murder, the goal of the law is that society does not implode with everyone doing the same as some norm of behavior. One does not need a God to tell us what works or not. Our different beliefs in God or not, meanwhile, color how we codify our morals in social conduct and the law.Good movie, within its narrowly defined universe, but Allen needs to expand beyond that small universe to truly answer the question of moral absolutes. I hope he reads my review somehow, as I get the sense that his is indeed a very troubled man.P.S. To those who analyze the film in terms of Utilitarianism and Kant, my above take based on human relationships draws from Asian philosophy and Confucianism, and the concept of societies as complex systems.