Name : Glenn Kenny / Alias : RogerEbert.com
It's the filmmaking around the writing that casts a particular spell. Particularly near the end, as Allen adds up the moral failings and squelched desires and doused dreams of all his characters.

Name : A.A. Dowd / Alias : AV Club
Neither especially funny nor particularly dramatic, but appealing enough in its handsome melancholia to create the phantom impression of Allen firing on all cylinders.

Name : Adam Graham / Alias : Detroit News
If it doesn't reach the heights of Woody's best - 2013's "Blue Jasmine" was his last great film - it still has several rich touches, including a luminous performance by Kristen Stewart.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
Maybe Woody Allen waited too long to make "Cafe Society"; it seems, weirdly, to be an uninspired remake of itself.

Name : Amy Nicholson / Alias : MTV
The film is so retro golden that old-timey miners would run the reels through a sieve.

Name : Owen Gleiberman / Alias : Variety
The movie, watchable as it is, never quite overcomes the sense that it's a lavish diagram working hard to come off as a real movie.

Name : Eric Kohn / Alias : indieWIRE
Aided by an anxious Jesse Eisenberg and the gently expressive Kristen Stewart, "Cafe Society" works about as a well as a decent-but-not-great Allen movie can.

Name : Bilge Ebiri / Alias : Village Voice
Lovely visuals, terrific performances, renewed ambition: There's enough good in Cafe Society to make it worth your while - and also to make you wish it were better.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Allen is confident that he can skip scenes, shift locations and more or less take his audience anywhere he wants, so long as he's entertaining, and in this he's right.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
With each succeeding year, Allen's insular version of the past feels more eccentric. Depending on the viewer, it's either happily reassuring or strangely out of touch.

Name : Alison Willmore / Alias : BuzzFeed News
It's a film that covers several years and relationships but comes across like a rambling anecdote being told by someone who keeps skipping over the interesting parts.

Name : Will Leitch / Alias : The New Republic
Replacement Level Allen. There are pleasures to be found. But you have to look a little harder than usual.

Name : Dave Calhoun / Alias : Time Out
A pretty, rambling, minor distraction.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
The film doesn't totally upend Allen's notion that L.A. is a seductively shallow place that has to resort to celebrating the ability to make a right turn on red to feel better about itself. In Cafe Society, it just looks so gorgeous while doing it.

Name : Kenneth Turan / Alias : Los Angeles Times
In the best sense, "Cafe Society" presents itself as an older director's film, dealing as it does with the difference between dreams and reality and the presence and persistence of regret.

Name : Joe Dziemianowicz / Alias : New York Daily News
Woody Allen's easy-to-like but lightweight "Cafe Society" serves up just you'd expect from the seasoned writer and director.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
As in many of Allen's period comedies, the dialogue sounds completely modern and evokes the era only in its endless name-dropping.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
A small fiction of amiable appeal and vibrancy which goes down as easily as a fizzy cocktail.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
"Cafe Society" meanders a bit . But because it's from a veteran comedian and filmmaker, it also has some smart jokes, and beautiful images.

Name : Calvin Wilson / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A love story drenched in nostalgia, "Cafe Society" is a film of rare beauty.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
"I'm kind of half-bored, half-fascinated," Eisenberg tells his bro over the long-distance line, and the sentiment could also apply to the movie - although Storaro's sumptuous cinematography makes even its mundane moments enchanting.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
Woody Allen's new period piece is no match for "Midnight in Paris," but the fine cast and bittersweet themes carry the day.

Name : Matthew Lickona / Alias : San Diego Reader
It's handsome, and pleasant, and polished, and sedate. You won't laugh or cry. You may, however, smile or sigh.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
The whole film feels charmingly insubstantial, just as it's meant to, with beautiful settings, amusing people and, for philosophical context, a classic Woody Allen one-liner.

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Stewart is irresistible here. Allen is a legendary director of women, and Stewart's performance is shockingly good, awards-caliber work.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
"Cafe Society" is a good-looking nothing, but there are times - thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade - when "nothing" is sufficient.

Name : Mark Feeney / Alias : Boston Globe
It's about '30s glamour and swank. More accurately, it's about nostalgia for those things. Either way, it's not about characters or chemistry or anything much resembling emotion.

Name : Mike D'Angelo / Alias : AV Club
Watching this film feels like listening to a formerly great pianist whose fingers are now gnarled with arthritis. The notes are right, and played in the correct order, but the tempo is way, way off.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Allen's literal voice, which supplies narration, sounds unusually sluggish and weary. The same is true of his voice as a writer and director. For every snappy scene or exchange there are three or four that feel baggy and half-written.

Name : Anthony Lane / Alias : New Yorker
There is a gravity to it, and a tug of sadness, that cannot be accounted for by the story.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
Cafe Society, is intermittently lovely and melancholic.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Romantic, bittersweet and funny as hell, Cafe Society turns Hollywood inside out, rooting through the superficial tinsel to find the real tinsel. You go away gobsmacked, beaming and happy to be both.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Buoyed by the nuanced performances of Stewart and Eisenberg, the 80-year-old Woody Allen creates a ravishing romance shot through with humor and heartbreak.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
"Life is a comedy written by a sadistic comedy writer," Bobby quips. Cafe Society, on the other hand, is a comedy written by a benumbed one.

Name : Megan Garber / Alias : The Atlantic
For all its beauty and its star power, the movie never elevates to anything beyond a kind of storyboard sketch.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
It'll probably never make it into anyone's list of the 10 most-important Allen films. But I'd watch it again over a few movies that would.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Woody Allen has made 46 films, of which I've seen 46, and I'm not sure which of us is more tired of them.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
It isn't a particularly great Woody Allen movie. Nor is it a particularly disappointing one. It falls into the vast middle ground on his resume - the movies you enjoy sitting through, but quickly forget once the lights come up.

Name : Bill Zwecker / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
It's a beautiful thing to behold.

Name : Kate Taylor / Alias : Globe and Mail
Cafe Society is mainly a small and unnervingly familiar private drama that is never funny enough nor smart enough to justify its anachronistic style.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
Allen narrates in a voice that, for the first time, suggests his 80 years of age. But his touch lightens with each film, and the melancholy bubbles up from below and catches you off guard.