Staying true to style Woody captures life and wonderment in its own amusement park holding strong acting, excellent script with great camera work.

...from Amazon Studios and writer-director Woody Allen. In 1950's Coney Island, former wouldbe actress and current waitress Ginny (Kate Winslet) is unhappily married to occasionally violent carousel operator Humpty (Jim Belushi). Ginny's son (Jack Gore) from her first marriage is a budding pyromaniac, and she's also having an affair with aspiring writer and current lifeguard Mickey (Justin Timberlake). Their routine is upended when Humpty's daughter Carolina (Juno Temple) shows up on their doorstep, looking for a place to hide out from her gangster husband who wants her dead for talking to the cops. Carolina catches the eye of Mickey, and Ginny starts to spiral out of control.

Allen does a pastiche of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, with sad, desperate characters looking for meaning in their lives. But at least Allen isn't shy about admitting his inspirations, as a character in the film gives the collected works of O'Neill as a gift. Winslet is good, although I had to grow into her performance, which is big and broad. This is one of the first times that I've seen her playing a woman worried about her age (she's turning 40 in the film; Winslet was 41 or 42 when they filmed it). Belushi is another name for the list of performers I never expected to see in a Woody Allen movie, but he fits his role perfectly. Pop singer Timberlake also acquits himself well. If it all doesn't add up to a lot in the end, it's still enough of an interesting character study to be worth a view, as is the colorful, evocative cinematography by Vittorio Storaro.

These days, even the college-educated don't recognize the classics. Spike Lee can film LYSISTRATA, but so long as he moves it to Chicago and calls it CHI-RAQ, no one makes the connection. Instead, they complain that he is slandering Chicago. Well, no doubt, that's what the municipal authorities said about Aristophanes at the time. In this movie, Juno Temple flees from her mobster husband to take refuge with her alcoholic father, James Belushi, and step-mother, Kate Winslett and her pyromaniac son from her first marriage; they've got marginal jobs. The story is told from the viewpoint of Justin Timberlake, who spent the war in the navy. Now he's a lifeguard, studying to be a playwright, conducting an affair with Miss Winslett and falling in love with Miss Temple.

Woody Allen's script makes several references to Eugene O'Neill, and were they living on Nantucket and complaining about how their lives were ruined because the father had made too much money playing the Count of Monte Cristo to attend to his art, everyone would recognize this as LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT. However, Mr. Allen has set it in the neighborhood he grew up in and made the fact that they're so broke they're living in a bankrupt freak show house an important plot point, so this will either be overlooked or seen as blasphemy.

This is one of Mr. Allen's serious movies. I join the general population in not being as fond of those as the ones that make me laugh out loud. Yet I take a good deal of pleasure in his recreation of 1950s Coney Island (although his "Greenwich Village hovel" is remarkably clean for the era) and his clear-eyed vision of a world, now vanished, that existed more surely than the one I live in now sometimes seems to.