Midnight in Paris

For Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's ode to nostalgia, the City of Lights serves as the setting and major player in the story of a quest for inspiration. Owen Wilson is perfectly cast as Gil, a disillusioned writer lacking direction in love and life—a spot-on clone of Allen's stock protagonist. While Gil has always had a soft spot for Paris, he seems to be surer of his love for the city than his love for his fiancée, Inez (a sexily unlikeable Rachel McAdams), who is in town to visit her disgustingly nouveau-riche parents. Foregoing an outing with Inez's pretentious college crush Paul (a well-cast Michael Sheen), Gil decides to take a stroll when, at midnight, he is picked up by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) and taken to a party—in the 1920s. Bemused and bewildered at first, Gil buys into the absurd time-travel premise with little hesitation, and while it's a well-done conceit, there is absolutely zero attempt to explain it. The film's supporting cast is brilliant, highlighted by a rhinoceros-obsessed Dali (Adrien Brody) and a wonderfully pugnacious Hemingway (Corey Stoll), but the movie suffers from a slight lack of self-editing, as the whimsically serendipitous device is unnecessarily stretched too far.