MOVIES . . . MIGHTY APHRODITE

“There’s something icky in Woody Allen’s compulsion to write scripts about fifty-something guys ready to dump their wives for nubile waifs the approximate age of Soon-Yi Farrow Previn,” notes critic Richard Corliss. This was the story of 1992’s “Husbands and Wives,” and it returns in this tale of a sportswriter with a pretty, peckish wife and a five-year-old adopted son. Allen’s take on marriage is bleak, clueless; he sees it as a prison for two, where the condemned finally rise to a level of reciprocal pity. But in spite of all this, Allen still has his deft sense of humor: there’s a good movie lurking behind his public troubles. “The suspicion lingers that Woody Allen deserves a good spanking, and not from a cheerful prostitute,” says Corliss. “But listen: humor and sentiment can triumph over stern morality any day. ‘Mighty Aphrodite’ reminds us that Allen is also a filmmaker with an acute touch for fools’ romance.”