Presents - Midnight in Paris

Synopsis

Successful Hollywood screenplay writer Gil Pender is spending vacation in Paris with his fiancée Inez and her parents since his future father-in-law is on a business trip. Gil is an aspiring novelist that loves Paris, and dreams of living in the city after getting married with Inez. Furthermore, the romantic Gil believes that the golden age of Paris was in the 1920s and he loves to walk through the streets of the city. When Inez meets her former boyfriend, the pseudo-intellectual Paul, with his girlfriend Carol, they spend some time together visiting tourist attractions. In the night, they drink wine at a party and Paul invites the couple to go dancing with Carol and him. However, Gil prefers to return walking alone to the hotel. At midnight, an old car stops and the passengers invite him to go a party and sooner he realizes that he is back to the 20's, where he meets his favourite writers, musicians and artists and lives his dream.

Reviews

Midnight in Paris is a loving embrace of the city, of art and of life itself.
Tom Long  June 10, 2011

There is breezy comedy to be made of a YouTube-age writer meeting the icons and idols of a bygone, classical era, but Allen goes deeper, expanding on his time-travel device to make unexpected and unexpectedly generous observations.  

Gary Thompson  June 3, 2011

The blend of charm, magic, wit, and characterization come together to make this an engaging and intellectually stimulating experience. This is a great film and one of the best of the year thus far.

Jeff Beck  September 20, 2012

Awards

Best Screenplay - Woody Allen - 2011 Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Best Original Screenplay - Woody Allen - 2011 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Top Ten Film of the Year - 2011 New York Film Critics Online

Trivia

Woody Allen stayed at the Hotel Le Bristol during filming - the same hotel where characters Inez and Gil stay. 

When Woody Allen had enough budget to shoot the movie in 2006, he contacted his preferred cast but many were working on different projects and couldn't commit. When Owen Wilson's name came up for the leading role, Allen rewrote the character to fit. 

Woody Allen won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for this film. The Oscar was Allen's fourth and the first he had won since Hannah and Her Sisters twenty-five years earlier. Allen received two Oscar nominations for this movie, the other being for Best Director, them being his 22nd and 23rd nominations. 

With four nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Art Direction and Best Original Screenplay), this picture is the most Oscar nominated Woody Allen film since Bullets Over Broadway which got seven Oscar nominations. 

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