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The desultory intellectualism of the references, combined with an almost total lack of credible dramatic motivation or interpersonal interactions, marks Irrational Man as a failure – albeit one with its share of qualified successes. Phoenix's slouched, shoe-gazing comportment is as much a piece of rigorous physical acting as his more stylised turns for Paul Thomas Anderson...

In some respects, you can clearly see a master at work – the crafty sensibility of a writer-director who gave us gems such as Annie Hall and Manhattan. And when you are about to convince yourself that maybe, just maybe, this might be Allen's return to form, he surreptitiously blindsides you with the sort of lethargy in execution that has characterised much of his recent work (case in point: the absolute horror that was Magic in the Moonlight).

[Irrational Man feels] like Chabrol. It's a breezy, superficial film about murder and philosophical angst... Little in the story comes off as a surprise, since the characters talk about nearly everything they do before actually doing it. And yet that feels appropriate enough, as Irrational Man is all about the seductive power of ideas, namely the idea of pulling off a "perfect" crime.

Irrational Man is so fundamentally uninspired that a viewer almost immediately begins looking for subtext... [It's] a rather rote assemblage of late Allen tropes, particularly the bourgeois murder plot and the moral inconstancy of women, particularly those younger ladies who are inexplicably drawn to older, wiser men. In other words, Woody is orchestrating his dirty-old-intellectual fantasies while nominally absolving his lead character with a modicum of self-indictment.

Because it's set in academia, Irrational Man is one of those slightly exasperating Allen pictures in which the dialogue amounts to endless variations on "I'm well aware of what Kierkegaard said." Once the plot finally kicks in, however (following about 45 minutes of laborious setup), the film is a lot of fun, as Abe struggles to conceal evidence of his crime while simultaneously feeling suddenly invincible.

Nothing about this movie is practically or intellectually plausible. Lena Dunham's most recent season of Girls gets more comedy from liberal arts life than does Allen's last handful of trips to college. So does Noah Baumbach's upcoming farce Mistress America.

[Allen's] latest, Irrational Man, is, whether one accepts or rejects its brutal fatalism, a totalizing aesthetic experience that provides evidence that this seventy-nine-year-old is a craftsman we should still be paying attention to.

Allen's sketch of the campus owes nothing to observations of real students or teachers; the setting and the setup are living abstractions that the trio of lead actors invest with their own vital whimsy. But, when the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen's venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.

The biggest problem is the script. "Irrational Man" has been directed by Allen with characteristic grace and economy (he's been a better director than writer for about twenty years), and it has been acted with what could be described as heroic resourcefulness... But every good effort by cast and crew is undone by Allen's disorganized, boringly declamatory screenplay, which often sounds like a bad impersonation of Allen's dialogue by somebody who has listened to his films with a superficial ear.

The same old" is Allen's default mode, and here it trucks along to a modest insight and an arbitrary twist-of-fate ending. But at least there are a few bumps along the way—courtesy of Phoenix and a sly Chekhov's-gun tease—and, as always, some pretty lighting by the great Darius Khondji.

A soulful presence, Mr. Phoenix excels at playing characters who often struggle to express themselves one tormented or comically inarticulate word at a time. Here, though consistently watchable, he often seems ready to flee the scene, perhaps because his character is so uneasy or because Mr. Allen hasn't given Mr. Phoenix enough material to turn Abe into a thinker who can persuasively cite Heidegger.

I've lost interest in reading the artist's life into his work, and I've gotten used to (and am occasionally taken by) the Woody malaise. He's his own man: Greatness eludes him, though rarely in the profound ways I get from e.g. F.F. Coppola. Preferred the Darius Khondji cinematography in Magic in the Moonlight; he works best in period. The same Ramsey Lewis Trio needle drop (which begins with the end of a round of applause) is reused throughout, so many scenes clap for themselves.