Woody Allen’s Café Society is a sweet, sad, insubstantial jeud’ésprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro – yet always freighted with a pedantic nostalgia for the 1930s golden age in both Hollywood and New York, nostalgia which the title,itself rather coercively announces. The movie boasts charming and intelligent lead performances from Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg – a career-highlight for Eisenberg, actually, who plays a white tuxedo-ed Manhattan nightclub manager whose broken heart has caused him to undergo a Bogartian growing up: from a gauche boy to a mature, disillusioned man, trapped in the wrong marriage.

Eisenberg is Bobby, a boy from the Bronx who is sick of working for his dad, entertainingly and cantankerously played by Ken Stott. Bobby is nervy, romantic, ingenuous and of course ventriloquising the director in the traditional manner; I can’t think of anyone who has done it better, and there is a kind of generational effect in hearing Allen’s own voice as the narrator: the slower, more grandfatherly version.

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