AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

junk-monkey Every now and then for the last couple of decades I have taken the occasional look at a Woody Allen film (with as open a mind as I can muster) in an attempt to work out what it is that people seem to adore about him so much. Having just read an extended magazine interview with the man in which he came over as a genuinely likeable human being I thought I was in a good place to have another go at finding what 'it' is.Whatever it is I didn't see it here. You would have thought with a title like 'A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy' there would have been some sex or comedy in it. Apart from one throwaway line line delivered near the end of the thing which was genuinely funny - more for the delivery rather than the content - the film didn't raise a smile! And the sex was endless talk about off- screen activity and a couple of 'humorous' on-screen sub Benny Hill fumbles.I hearing an interview with Jack Lemmon, many years ago, in which he said that when Billy Wilder was directing him in a scene in 'Some Like it Hot' Wilder gave him a pair of maracas to hold, and told him to shake them after Tony Curtis said his line and stop before he delivered his own. Lemmon was perplexed. The scene's dialogue was a snappy and rapidfire to and fro interchange. The maraca shaking would slow it down to a crawl. But Wilder was the director and Lemmon did what he was told. When Lemmon saw the film with an audience he understood. Curtis' s line were funny. So were Lemmons'. If Lemmon had come in with his line as soon as his actor's instincts told him to, the audience would not have heard it because they were still laughing at Curtis's previous line. His line would have been lost. Curtis's next line would make no sense... and the scene would have collapsed like a house of cards. Wilder knew where the laughs were and built space into his direction to let the audience enjoy them. Allen doesn't leave any space for the audience. We're not given any space to get the' jokes' (such as they are) because there's always someone talking straight after them. What they are saying is usually inane piffle and by the time you've ed that what they are saying is of little consequence and not a zinging comeback (if was generous I could concede that a lot of the inconsequential dialogue here is Allen's carefully crafted, verbal equivalent of maraca shaking) any humour in the 'joke' that just went past has evaporated.The less said about Allen's helpless, "oh look at me,I'm so clumsy" shtick the better.I'll give it a couple of years and have another go and seeing what the Allen cultist adore so much.

HotToastyRag Anyone who's seen Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music is probably partial to the song "A Weekend in the Country" and will be able to appreciate the obvious inspiration behind Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. Woody Allen and his wife Mary Steenburgen host a weekend party in their country home for their friends: Mia Farrow, Jose Ferrar, Tony Roberts, and Julie Hagerty. Sexual tensions abound, and pretty soon everyone winds up in bed with someone they shouldn't! While I'd categorize this one as more wacky than funny, it's not Woody's worst film. There are some pretty funny moments, especially if you recognize the famous spoof. If you're looking for the depression, moral dilemmas, and discussions about life's great mystery—themes that are usually present in Woody Allen movies—rent Crimes and Misdemeanors or Hannah and Her Sisters. But for something incredibly light and fluffy, watch the preview and see if you might like A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

ElMaruecan82 "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" What an intriguing title if you're not quite familiar with the work of Shakespeare or Bergman, it reads itself as if Woody Allen was so trusting our general knowledge that he expected us to know what would sneak behind the bush of this charming title. Well, for one thing, I'm not familiar with what it is referring to, but nonetheless I thought it would be the opportunity to tackle some sexual issues with a subtly comedic tone, something less raunchy than "Everything You Wanted to Know" yet more sophisticated than "Manhattan". Unfortunately, whatever Allen tried to do, all we got at the end was a timid approach of sexuality in a light-hearted drama.That's the inconvenience with movies defined by their titles, it better gets it right... and in this unfortunate case, Allen didn't have the gutsy approach that could have inspired more ionate and inflamed moments, and the level of detachment that could have enlightened him about the danger of taking himself too seriously, it's already bad for a dramatic director, let alone a comedic one. Woody Allen takes himself too seriously on a first-degree level and it is so frustrating that I wonder how the fans felt after watching this movie that followed the puzzling "Stardust Memories": Allen's homage to Fellini's "8½" ... when the desire to copy his idols became more and more symptomatic.Take "Love and Death", which I believe to be his funniest comedy, the movie features many takes on Bergman's iconic shots but the genius aspect is that Allen uses the tone of parody, which creates a clever mix between homage and the awareness of his own comedic talent, something that Bergman could never have achieved. In "Interiors", Allen surprises his world with a dramatic film that can be considered the most Bergmanian non-Bergman film, but he doesn't fool anyone, the movie is so un-Allenian that the feeling of cinematic experimentalism and artificiality could have ruined the film is it wasn't redeemed by the actors' performances, a great script and a tactful direction."A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" is in the continuity of "Stardust Memories" but at least the movie features a plot, made of triangular loves, between men whose sexual desire is like a com with the north deviating from the women they actually love and women who are so apparently moral that the only way for her to it their own luscious desires is when a man makes the first step. And the film takes place in midsummer, in a natural setting inhabited by never-ending twilights and ephemeral nights, a peculiar cycle governing the natural impulses of all the protagonists. The movie features many magnificent shots accentuated by an enchanting cinematography depicting nature in a hormonal state.Indeed, Nature steals the show in a film where the acting could have been much better handled. It had a strong lead through the character of Leopold, Jose Ferrer in a flamboyant performance as a rationalist scientist with such a huge ego we would never believe he'd fall into the trap of adulterous basic instincts, since he's already engaged to the angelic Ariel, Andrew's first true love. Andrew is Woody Allen, the wacky inventor and Tony Roberts is a sex-addicted doctor whose personal theory is that 'marriage is the death of hope', he comes with his nurse, Dulcy, played by Julie Hagerty, a woman with a frivolous lifestyle matching Maxwell's personal conceptions. And last but not least, there's Adrian, Andrew's wife, played by Mary Steenburgen, a woman whose rigidity rhymes with another unfortunate word. It's only fitting that it's always the men making the steps because their characters are so well-written that I question the distribution of the roles for the female cast, a weakness that undermines the quality of the film.Maxwell has a love at first sight with Ariel, but she's so cold and dull that I could never have pictured her as his soul-mate ... while there was much more sex-appeal in Adrian. Dulcy was supposed to exude something that would convince Leopold to live his last hours of freedom but the role is played with such fragility and shyness that I failed to see the appeal again. I don't blame the actresses, although I thought Mia Farrow's performance was awkward and would have better suited the character of Adrian, but at the end, we have the men leading the film and the women's performance is like a self-reflexive take on the script's own weakness, it's as if the story was also sinning by cinematic frigidity. I suspect Allen already had the ending in mind, and a promising script on the paper but on the screen, echoing his own inventions, it failed to take off despite all the pedaling.The film can be compared to a sexual moment with nice preliminaries ruined by a climax that just comes off too early, and this is what I felt from the ending, a sort of waste of actors' talent, of actors' direction and a bizarre sensation of 'unfinished material'. Each one is entitled to some mistakes, I wouldn't call this film a mistake, because many parts are still enjoyable but there's just something slightly misleading in the title for there's no real sex and no real comedy, only some flirts, some smiles and at the end … a big interrogation mark.This interrogation mark would have been dramatic if we didn't know that Woody Allen would finally pull himself together and bring out his greatest streak of movies in the 80's, with "Hannah and Her Sisters" as the pinnacle, a film with more than six characters but each one written with an extraordinary level of a three-dimensionality that cruelly lacked in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy", not Allen's best film but still better than some best directorial works

MisterWhiplash Woody Allen can surprise every once in a while, and Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a slight surprise. If I had heard more praise for it then I would've expected whatever, but it seemed to be one of his more "minor" works, something he wrote and directed very quickly in the midst of working on his big project Zelig. Expecting just a simple trifle, maybe along the lines of a Scoop or Manhattan Murder Mytsery, I got something more substantial. It draws upon sources of Bergman (Smiles of a Summer Night, making it Allen's only homage of Bergman that isn't dark and depressing), Shakespeare (for obvious reasons of the title, but also for the magical element), and maybe just something else that sprang out of Allen that I couldn't really tell.It's a comedy about mis-matched lovers, and how over the course of a day and night old wounds are opened, old flames come up, and lust is purged for better or worse. It's Woody Allen as an inventor with wife Mary Steenburgen inviting a philosophy professor (Jose Ferrer) and his to-be wife (Mia Farrow, first Allen movie and one of her best), who Allen's character Andrew used to date once, er twice, er three times. Then there's Julie Hagerty and Tony Robbins, good friends of the hosting couple, and with Robbins feeling some hardcore affection for Farrow, and the marriage between Allen and Steenburgen being in momentary peril (and Ferrer's "one last hurrah" ideal in Hagerty), it becomes like a twister game of affections and immense sexual stimulus.Whether or not this all makes sense is besides the point. Allen isn't out here so much for logic- how could he with laughable old self-flying machines and that weird magic box that springs out spirits into the night- as he is for personalities and using his effortless ear for dialog. Some of this is really funny, and even clever, like the sly joke with the bathtubs filling up with water (and Robbins/Farrow 'falling asleep', or with the near sex scene on top of the stove in the kitchen. So much of Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy tries to deny the whimsy of the setting, but by the end it becomes undeniable. Rarely has infidelity been this much fun, or with such good performances, in a film by this director, and it should be marked as one of his underrated (or maybe not widely seen) piecfes; for the nature montage early on alone, which is like the forest version of the opening of Manhattan, is worth viewing.