WOODY Allen has made a film every year since 1977 (“Annie Hall”). His latest unfolds among Hollywood’s people not long after movies learned to talk and hit the screen in glorious colour, using a movies-centric collection of issues and cultural practices in a community where fame once achieved depended on the next movie and wealth came to people who never appeared on a screen.

Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) leaves home in New York for Hollywood, where he taps his talent agent uncle Phil (Steve Carell) for a job. Success awaits him, on a modest scale. By the end of the film, Bobby is joint owner of a New York nightclub where the rich but not necessarily famous come to spend their surplus money.

Allen takes his characters for journeys among Hollywood behaviours, post-Prohibition racketeering and the so-called café society that provides an environment that feeds more on an obsession with pleasure than on social merit. His observations are perceptive and often abrasive.

It’s agreeable stuff, well-enough written and acted, with high visual values backed by a wonderful collection of songs of its time. While it’s perhaps Woody at less than his freshest, heck, he’s been generous enough to his fans to justify getting forgiveness from them.

At Palace Electric, Capitol 6 and Dendy