WOODY Allen makes a fantasy time-travel visit to the City Of Light during three of its most notable cultural, intellectual and hedonist eras.

Gil writes episodes for network TV series, but he’d dearly love to finish his novel. He hopes the Parisian ambience will re-invigorate his muse but his fiancée Inez (Rachel Adams) and her parents are more concerned with sightseeing and shopping. Gil sets out to explore on his own and on the stroke of midnight, a yellow taxi draws up beside him and the occupants invite him to a party.

Some party, this one, its guests a choice collection of the creative high-fliers who chose Paris as their place to live and work in the culturally-turbulent years between the wars – Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda, Bunuel, Dali. And Adriana, the gamine who leads Gil among the city’s night-life and its famous inhabitants in the 1920s, in the belle époque where they meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin, and even back to pre-revolutionary years.

Gil is Allen’s doppelganger, wide-eyed at the joyous splendour of the revolutionary cultural environment into which he has stumbled.

Allen delivers pungent comment about how Americans off their home turf amuse or distress their hosts in a story that deftly mixes quirky with iconoclastic. Owen Wilson is gently charming as Gil. As Adriana, Marion Cotillard is a total delight. And Paris is simply beautiful.

At Dendy