... at once a lively tale of growing up lower-middle-class in Brooklyn; a gossipy account of scrambling up the comedy ladder from tabloid gag writer to Oscar winner; an aggrieved attack on Mia Farrow; and a look in the rear-view mirror at his long career with the aim of assessing its worth. (His verdict: not much.) If you’re 100% convinced that he molested his daughter Dylan, this book is not for you. But for those of us who admire that career and can still muster an interest in it, this memoir is for the most part a pleasure to read and entertaining company ... There are some tells in Allen’s account that are disquieting ... And yet you read on (or I did). You’d have to be a real sourpuss not to laugh at the fusillade of one-liners, two-liners, three-liners and so on ... If he’s tough on those supposedly near and dear, Allen is equally unsparing of others, no matter how powerful ... Apropos of Nothing is filled with vivid detail about the movies and the producers, directors and actors with whom Allen worked ... The first third of the book is a romp, but when Allen finally works his way up to Mia Farrow, out comes the heavy artillery ... On his life in exile and his genuine feelings about being ostracized, there is, unfortunately, almost nothing, though a general sense of resignation creeps in.

Volunteering to review [Apropos of Nothing], in our moral climate, is akin to volunteering for the 2021 Olympic javelin-catching team. I told my wife and daughter my plan, and they stared at me as if I’d announced my intention to find the nearest functioning salad bar and lick the sneeze guard ... I believe Allen’s sexual relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his longtime partner Mia Farrow, which began when Previn was 21, was obviously the perverse act of a man whose brain salts are dangerously out of balance ... The accusation that in 1992 he molested his adopted daughter, the 7-year-old Dylan Farrow, is a charge of another magnitude. I believe that the less you’ve read about this case, the easier it is to render judgment on it ... I believe that Hachette, the publishing house that acquired and then canceled Apropos of Nothing, behaved cravenly ... So kill me now or come along, there’s a book to talk about ... Anyone who’s read Allen’s previous books...knows he has an authentic and easygoing voice on the page. That’s true in Apropos of Nothing, too, at least for a while. Later on this book begins to make the clicking sound cars do when the battery has expired ... Like many of our fathers and grandfathers, Allen is a 20th-century man in a 21st-century world. His friends should have warned him that Apropos of Nothing is incredibly, unbelievably tone deaf on the subject of women ... Nearly every time a woman is mentioned, there’s a gratuitous pronouncement on her looks ... The heavy breathing gets more intense as the book moves on ... 'When you meet her you have to fight your way through the pheromones,' he writes about Scarlett Johansson, 19 when he first worked with her. 'Not only was she gifted and beautiful, but sexually she was radioactive' ... The final third of this book falls apart dreadfully. It’s a rolling of credits, a handing out of goody bags ... He can live with being reviled by many, he says, because he doesn’t read the articles. He lives in a bubble. He’s making a new movie.

Allen is surprisingly forthright on the various accusations against him ... Allen is not exactly blasé about it all, but it’s close ... Is this text the same as the one Grand Central had intended to publish? The authorial voice is loose by design, but there are lapses that I’d imagine would bother most editors (like a forgetful relative, Allen clumsily repeats an anecdote, about a statue of him erected in a Spanish town). I do not know whether the more salacious disclosures—such as that Ronan 'had his legs broken a few times and reconstructed to lengthen them' to gain the advantage of height that might serve him in a future political career—have been subjected to legal review ... Apropos of Nothing is a reminder that Woody Allen has been playing himself for a long time ... I was mostly unmoved by his whiz-bang voice; though I’m a sucker for gossip, I was mostly uninterested in his prodigious name-dropping. Leave aside, if you can, the question of whether Woody Allen ought to be canceled and consider, instead, whether he’s simply gone stale.

There are essentially two books in one in this (for what it’s worth) highly consumable memoir by Woody Allen, and it’s not always an easy join between the two. The first and frothier is an overview of his life and loves and influences and achievements, one conveyed in fluent Woody Allenese, all set-ups and payoffs and sprinkles of self-deprecation and existential dread...The second is his vigorous defence against the charges of sexual abuse that have come to cloud his career again after first being raised in 1992 ... Allen mounts a stout defence of himself, and his account of going out with (and never living with) Mia makes her appear simply awful and him appear merely passive and incurious ... Allen argues correctly that he has spent decades writing many strong leading roles for actresses, but it’s a shame he has a tin-eared tendency to define them by their looks ... Still, while it’s jarring to be reading about Mia’s attempts to destroy him one moment and what a joy Alan Alda is to work with the next, the Allen fan will find plenty of details and plenty of delights in here ... his comic defences are his consistent and, in their way, thoroughly sincere response to a world he has countered for so long and so staggeringly successfully with his wit.

It is 'really not so,' Woody Allen remarks defensively, halfway through his new memoir...that 'I gravitated toward young girls' ... That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it ... And so it goes throughout Apropos of Nothing, which came out in a surprise drop on Monday after Allen’s last publisher canceled the book due to staff protests: Allen sticks to his story. Specifically, he sticks to his story about what happened between him, Mia Farrow, and their adopted daughter Dylan Farrow ... Farrow, he says, was abusive and vindictive and obsessive, and on this point he waxes long and eloquent throughout the pages of his memoir ... Here’s the big difference between Allen’s story and the Farrow camp’s: As both Dylan and Ronan Farrow have pointed out, theirs has gone through fact-checking in multiple journalistic outlets, which always corroborate their claims with multiple sources. Allen’s generally has not, and Apropos of Nothing, like most books of nonfiction, was not fact-checked either ...The only big new addition Allen makes to his account in Apropos of Nothing is to address the long line of actors who have denounced him in the wake of the Me Too movement. He bears none of them any ill will, he says, and moreover, he doesn’t think most of them bear him any either ... As for his own behavior, Allen writes, he has only one regret: that he’s never made a film he considers truly great. The rest, he thinks, was all worth it.

Titled Apropos of Nothing, the memoir is actually three books: One is a hilarious account of his Brooklyn upbringing; the second is a superbly revealing analysis of triumphs and flaws in his filmmaking; and the third is a baffling and unhinged report of his personal encounters, which reads like a bad parody of a Dostoevsky novel, with subtitles by Freud ... If the book hides nothing, it also clarifies little ... The Allen-Mia Farrow relationship remains an operatic puzzle ... The Woody Allen who emerges from his memoir is at once numbingly egocentric and self-indulgent ... Significantly, the only character who is lovingly described in his book is Soon-Yi, who embodies both warmth and smarts. To be sure, she also happened to be Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter and Ronan’s sister ... But nothing in Woodyland is simple. 'As I get older I run into the same question that bugged the former prince of Denmark,' he writes. 'Why suffer the slings and arrows when I can just wet my nose and insert it into a light socket?' His answer: 'Rather than live in the hearts and minds of the public, I prefer to live in my apartment.'

As if coping with the ravages of a global pandemic hasn’t made life unpleasant enough, now we’ve all got to talk about Woody Allen. Again ... The least Allen could do was spin us a good yarn for all that trouble ... Apropos of Nothing is 400 pages of feeling stuck sitting next to the world’s most tiresome dinner party guest, a longwinded old man rhapsodizing over his many sexual conquests, recounting in exhaustive detail every fancy meal he has ever eaten and name-dropping all the celebrities he has ever rubbed elbows with. There are some insights into his creative process, but none of them are deep – it’s largely reminisced hobnobbing and dalliances. Until he gets to Mia Farrow and her daughters, Soon-Yi Previn and Dylan Farrow ... The way he talks about women is frequently repellent ... The rest is whinging self-pity ... Apropos of Nothing is devoid of introspection, feeling and accountability. It’s hard to reconcile how a man with enough romance to make enough heart to make The Purple Rose of Cairo, enough humor to make Bananas and enough psychological insight to make Crimes and Misdemeanors can show so little of those same qualities in the pages of this book.

With grammar and punctuation not 100% proofed, the reader would guess that the transfer from Hachette to Arcade/Skyhorse might have made Skyhorse jump to release the book before it was ready ... a long, nearly 400-page, disjointed ramble intended primarily for boomers who will recognize Allen’s name-dropping of celebrities whose paths he’s crossed since the mid-20th century. Younger movie buffs and film school majors will also relate well to this tome, written by a 20th century cultural icon.

...Allen’s autobiography is a mixed bag. If he can write (obviously, he can), and if he is, at points, surprisingly honest (eye-poppingly so, on occasion), then he can also be a bore and a self-deceiver. Of course, if you’re one of those who, disgusted by what you regard as his moral failings, has vowed never to watch Annie Hall or Manhattan again, then you’re unlikely to want to embark on Apropos of Nothing in the first place – and fair enough, that’s up to you. But I’m not in that camp. Nor can I comment on Allen’s alleged abuse of his adoptive daughter, Dylan, a crime of which he was first accused in 1992 (two police investigations into this have come to nothing). What I will say, however, is that I regard it as both disgraceful and alarming that Hachette, his original publisher, gutlessly dropped his book following a walkout by some of its staff – and that though I was sometimes repulsed by it myself, I was also fascinated, even entertained. So, shoot me. Again, that’s your choice ... OK… I’m coming to it. Allen devotes around 100 pages – extremely energetic, committed pages: by turns angry and whiny, disingenuous and sometimes just plain baffled – to his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn and its discovery in 1992 by her mother, his then partner, Mia Farrow ... However, Allen would have been equally damned had he said nothing at all on this score ... This is a horrible, painful and, above all, highly opaque story, and it always will be – up to, and including, the day it is inevitably mentioned in the first paragraph of a long newspaper obituary.

There’s a witty sentiment on nearly every page of this book, but Allen’s chilly approach to his own story feels alternately humble and crabby ... Apropos of Nothing has several...startling lines, revealing the occasional emotional benefits of Allen’s direct, plain-stated prose. Such writing underscores the book’s pervading and often unexplored sadness, suggesting the fuller autobiography that might’ve been ... Allen has a sense of what you want from him, in terms of the glories and the terrifying still hotly contested nadirs of his life ... Allen’s descriptions of women are generally dated and tasteless, probably to willfully spite the Woke Police ... Even Allen’s anger at Farrow, and modern society’s hypocrisy, isn’t mined as fully as it might’ve been; he essentially shrugs it all off, ending his book with a sigh of 'fuck it.'

Many readers will be grateful that Woody Allen’s memoir has arrived in a time of face masks and latex gloves. So toxic is the volume that some may be tempted to rinse it in chloroxylenol before placing on a lectern 2m distant ... so much of the book is harmless ... Was there nobody around to tell 21st-century Woody it’s no longer all right to introduce every female acquaintance with an assessment of her physical charms? ... The more general lauding of collaborators has, at least, the virtue of being unintentionally hilarious. Every actor is wonderful. Every technician is a genius ... The sense of sub-journalistic carelessness is heightened by a series of weird repetitions ... The big questions are knocked back with glib quips. His outrage at the abuse accusations drowns out all other objections ... Still, the stuff about his jazz band is nice.

There may be no American filmmaker alive other than Terrence Malick who has volunteered less insight into his art — his writing process, his taste in actors, his creative struggles, when he thinks he succeeded or failed, why he made the choices he made, what, if anything — please, anything! — he felt ambivalent about ... the list of what Allen is not interested in could and does fill a book and includes, first and foremost, himself. We know this because he misses no opportunity to tell us ... So forget the movies — he certainly has. What remains is the man, and on that score, Apropos of Nothing is one of the most unsettling accounts of a life I ever hope never to encounter again, a slick comedy routine that evolves into a wildly protracted self-justification, then into the longest, most seething deposition/prosecutorial brief in history, only to finish as a series of generic toasts and hat tips. From its first pages, what is meant to amuse is as discomforting as steel-wool underwear ... This is writing about coldness so coldly that you can’t tell what’s giving you chills, the content or the tone, the cruelty alleged or the casualness with which three deaths are enlisted to allege it. It is brain-breaking, and the most coherent thought I could muster about it was 'What kind of person talks this way?'