Match Point

Woody Allen set the script in the Hamptons and moved it to London when BBC Films put up the money, which required a largely British cast and crew. Kate Winslet had the part of Nola and withdrew a week before the shoot. Scarlett Johansson landed in London having met neither the director nor her fellow actors, went straight into one of her biggest scenes, and the part was rewritten as American. Nola’s outsider standing in that family is partly an accident of casting. There is no original score. The soundtrack is built almost entirely from Enrico Caruso’s gramophone recordings made before 1914, and the murder sequence plays under nearly all of the Otello and Iago duet from Verdi’s Otello, so the killing runs as opera, not suspense. The film declines to settle its moral account. The ring that should sink Chris strikes a railing above the Thames, drops back onto the pavement and saves him; the detective who reaches the right conclusion is talked out of it by his partner. Its one Academy Award appearance was a nomination for original screenplay, which it lost. A good fit if you take the opening ball on the net and that ricochet as the film’s whole idea. Not for viewers who need the detective’s correct reading to become a prosecution.