Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen never explains how the travel works: a car pulls up at midnight, Gil gets in, and that is the whole mechanism. Anyone waiting for rules will wait out the film. The twenties passages are a run of introductions, and the people who walk in go unexplained, because you are assumed to know the names. Its real move arrives late, when Gil is carried one step further back into the Belle Époque and the idea closes on him: the golden age is always the previous one. The present day engagement is deliberately underwritten, given almost no defence, so the break is decided in advance rather than asked. Allen built the screenplay backwards from its title, settling on the phrase before he had a plot. Gil was first written as an East Coast intellectual, and the part became a Californian once casting director Juliet Taylor proposed Owen Wilson. This was also the first Allen picture finished through a digital intermediate instead of photochemical timing, and it opened the 2011 Cannes festival, reaching French cinemas on the same day. A good fit if you will wait for the Belle Époque detour, where the argument turns back on Gil himself. Not a fit if you want the twenties figures introduced as they enter; they arrive unannounced and the film moves on.