Woody Allen is such a staple of New York and city-living that it's a hoot to see him at the center of the far-out futuristic surroundings in "Sleeper". His nuttiness isn't tempered by the visual gimmicks, and the movie is both recklessly daffy and wonderful to look at (it's great eye-candy, one of his best designed pictures). Allen's screenplay, co-written with Marshall Brickman, about an ulcerous health food fanatic frozen in 1973 and thawed out 200 years later, is a doodle that desperately has to work up new subplots just to keep going, and the entire brainwashing thread is wearing (although it does allow Diane Keaton to do an impersonation of Brando which is very funny). The film is decidedly shrill, and the neurotic one-liners (mostly about sex) seem to come from nowhere. Still, the movie has a lunatic decadence to it, and a kind of nostalgic abandon, which makes it both silly and edgy at the same time. *** from ****
Review of Sleeper
