Dir:

Woody Allen

With: Emma Stone, Colin Firth, Eileen Atkins

Runtime: 98 minutes

PLAYERS of the Woody Allen Lottery (motto: "It could be you who gets a funny one …") have had a good run of late. Blue Jasmine was a tragicomic masterpiece with Cate Blanchett in Oscar-winning form as Blanche DuBois with a Birkin bag. Midnight In Paris was vintage Allen at his most playful, this time with the delightfully tousled Owen Wilson in the lead.

Alas, the luck of WAL players is about to run out with Magic In The Moonlight, the writer-director's latest. While the picture is not entirely without its charms, among them Emma Stone playing a psychic, and the sun-baked, blossom-drenched Cote d'Azur setting, it is a dusty piece, almost museum-like in its willingness to take items out of the Allen archives and put them on display one more time.

The film opens in Berlin in 1928 where Colin Firth, aka Wei Ling Soo, an illusionist, is conjuring up a storm in his magic act. When he is not bamboozling audiences, the performer known as plain old "Stanley" to his few friends is a semi-professional debunker of psychics and other stage frauds. Working under the assumption that it takes a kidder to know a kidder, Stanley delights in pulling the curtain aside and revealing the shyster behind.

With that in mind, Stanley's friend Howard (Simon McBurney, one of many fine character actors in the cast) has a job that needs to be done. A psychic of his acquaintance, Sophie, has grown close to some chums of his. Asked to find out if she is the real deal, Howard has been unable to find fault with her. There is no such thing, Stanley tells him, mentally licking his lips at the prospect of exposing this faker.

In person, however, Sophie is a fabulous flirt, and genuinely seems able to read minds. Has Stanley met his match? Will Emma Stone fall for him, or vice versa, despite the age difference? And will everyone have a jolly time on holiday in the South of France?

The answer to the latter is a definite yes. Allen knows his Europe by now, and he has chosen a sublime spot to match previous sojourns in Paris, Barcelona, Rome, and London. Just to make Allen fans feel even more at home, there is a psychoanalyst in the house party, who, in tandem with Stanley, steers the conversation whenever he can towards mortality, the meaning of life, the metaphysical world, and all that jazz.

None of these topics, unfortunately, yields the kind of zingers Allen threw out so frequently in the early years of his screen career. If there is a belter of a joke to be made on such subjects, he has probably already made it.

With no such base behaviour as laughing to detain us, one can only sit back, enjoy the scenery, and the performances of Stone, Eileen Atkins (Stanley's aunt) and other members of the cast. In Stone, Allen has found another winning leading lady to rank alongside Blanchett and Keaton. She is perhaps the closest match to Keaton for comic timing, and in general she rivals the Riviera sun in her ability to light up a scene.

Stone exercises the feather-like touch required in this kind of caper with ease, which is far from the case with Firth. His Stanley comes across as a Bertie Wooster type at first, only to morph, with all his grumping, into Jeeves, and then Mark Darcy from Bridget Jones. Whatever, it is a persona that never quite comes off.

Between the psychobabble, the mannered style and the period setting, there are many sights and sounds that will seem familiar. All of which could be forgiven if the script was up to scratch. But the basic deal with a comedy is that it should make us laugh, and only the most forgiving Allen fan, of which there remain many, could rise to that occasion with this film. For the rest of us, Magic In The Moonlight will be less a case of abracadabra than ah well, better luck next time.