“Blue Jasmine” is a perfect film, the first perfect film I’ve seen all year. It is smart, well-written, entertaining, beautifully filmed and the performances are unbelievably good. The film is also more remarkable for what it demonstrates of the faculties of Woody Allen. After his amusing but rather shallow exercises of the past years, not only with his European forays but even before (remember “Whatever Works”? I didn’t think so), he manages to completely renew himself

Woody Allen continues his European wandering, this time taking on four stories centered around love, infidelity and fame and set in beautiful Rome, la bella città. Only the narrative is so slight and the comedy so unfunny that "To Rome with love" quickly grows tiresome. This is the first time that Allen has gone in front of the camera in a while and it helps because he gives himself all the jokes that actually hit the mark. In "To Rome" he plays

Baldwin’s forays into politics have been mostly via his chronicles in the Huffington Post. He’s no Hendrik Hertzberg but the world could always use more politically-committed actors (as long as they’re not taking an Academy Awards telecast with their pleas—Susan Sarandon and Tim Robins).

Last April Baldwin wrote an article bemoaning clean-nuclear politics’ “dishonest” agenda in HuffPo (he’s a contributor). Most recently, also in the media outlet, Baldwin wrote a commentary of the recent Anthony Weiner debacle, saying, “He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off.”