Make no mistake — Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York is far from the auteur’s best work, and it makes no pretensions otherwise. It’s the only of his films since 1982’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy to come after a full calendar year without a film release for the director, and it has received a largely chilly response, when it’s received any response at all. Of course, most of the criticism levied against the film has less to do with its content and more a provenance come under renewed vitriol over the alleged sexual abuse of his daughter some twenty-seven years prior. For moral detractors of Allen, the film’s very existence is testament to the wider industry’s failings in a new age of systematic cancel culture; never mind that his auteur status, post-#MeToo, has been revoked in a country that once venerated him (2017’s Wonder Wheel served as the New York Film Festival’s closing film, whereas A Rainy Day in New York was given an initial theatrical release in Poland). Critical naysayers point to his self-aggrandizing misanthropy, thematic rehashes, and ephebophilic tendencies as hallmarks of a perennial narcissist unable to outgrow himself and his dated ideas of comedy. [...]