In Woody Allen‘s Blue Jasmine, Cate Blanchett‘s tragic character “has lost her public identity — indeed, has become something of a pariah. She has lost her money, and she has to find something to do. Allen, of course, also endured (in the early ’90s) the shattering of his public identity and a barrage of hostility; like her, he was rejected by one of his children in the wake of scandal. (And, like her, he’s known to the world under a pseudonym.) But Allen didn’t lose his money and he didn’t lose his ability to work; he didn’t struggle and strive to recover his former status, because he was able to simply keep going forward — and the artistic results have often been wondrous.”

In Blue Jasmine [and] “in a highly refracted and filtered way, Allen faces some of his most traumatic experiences — even while suggesting that he was spared their most harrowing implications. He shows that he’d be lost, to the point of madness, if he lost the ability to make movies — or maybe just his money. He distances himself from the passionate and frenzied events on-screen — and quietly contemplates his distance from them. It’s a movie that’s rescued in fragments; in those intermittent quiet moments, it’s among his most moving works (there’s a plot twist, too good even to hint at, that arrives like a thunderbolt). But, for much of its running time, it’s a movie to admire while wishing that the wild man would come out from behind the curtain and sing his blues.” — from a 7.25 New Yorker assessment by Richard Brody.