You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger follows two generations of a London family as their relationships come apart. After four decades of marriage, Alfie abruptly leaves his wife Helena and takes up with Charmaine, a much younger woman. Helena, shaken by the separation, turns to a fortune teller who predicts a new romance in her future. Their daughter Sally is also unhappy at home: her husband Roy, a struggling writer, becomes fixated on a woman he sees from his window, while Sally herself develops feelings for her employer, a gallery owner named Greg.

Woody Allen wrote and directed the film, the thirty-eighth of the forty-eight features he has directed in chronological order, arriving between Whatever Works and Midnight in Paris. Anthony Hopkins and Gemma Jones play Alfie and Helena, with Josh Brolin and Lucy Punch as Roy and Charmaine, and Antonio Banderas and Freida Pinto completing the main cast. The production brought together British, Spanish and American companies on a budget of about 22 million dollars, and it went on to take roughly 36 million dollars worldwide.

Audience response has been modest: on IMDb it holds 6.3 out of 10 from nearly 49,000 votes, and on TMDB 5.9 out of 10 from a much smaller sample. A film critics' rating of 5.5 out of 10 from 133 reviews places it slightly below the audience scores, suggesting a muted reception on both sides.