3. Hollywood Ending (2002)
Though blessed with one of the strongest concepts of any recent Allen film - in which a downtrodden director, helming a film for his ex-wife, suddenly loses his vision and has to direct the film blind -
Hollywood Ending can't quite meet the sum of its parts. The premise is brilliant, a self-reflexive exercise for the director which sees him contemplating his own critical failure in the mid-90s and early 2000s, while satirising the big-budget Hollywood system, in which directors frequently make films "blind", at least from an artistic perspective. However, despite a strong opening and amusingly happy ending, the middle sags wildly, and Allen doesn't seem to know where to steer the satire; there simply isn't enough mileage in the script for the film that Allen decided to make regardless.