May 26, 2012

Woody Allen's Whatever Works to Kick-Off the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival

by Mark Hurley | Published March 5, 2009

Woody Allen’s highly anticipated new movie, Whatever Works, is set to premiere at the opening night of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. This is the native New Yorker’s first film set in his home city since 2005, after a four-year European hiatus. Allen is fresh off his most recent critical and box-office success, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which produced an Oscar win for Penélope Cruz and earned a Golden Globe win for Best Musical or Comedy.

Whatever Works features an extraordinarily talented cast, including “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David ("Curb Your Enthusiasm), Evan Rachel Wood (The Wrestler), Patricia Clarkson (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and Ed Begley, Jr. (Pineapple Express). Allen is pleased to have his film debut at New York’s famed Tribeca Film Festival, exclaiming it’s “a lovely idea of showing my film in a film festival in my own city. It’s very exciting."

In what looks to be a classic Allen comedy, Whatever Works tells the story of a Greenwich Village eccentric (David) who gets mixed up in a series of quirky relationships, one of which is with Melodie (Wood), a girl half his age.

All film-followers in the Big Apple are looking forward to the premiere, including Tribeca’s co-founder Jane Rosenthal, who admits “I fell in love with New York through Woody Allen’s movies and I am excited we are opening this year’s festival with Sony Pictures Classics for the world premiere of Woody’s Whatever Works.”

The film will debut on Wednesday, April 22, the opening night of the festival.