I would nominate this as the worst of Woody Allen’s color comedies to date, though there’s a morbid fascination in the degree to which it exposes both his cynicism and his contempt for his audiencesomething expressed more directly in Stardust Memories, a more interesting picture. Here Allen plays a neurotic film director whose career is on the skids and whose ex-wife (Tea Leoni) campaigns to get him hired on a $60 million picture. Still in a rage over her leaving him for the studio boss (Treat Williams) she’s now engaged to and works for, the director goes psychosomatically blind just as the picture begins shooting, a fact that he and she contrive to keep secret. I’m sure Allen knows that blind people know which directions voices come from, just as I’m sure he knows that Jerry Lewis stopped being in vogue in France about 25 years ago. But he also knows that some people will laugh at gags predicated on misinformation about these matters and proceeds accordingly, as if to demonstrate how much he despises them for laughing. (For more than a decade it’s been Allen, not Lewis, whom French audiences have adored.) I only laughed once here, at a Treat Williams reaction shot; the rest of the time I was trying to figure out why Allen made this movie. With George Hamilton, Debra Messing, Mark Rydell, and Tiffani Thiessen. 114 min. (JR)