The reedy vibrato of Woody Allen’s jazz clarinet bathes the streetlamp-dappled Seine, and we find ourselves seduced once again. In the Parisian edition of his love letters to European culture, Midnight in Paris, I wonder if it is with the splendour of the city, or with Allen himself, that we are enamoured.

A dazzling satirical fairytale, Midnight in Paris follows Owen Wilson as a disillusioned Hollywoodite on a pseudo-cultural tour of Paris with his fiancée, the beautifully vacuous Rachel McAdams, who finds himself in the 1920s Golden Age by night, bemusedly meeting a Who’s Who of his Lost Generation icons, from Ernest Hemingway to Gertrude Stein. Wilson is Woody Allen incarnate; a pair of urban neurotic glasses away from a Madame Tussauds waxwork, and yet his previously irritating douchebag drawl is somehow endearing against McAdams’ sorority girl chirping, and his charming self-deprecation and hesitant one-liners carry considerably more weight away from his usual territory of junk-food romcoms. The excellent but terminally nauseating Michael Sheen embodies cultural snobbery as a well-read but shallow lecturer, providing a focal point for Allen’s trademark caustic humour at the expense of pseudo-intellectuals.

The difficulty of critiquing Woody Allen films arises from the fact that every movie can be boiled down to one or other of his personas: the cynic, the philosopher, the romantic. We are essentially in a one-sided conversation, in which the plot and cast are props in what would otherwise be a soliloquy. Allen even has Owen Wilson dress like him. It is a remarkably self-indulgent thing to do, and I am objectively at a loss to understand how he has gotten away with it for the past forty years. The answer of course lies in Allen’s neurotic insight and remarkable wit; a standard-bearer for middle-brow awkwardness, he is almost universally beloved.

Like Vicky Cristina Barcelona before it, this film capitalises on decades of success in ruthlessly satirising the intellectual upper classes, while providing a reverent homage to those Allen considers worthy of attention. Evoking the relativity of nostalgia, perhaps Allen is remembering his own Golden Age, when Annie Hall placed him among the greats. Or perhaps we are to infer that the best is yet to come.