Another year, another Woody Allen picture, and with this current run -- Husbands & Wives, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and now Bullets Over Broadway -- he seems to have finally bucked his record of one film on/one off. And like the entirely vacuous and extremely funny Manhattan Murder Mystery, this new film, give or take some maturity in the detail, could easily pass for one of the early funny ones.

It's the jazz age and New York playwright David Shayne (John Cusack) comes to rue the day gangster Nick Valenti (Joe Viterelli) agreed to stump up the cash to stage his outrageously pretentious new work, God of Our Fathers. Valenti bankrolled the play for his shrill showgirl girlfriend Olive (an unrecognisable Jennifer Tilly) and insists she is accompanied always by thuggish minder Cheech (Chazz Palminteri). Gradually though, as the luvvies -- Helen Sinclair (Diane Wiest), Eden Brent (Tracy Ullman), the lascivious, corpulent Warner Purcell (Jim Broadbent) -- rehearse, it's the suggestions offered by the anonymous cold-blooded killer that turns Shayne's play into a critical smash, and the same Cheech whose perfectionism and dedication makes him more and more convinced that Olive is ruining his play.

Cusack is essentially playing Woody Allen playing David Shayne. Not only is the writer/director reviving his early funny films, but, it seems, his early funny self with it. Wiest deservedly took a Best Actress Oscar for her old soak Helen Sinclair -- "No! Don't speak! Don't speak!" -- playing Gloria Swanson from Sunset Boulevard on acid. And among the six other nominations, Palminteri shows his scene-stealing performance for De Niro in A Bronx Tale was anything but a fluke. Any other year (ie. not up against Martin Landau's celebrated Lugosi in Ed Wood) he would have almost certainly walked it for the vicious, amoral but divinely gifted Cheech.

Of the remaining, fine cast it's the British Broadbent who stands out as the ballooning former matinee idol whose hot water and lemon diet soon gives way to pockets on stuffed cakes and dog biscuits. In his hands, a piece of pure farce -- a fat man in a corset hiding in a wardrobe -- becomes a comic highlight.

Designed by longtime collaborator Santo Loquasto and shot in rich autumnal oranges and golds by Carlo Di Palma, Allen handles all this with his customary (seeming) effortlessness. The script -- co-written with Douglas McGrath -- offers little in the way of the philosophical inquiry of say Crimes & Misdemeanours or Hannah & Her Sisters, but does allow Allen to dabble, albeit briefly, in questions about the boundaries and responsibilities of the artist; whether, for example, a life is always worth more than art.

It's also, unusually for Allen, slightly over-long, once or twice tossing in a scene of little narrative or comic effect to slow things up. The Woody Allen that once claimed no film need be over 90 minutes is needed here. But for the most part this is a charming, funny valentine to twenties Broadway and yet another surprisingly substantial work in the Allen canon. Here's to next year.