No one is about to claim for Woody Allen's output in the nineties the weight of his oeuvre at the end of the last decade: Hannah and Her Sisters and the too often overlooked Crimes And Misdemeanours especially. Let's quote the Stardust Memories aliens just once more and say that he's back making the early, funny ones again. Mighty Aphrodite is certainly that.

Allen casts himself as Lenny, a sportswriter with a young gallery owning wife (Helena Bonham Carter, doing a tremendous job with the New York accent and frown) who decides to adopt. When Max turns out to be exceptionally bright, Lenny ignores the old nature-nurture debate and elects to track down the mother who could gift such singular genes to her offspring.

Naturally (well this is a comedy) she turns out to be Linda Ash (Mira Sorvino) an Upper East Side hooker and actress, albeit under the enlivening pseudonym, Judy Cum. The meddling Lenny can't decide to let things alone and determines to save Linda from the business and set-up with a nice man.

Sorvino recently took home an Oscar for Linda Ash (cue floods of tears from dad, Paul) and in the early stages -- although she doesn't actually appear for some time -- you have to wonder for the Academy's senses. Tall, possessed of an absurd squeak-voice and cultural aspirations that writer Allen can only ridicule (her astonishing apartment looks to be furnished from the pages of some very specialist publications), she's played for comic effect from the word off. "I'm always attracted to losers," she tells Lenny on their first meeting. But eventually something else emerges from this crude hooker-with-a-heart, a touching, if slightly patronising, innocence that lifts the film to previous Allen heights. Sorvino really is very good indeed.

Of course there have been the naysayers, those who will criticise the picture for its simple-minded lower classes (mind, there is an unintentional laugh to be had when Bonham Carter can't have her own child because, "I can't take a year out right now"), but it would take someone very hard of heart not to smile at Michael Rappaport's supernaturally dim boxer, to whom Schindler's List is "the one with the Jews, right?" Things are wrapped-up a little neatly -- Lenny able to buy off Linda's Neanderthal pimp with little of Travis Bickle's trouble -- and the end is positively fairytale, but to read more into it than light comedy is to want the moon on a stick.

The only real mistake, nagging rather than annoying, is Allen's insistence on using an F. Murray Abraham-led Greek chorus (this is a recast Oedipus Rex, of course) to comment on the action. What can be initially amusing can also get to be in the way. Criticisms that Allen is again casting himself opposite actresses half his age are neither here nor there; no one does Allen like Allen.

Anyway, slight caveats aside, on the Allen sliding scale Mighty Aphrodite has less laughs per square inch than Love and Death, and less weight than Hannah or Crimes, but is more entertaining than last year's rather overrated Bullets Over Broadway. It's a Woody Allen picture and it's very funny; since when has that not been enough?