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Perhaps it’s even a first film, or at any rate, he is as an unknown director, lucky enough to score an ensemble with the pedigree of Anthony Hopkins, Naomi Watts, Josh Brolin, and Antonio Banderas.

Mind you, it soon becomes apparent that this filmmaker is no spring chicken. He’s made a film about old people for goodness’ sake, and the fools we make of ourselves when we’re running away from our mortality.

Alfie (Mr Hopkins) has left Helena (Gemma Jones), his wife of several decades, for a young blonde aerobics teacher, Charmaine (Lucy Punch). Understandably miserable, Helena finds comfort in the guidance of a fortune-teller (Pauline Collins), to the great discomfort of her daughter Sally (Watts) and Sally’s husband, Roy (Brolin).

Not that they have so much to feel superior about. Roy is a frustrated writer who isn’t getting anywhere, and who falls in love with the beautiful woman across the road (Freida Pinto). And even Sally, the most stable of the lot, harbours a crush on her married boss (Banderas).

The film isn’t above a bit of caricature and the odd cheap shot (Lucy Punch’s energetic portrait of a gold-digger for instance), but mostly what’s sad about these characters is also what’s funny about them – and vice versa. That’s a delicate balancing act to pull off, but You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is consistently amusing and sometimes poignant.

Surprisingly, perhaps, it’s veteran Gemma Jones who gets the most screen time and the most satisfying emotional arc. Jones may not be a household name, but she’s certainly a household face – she was Bridget Jones’s mum, Mrs Pomfrey in the Harry Potter movies, Connie in Spooks, and Mrs Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (older readers may remember her as the star of TV’s The Duchess of Duke Street).

Helena’s manic faith in destiny is pretty funny, but Jones is also touching when her soul-mate turns out to be someone other than the tall, dark stranger she was expecting.

Hopkins is also quite amusing as the foolish old man, swallowing blue pills and credit card bills to keep up with his new girlfriend – this is a different take on the May-December romance than we usually get from this filmmaker.

There – I can’t keep up the pretense any longer: even when he’s not on screen himself, setting his film in London, and tweaking his favourite themes, Woody Allen is always unmistakably Woody Allen, and he always will be.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger reworks the Chekhovian tragic-farce of two of Woody’s strongest films, Hannah and Her Sisters and Husbands and Wives, into something a little lighter and flimsier. For all its tentative morbidity, the new film doesn’t seem to have engaged Allen’s heart, or even his head all that much.

Skillful and lazy in roughly equal measure, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger is amusing enough. If it really was made by a newcomer, I think we’d probably call it promising. But there’s nothing that makes me doubt Mr Allen’s best work is behind him.