Cannes: "Midnight in Paris" a time-traveling delight - Andrew O'Hehir, Movie Critic - Salon.com: It's pure and unadulterated silliness, mixed with Allen's chronic longing for the era shortly before his birth (isn't that often the one we focus on?), but frankly those are his best instruments these days.
Within a few minutes of this miraculous transubstantiation, Gil is standing in a crowded party with his jaw on the floor, being introduced to a Southern belle named Zelda (Alison Pill) and her husband, Scott (the delightful Tom Hiddleston, aka Loki from "Thor"), while Cole Porter bangs out "Let's Do It" on the piano to an increasingly interested crowd of female onlookers.
And the guest stars just keep on coming! Scott soon introduces Gil to his likable but hypermasculine friend Ernie Hemingway (Corey Stoll), who's full of boxing and hunting stories and bons mots about grace and courage, and who pulls Gil along to meet the mentor and advisor every budding novelist deserves. That would be Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), of course, holding court in her enormous apartment and arguing in several languages with a young painter named Pablo (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo).
If "Midnight in Paris" gets almost totally taken over by this string of cameos -- Bates is terrific, but Adrien Brody steals the show as the charming, somewhat idiotic Salvador Dalí, somehow making the rolling roundness of the word "rhinoceros" hilarious.