Two-thirds of the way through Woody Allen’s new-but-not-really-new film Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet’s nerve-shot, middle-aged tragic heroine, Ginny, turns to her younger lover, Mickey (Justin Timberlake as a living Ken doll), and says forlornly, ‘Rescue me’. I could not have composed a sadder, more apt summation of the situation of Allen’s women onscreen.

A neurotic, disappointed clam-shack waitress with an oafish husband (Humpty, a carousel operator played solidly, unimaginatively by Jim Belushi) and pyromaniac son (the first Woody surrogate), Ginny finds solace in an affair with Mickey, a lifesaver and aspiring playwright (the second Woody surrogate). This new paramour, listening to her bitterly nostalgic recollections of her better years as a promising actress, offers her a brief paradise of excitement, before turning to Ginny’s prettier, girlier, younger stepdaughter (Juno Temple, effective in a terribly utilitarian role) Carolina, who has just returned to the family home from a period of estrangement following an aborted marriage to a mobster. Autobiographical readings can be a lazy, obvious way to interpret the work of an artist, but with its triangular love affairs with stepdaughters and lost women in distress, it is impossible to read Wonder Wheel as anything but the newest manifestation of Allen’s brilliantly, barefacedly sexist and self-involved world view.