In recent times, Woody Allen has indulged in revisiting classics of American cinema. This was the case with BLUE JASMINE in 2013, a loose adaptation of A STREETCAR NAMED OF DESIRE (1947), the play by Tennessee Williams, which Elia Kazan brought to the screen in 1957. Although the tone wasn't the same as the melodrama of the film starring Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in '57, Woody Allen's film brought an ironic edge that made the drama of the main character, played by Cate Blanchett, all the more poignant. Blanchett received an Academy Award for her performance in the film.

In IRRATIONAL MAN (2015), Allen takes a look at Alfred Hitchcock's classic ROPE, released in 1948, in which a group of university students murder one of their classmates, striving for the perfect crime and hoping to please their favorite professor, played by James Stewart. In the 2015 film, the elements are similar, in that the story unfolds in a university setting and the victim's death occurs after an intellectual exercise that almost justifies the criminal act. The difference lies in the fact that it is the professor who carries out the act, and it is the students who expose his transgressions. Again, it is Woody Allen's ironic tone of subtle comedy that defines the film's style and is also what makes it more aggressive, because just when the viewer expects the director to express shock and outrage at his characters' actions, elegant cocktail music takes over, setting the film's pace.

In Woody Allen's hands, the revision of literary and film texts becomes a true rewriting of the original stories. He gives new meaning to the question of why it is important to be cultured, or rather, he reframes the question of what constitutes originality.