Woody Allen’s new film is a picturesque however boring comedy about infidelity, set on the San Sebastián Movie Competition.

“In the movie, were all your orgasms special effects?” is an example of the humor, which is broad and not especially clever. The same might be said of the film’s central conceit, in which Shawn’s Mort Rifkin — like many Woody Allen protagonists before him, a stand-in for the filmmaker himself: neurotic, insecure and obsessed with death, God and the meaning of life — has black-and-white dreams based on classic films by such directors as Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Orson Welles. These cinematic nightmares show Allen to have insights on such movies as “Citizen Kane,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Exterminating Angel” and “The Seventh Seal” that are no deeper than those of a C student in an undergraduate film history class.