Writer-director Woody Allen’s follow up to 2005’s “Match Point” is another greed-murder-guilt thriller. Brit brothers played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell hit up an uncle (Tom Wilkinson) for cash, but he enlists them as hitmen to get a witness out of his way. “I need the help of people I can trust with my life,” he confides. “Family is family, blood is blood… You protect your own.” After all, he counsels, the target is a “total stranger” to his nephews. Even if Allen dispenses with his signature Woody-like characters and cadences, not to mention Manhattan neuroses, his favorite moral concerns surface in the U.K. on a sailboat bearing the title. The film’s strength is the brothers’ struggle to justify, then rectify, their deed: “If we were in the army, we’d kill strangers every day.” The mordant irony is limited to quips about Greek tragedy, a clue to the undergrad gravitas that’s all Allen-like. The auteur recently quipped that overseas financiers and locations let him fulfill a youthful fantasy: “When I started making movies, I always idolized people like Bergman and Fellini and Buñuel and De Sica. I always wanted to be a foreign filmmaker.” With Sally Hawkins and an uncharacteristically non-sinusoidal score by Philip Glass. 108m. (Bill Stamets)
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