The new Woody Allen film, Whatever Works -- his 40th for those keeping count -- signals a return for the filmmaker in more ways than one. For starters, it is his first film to shoot on location in New York since Melinda and Melinda in 2004, interrupting a half-decade European vacation during which the 73-year-old Allen has directed three films in London and one in Spain. It also marks the realization of a project he first conceived in the 1970s as a vehicle for Zero Mostel, then set aside following the actor's untimely death. The result is a light comic burlesque -- a minor key but eminently pleasurable Allen confection -- starring Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm mastermind Larry David as Boris Yellnikoff, an atheistic, egotistical, misanthropic physics professor whose contempt for the entire human race is lessened by his chance meeting with the ditzy Southern belle (Evan Rachel Wood) he finds squatting underneath his backstairs.

Allen is running late on the sunny May afternoon, when I show up at his Upper East Side editing room, tucked away inconspicuously behind a door labeled "Manhattan Film Center" on the ground floor of an otherwise residential building. It's here that Allen cuts all his films, screens them (and others) in a soundproof, green velour screening room, auditions actors for his upcoming projects (and there is always an upcoming project), and otherwise holds court. On the two previous occasions I have come here to interview him, the results have never been less than surprising, Allen holding forth with unexpected candor and ease about his films and about the cosmic matters that weigh heavy on his soul. And today is no exception, as Allen enters in his signature attire of pastel button-down, khaki trousers and well-worn brown lace-ups, apologizes for his lateness, and proceeds to talk at length about the meaning of life (or lack thereof), the trouble with actors, and the allure of younger women.

The Greatest: a mourning-family turkey with all the trimmings

What is the shape and size of a human soul? Does it look like a chickpea? A gumdrop? A pet rock? And if you could somehow extract your soul from your body, what would be left? Would you still be you? These are among the concerns taken up by writer-director Sophie Barthes's Cold Souls, an amusing divertissement that has injected some welcome levity into the dramatic competition of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, which has otherwise been dominated by visions of poverty, incest, domestic violence, dead children, bloody border crossings, and the shadow of 9/11.

Barthes's film, which could alternately be called Being Paul Giamatti, features the hangdog American Splendor star as himself, in a gently existential comedy about the little-known but highly lucrative world of international soul trafficking. During the rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, Giamatti begins to feel consumed by Chekhov's lovelorn, chronically dissatisfied protagonist, finding himself unable to slip out of character when he goes home at night. At the suggestion of his agent, the actor puts his soul on deposit at a Roosevelt Island "soul storage facility" run by a kooky David Strathairn (not playing himself), then later opts for a black market soul transplant -- his new soul having been harvested in Russia and transported to the U.S. in the belly of a human mule (played by the excellent Russian actress Dina Korzun, last seen at Sundance as the wife of Rip Torn in Forty Shades of Blue).