Kate Winslet joins up with Woody Allen, prompts torn feelings

Kate Winslet is going to make her first Woody Allen movie! Or wait: Maybe we should dial back that enthusiasm. In any other year this news would be cause for cheer — a legendary and absurdly prolific filmmaker, with a long track record of directing women to Oscars, working with one of the very finest.

But this is 2016, when we may have finally turned on Woody Allen. The allegations plaguing him for 25 years have never been proven or cleared, but the public seems to have decided, at long last, that we can no longer watch “Annie Hall” or “Bananas” or even “September” without wondering if the man who made them wasn’t the worst kind of villain.

And so here we are, forced to ask ourselves impossible questions. Are great movies tainted by the (possibly) terrible man who made them? Are we succumbing to mob mentality? Or are we letting a guilty man keep directing pleasant movies with good jazz and fine quips that arrive every year like clockwork?

Winslet will probably be excellent in whatever it’s eventually called. But will people see it? We’ll find out when Allen’s latest, “Cafe Society,” comes out in a few weeks.