Even at 70, Woody Allen is still producing a movie a year. Scoop, a lighthearted, contemporary comedy about a newspaperman who comes back from the dead to help a hungry media student solve a serial killer mystery, is, like last year's Match Point, also set in London.

Scoop is far from Allen's best, but it's still good fun. It has many hallmarks of a Woody Allen comedy, including a beautiful, myopic heroine Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson in ditzy blonde mode) and Allen himself, cast as a lugubrious magician called Splendini.

During a disappearing act, the spirit of a hack appears to Sondra and tells her to pursue the biggest scoop of the century. He reveals that a dashing artistocrat (Hugh Jackman) is London's "Tarot Card Serial Killer," but there is no evidence to prove it.

Sondra enrolls the reluctant Splendini in the hunt, involving various farcical antics, as they slip with surprising ease into Lyman's upper crust social circle, but things get complicated when the wannabe newshound falls for the subject of her story.

Murder and death hath no sting as Allen sets about milking the laughs from his macabre theme - funny to see, for example, the deceased hack evading the Grim Reaper to ensure that his scoop (discovered on the ferry to the Afterlife) is followed up on.

An enjoyable, frivolous jaunt, the film is rife with Allen's wisecracks, the American abroad variety in particular. The elegant settings of the London and English countryside and the stiff upper lips of the aristocratic milieu provide a nice backdrop for Allen's cracks, while Johansson proves a good comedic sport.