Six years ago, the New York Times published a front-page article reporting that only eight people had shown up at a Times Square cinema to see an afternoon screening of Woody Allen's new film, Hollywood Ending. To many of us, the number sounded a bit high; surely the eight included ushers, refugees seeking political asylum, undercover cops and vagrants.

The ex cathedra pronouncement that Woody Allen comedies were no longer in vogue came as no great shock to most regular moviegoers, and certainly not to people under the age of 30 (sticklers who prefer comedies that are actually funny), as it had been widely reported in other outlets that the once-revered actor/ writer/director hadn't made a film worth seeing in years, and nothing vaguely approaching the quality of Annie Hall, Broadway Danny Rose, Manhattan, The Purple Rose of Cairo, or even Bullets Over Broadway. People didn't talk about Woody Allen movies any more, not even people who had been breathlessly waiting for his latest release since their university days. Allen was a spent force, and - because of his unorthodox parenting style, his unseemly custody battles with ex-partner Mia Farrow and the distressing allegations of child abuse that arose from this contretemps - an embarrassment.

Be that as it may, the front-page coverage by the NYT, a newspaper whose core audience consists of people who positively adore the witty foreign-films-lite of the type Allen once offered, was a watershed moment: in a sense, a long-delayed eulogy over a corpse that had been awaiting interment for years. It was a pretty clear indication that Allen was finished as a driving force in US cinema.

Nothing if not resilient, the feisty auteur trundled off to Britain in the hope of reviving his career. The result was a glum trio of daft, extraneous London films: the sycophantic, culturally benighted Match Point, the paleolithic murder mystery Scoop, and the lugubrious drama Cassandra's Dream. Allen, who had complained vociferously about Hollywood's crass obsession with big-budget films, was hoping that his diehard European fans would flock to his latest offerings, thereby shaming his compatriots back home into revising their opinion of his recent work. This tactic paid off with Match Point, a deceptively repugnant film that did shockingly well at the box office considering its shallow premise and asinine plot, but Scoop was not a hit.

The water having run dry at this particular oasis, Allen then moseyed along to Spain, where he began shooting Vicky Christina Barcelona, which debuted at the Cannes film festival this weekend. The cast includes Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson, very possibly the only actor on the planet who is more annoying onscreen than Allen himself.

Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films. Europeans are the ones paying the freight for Allen's cavalcade of duds.

To those of us who have watched Allen's two-decade decline into that cataleptic Eric Claptonesque state where an artist is revered as a god, but not by anyone who originally worshipped in his church, Allen's Grand Tour of Europe is baffling. I have seen Match Point three times now and simply cannot keep a straight face during Allen's perplexing and in many ways offensive attempt to make a Mike Leigh movie. The film is ostensibly about class: a penniless Irish ex-tennis star (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is determined to rise above his station by reading Dostoyevsky, attending La Traviata and Damien Hirst exhibits and marrying Emily Mortimer.

Unfortunately, Allen gets it all wrong: when you shoot a Mike Leigh movie, you aren't supposed to make Mummy and Papa and their grouse-shooting twit progeny the heroes. And when you repeatedly show Mummy and Papa and Twitty and Tweedledum at Covent Garden going into raptures over Verdi, you can't then have Mortimer salivating at the prospect of attending Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Woman in White. It makes you look like an idiot. Here, as in so many other Allen films, art, music and literature serve a phony, ornamental function; you never really believe that any of his characters actually enjoy abstract art or have read Aristophanes. It's just an excuse for the college drop-out Allen to show off. "Look, Mom! I know who Modigliani is! See, I can pronounce the word 'Proust'." Match Point is like a dozen other Woody Allen movies: Low-Fat High Culture, Bergman for Beginners.

Ostensibly a parable about the role of luck in human destiny, Match Point is actually yet another opportunity for the notoriously craven, Wasp-obsessed director to suck up to the wealthy, heaping all the abuse on the depraved - Irish! - working-class slob who tries to better himself, while reserving the most glowing admiration for the aforementioned Mummy and Papa, paragons of pristine plumminess and supah seraphic swellness. The crowning moment in the film occurs when the prole gets a surprise late-night visit from the ghost of his mistress (Johansson), who still seems pretty ticked off that he blew her head off with a shotgun just as she was getting ready to pick out baby clothes for her unborn child. Oliver Twisted handles the dopey ditz well enough, but then when the ghost of Johansson's next-door neighbour also pops by for a late-night confab, and demands why on earth he had to blow an innocent bystander like her to smithereens, he replies by quoting Sophocles. This is the reason there were only eight people in that Times Square movie theatre six years back. We got sick of this malarkey years ago.

In the follow-up to Match Point, Allen made the disastrous decision to cast Johansson in the role that had previously been played by Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow - actresses who can actually act. He made the equally disastrous decision to cast himself as her sidekick, a klutzy third-rate magician. Thus, while he had officially taken the hint and stopped casting himself opposite nubile young women in romantic situations where he got to paw them for a few hours, Scoop ended up with Allen and Johansson sharing the screen together most of the time, with the dapper male lead Hugh Jackman twiddling his thumbs off-camera.

In other words, Allen - who simply has no idea how cadaverously gross he looks onscreen at this juncture, who simply cannot accept that he is not the second coming of Groucho Marx - was back to his old tricks as The Dirty Old Man with a Heart of Gold. The laughs seeming to have dried up, Allen next cranked out Cassandra's Dream, a grim tale about two brothers who decide to launch second careers and become the most inept hitmen in the history of south London. The film is essentially a meditation on the meaning of life, which raises the interesting question of why it is set in south London.

There is no law against making movies about amateur working-class hitmen, just as there is no law against making movies about shotgun-toting tennis stars masquerading as Notting Hill burglars who quote Sophocles to spectral apparitions. But if you people on your side of the Atlantic are going to keep funding this hokum, you're going to have to accept the responsibility. My greatest worry is that Allen will keep this European tour going for the rest of his life, dropping in on one gullible country after another, making a couple of locally financed films and then blowing town before the stench hits.

I can see a Zagreb-based Woody Allen film where the director plays a washed-up Serb stand-up comic whose career is suddenly revived by meeting a perky Bosnian-American exchange student played by Thandie Newton. I can see a Polish Woody Allen film about a washed-up klezmer player whose career is revived by a chance encounter with a Santa Cruz forensic scientist (Tina Fey) investigating Chopin's suspicious death. I can see a Macedonian film about a social-climbing rag merchant who keeps getting visits from a ghost who claims to be Alexander the Great, but is actually a delusional Second Avenue deli counter man named Herbie Schlegel.

I can see movies with names like Fulvio's Inamorata, Anne-Laure et Ses Tantes Amusantes, The Caper Was in Copenhagen, the Kapers in Kiev and Trust Me, Mahmoud, I Can Get It for You Wholesale! I can see the sultry, maladroit, pointless Johansson cast as Mata Hari, Marlene Dietrich, the Empress Dowager, Helen of Troy, Judy Garland and Boudica's long-lost twin sister, Vicki. I can see Allen casting himself opposite Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway, Audrey Tautou and three dozen as-yet unborn children. Not only can I see a reworking of Hannah and Her Sisters, I can see Allen starring as an aging Lothario in Hannah Montana and Her Sisters. I can see this thing going on and on, year after year, forever. Don't blame us, Europe. We warned you.

· This article was amended on Tuesday May 27 2008. We described a piece in the New York Times about Woody Allen as "a long-delayed eulogy over a corpse that had been awaiting internment for years". It should have said interment (burial) rather than internment (detention). The mistake was introduced during the editing process. This has been corrected.