Woody Allen has found the right time and the right place with “Midnight in Paris,” his lightest, funniest and most-satisfying movie in a long time.

Shooting a full film in France for the first time, writer-director Allen has crafted a pastry-light romantic fantasy with virtually no dramatic pretensions.

Allen presents a wide-eyed-with-wonder view of the City of Light that nicely complements his story of an American writer (Owen Wilson) who pines for the 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. All things seem possible here.

Wilson’s Gil is a successful Hollywood screenwriter who yearns to give up the schlock he writes for the screen and focus on his novel instead.

Visiting Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her disapproving parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), Gil whines in the standard fashion of Allen and his various stand-ins since the filmmaker began easing himself off-camera.

Life today is too fast, too hollow, too homogenized, Gil thinks. Wouldn’t it be great if things were rich and vibrant like Paris of the 1920s, he wonders?

As midnight chimes on Gil’s drunken stroll through the city one night, a vintage car full of revelers stops to pick up Gil, who is transported back to that golden era, where he encounters Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and wife Zelda (scene-stealer Alison Pill).

Most important, Gil meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the bewitching lover of Pablo Picasso. Over Gil’s ensuing trips back to the 1920s, he and Adriana find themselves kindred spirits from really different time zones.

Guiltily, Gil tries to conceal his time-traveling dalliance from Inez.

The performances are mostly assured all around, with Bates simply commanding in her brief moments as Stein, Stoll drolly funny launching into manly Hemingway-speak, Hiddleston utterly charming as Fitzgerald and Brody hilarious in a tiny gag bit as Dali.

Wilson is fine, yet while his laid-back boyishness suits Gil’s romantic notions of the past, it clashes with the character’s intellectual affectations.

The gags inspired by the time juxtapositions often are silly, even a bit cheap. Yet it’s a winsome silliness that provokes consistent laughter, and laughs are laughs, cheap or not.

Allen’s shots of Paris cover the predictable sights and they’re so radiant they might make you want to book a flight over as soon as you leave the theater.

The outcome of Gil’s search is pretty obvious about halfway through the film, and when the final scene plays out, Allen fans may feel as if they’ve seen this sort of Hollywood ending before — and they have, in many other Allen films.

But we like Allen’s early, funny ones, too. Even when they’re latter-day funny ones like “Midnight in Paris.”