Annie Hall

Woody Allen's sublime comic drama. Read full review

Arguably Woody's finest, now neurotic intellectuals have a film they can cherish. Read full review

This is the film that the movie world had been anticipating since the man born Allen Stewart Konigsberg had signaled his raw comedic talents with mad-cap directorial debut, Take The Money And Run, nine years earlier. Marrying the free-flowing sketch form of those early comedies with real emotional and psychological depth for the first, and, arguably, most successful, time. Read full review

Allen joins the Catskills tummler’s anything-for-a-laugh antics with a Eurocentric art-house self-awareness and a psychoanalytic obsession with baring his sexual desires and frustrations, romantic disasters, and neurotic inhibitions. It’s a mark of Allen’s artistic intuition and confessional probity that he lets Diane Keaton’s epoch-defining performance run away with the movie and allows her character to run away from him. Read full review

There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have. Read full review

Annie Hall is bracingly adventure-some and unexpectedly successful, with laughs as satisfying as those in any of Allen's other movies and a whole new staying power. Whether Annie Hall is autobiographical or not, it has enabled Allen to progress from the realm of simple self-representation to that of the artfully shaped self-portrait. [02 May 1977, p.78]

After slapstick farces as exuberant and hilarious as Sleeper and Love and Death, it comes as a soft, fuzzy, mildly diverting letdown. Read full review