Annie Hall

Lovely performances, and more superb gags in one minute than most movies manage in 90. It's like drinking champagne.

There are moments when it seems Allen’s comic muse has temporarily deserted him - but it has been replaced by something much greater. Annie Hall touches the heart.

In a decade largely devoted to male buddy-buddy films, brutal rape fantasies, and impersonal special effects extravaganzas, Woody Allen has almost single-handedly kept alive the idea of heterosexual romance in American films. Annie Hall is a touching and hilarious love story that is Allen’s most three-dimensional film to date.

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.

In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both.

The simplicity of the seemingly impromptu story, set largely in Allen's beloved New York City, is part of Annie Hall's undeniable charm, along with Allen's flashbacks to childhood (with side-splitting Jonathan Munk as a young Woody) and constant asides to the camera, a device that sometimes has to carry the laughs.

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

One of Woody Allen's most outstanding works, from his glory days, where he shows off his obsessions: sex, death, psychology and Groucho Marx. It doesn't take great intelligence to savor it. Indispensable.

Not everybody will love Woody Allen's humour, some will find him interesting and sharply insightful while others will find him self-indulgent. With me, it veers very largely towards the former with some occasions where the latter does creep in. Annie Hall is one of his best films, a masterpiece and one of the better Best Picture winners of the 70s with only the two Godfather films even better. The best assets are the script and the chemistry between the two leads. The script is enormously witty, with cracking dialogue that induces one and at times more laughs a minute, and full of insightful observations. People have deemed it one of the best screenplays of all time, and from personal perspective there is no reason to argue. The chemistry between the two leads, running somewhat on a parallel between the relationship of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton itself, and the actors in general actually is throughout very believable. It is often adorable and often dynamic. It helps that Diane Keaton gives one of her best and most endearing performances, and while Alvy is not a particularly likable or sympathetic character Woody Allen is similarly great, his looking into the camera and breaking the fourth wall moments were funny. The supporting cast all give spirited performances, especially Tony Roberts, Paul Simon, Carol Kane and Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum is memorable as well for one of the film's best and most quotable lines. The romance is sweet and relateable, the ending for me was really moving, but the story doesn't depend on that alone, Allen also muses over topics that were relevant then and that we can see as relevant today as well, he does so in a very thoughtful way. Allen directs with assurance, and while there have been more visually audacious Woody Allen films since Annie Hall it is still cleverly made with the way it's shot, the cartoon images and how we're shown visually what the characters are thinking. There is no music score and in this case that was a good idea, there was more leeway for the relationship between the two lead characters and observations to speak, and that's the same for the deliberate but never tedious pacing. Overall, an outstanding film, one of Allen's best and one of the greatest films of the 70s. People may dislike it for it winning Best Picture over Star Wars(this viewers and many others however think it fully deserved the win), as much as I'll have a fondness for the Star Wars original trilogy and consider it a milestone of its genre it is easy to see out of Star Wars and Annie Hall which is the superior film. 10/10 Bethany Cox

The most influential, inventive & (still) funniest romantic comedy ever made— an absolute masterpiece from the first second to the last.

A talky and sometimes sweet romantic comedy, way before its time. Most of the humor wasn't that great and is real specific. Great little last 5 minutes.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]