Woody Allen's top 10 best films
Woody Allen's oeuvre has, in recent years, been overshadowed by his messy personal life. And not without good reason. And it's uncomfortable, at times, enjoying the work of a man who at best is a louse who married the adopted daughter of his longtime partner and who at worse has been accused of child sexual abuse.
But Allen, 78, is nevertheless an icon who has left a profound impact on the American film canon. The prolific filmmaker works fast and has more than 40 feature films to his name — many of them trifles, but also many of them out-and-out masterpieces.
With new Allen film "Magic in the Moonlight" hitting theaters, now is a good time to revisit those masterpieces.
10. "Midnight in Paris" (2011): It's no match for Allen's earlier masterpieces, not by a long shot. But it isn't his most commercially successful film for nothing. An American screenwriter (Owen Wilson) visits Paris with his materialistic fiancee. There, he travels back in time each night at midnight, consumed with nostalgia for a time he has never lived in — in this case, 1920s Paris, alongside the great ex-pat artists: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein (all hilariously brought to life through brilliant casting). It's a charming escapist confection showcasing Allen's deft touch for magical realism.
9. "Radio Days" (1987): "Forgive me if I tend to romanticize the past," Allen narrates at the start of this sentimental paean to the golden age of radio, a series of vignettes about 1930s and '40s radio personalities and the life of a working-class Jewish-American family who listens to them. And he does bask in the warm glow of the past in a tumble of music and memories as Joe, a young Seth Green as Allen's childhood stand-in, is indelibly shaped by the intimacy and sense of connection created by the sounds, stories and legends that fill his family's apartment through the radio.
8. "Husbands and Wives" (1992): Released in the shadow of the scandal of Allen's real-life breakup with longtime partner Mia Farrow, it's impossible, if unfair, to separate the film from circumstance. But even without those intensely personal associations, "Husband and Wives" would still be one of Allen's most searingly uncomfortable movies. Ambitiously stylized with hand-held camera work and aggressive editing, the film tells the story of the concurrent dissolution of two marriages. Married couple Gabe and Judy (Allen and Farrow) are dumbstruck when their close friends Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) announce their separation. Then, they find the fault lines in their own union, and the earthquake that follows threatens to leave nothing standing in its wake.
7. "Broadway Danny Rose" (1984): Allen doesn't get a lot of accolades for his acting (since he essentially seems to be playing the same neurotic riff on himself), but his performance as Danny Rose, the hapless talent manager of a menagerie of losers and loveable misfits, is among his most affecting. There's nothing he won't do for a client, and that includes masquerading as the boyfriend of a lounge singer's mob-connected mistress (in a very different sort of role for Mia Farrow) and ending up on a hit list. There's warmth and heart under the surface layer of situational absurdity, and the look on the fiercely loyal Rose's face when one of his clients betrays him is devastating.
6. "Sleeper" (1973): The best of the breezy farces of Allen's early career. There's no deeper insight in this sci-fi spoof, just a wealth of slapstick pratfalls and sight gags as Allen plays Miles Monroe, a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who is cryogenically frozen in 1973 and defrosted 200 years later to find himself in a ludicrous police state where robots have replaced servants and Orgasmatron booths have replaced sex. Miles embarks on a madcap plot with the privileged (and not very good) poet Luna (Diane Keaton) to hilariously upset the status quo.
5."Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986): This movie begins and ends at the apotheosis of family gatherings: Thanksgiving. Gathered in a New York City apartment are a trio of sisters, with Mia Farrow as family linchpin Hannah, a celebrated actress with an army of children; Dianne Wiest as directionless Holly, who wants to be an actress or writer or something; and Barbara Hershey as intellectual Lee. Allen navigates a tangle of relationships and pain with deft narrative footing and bright humor as drama roils underneath the surface dynamics, with Hannah's husband (a perfectly pathetic, unctuous Michael Caine) falling in the throes of infatuation with Lee. Caine won an Oscar for best supporting actor, Wiest for best supporting actress and Allen for best screenplay.
4. "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985): "I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional, but you can't have everything." It's Allen's most infectious foray into magical realism, when a Depression-era movie star walks off the black-and-white screen of his escapist romance film and into the sepia-toned life of Cecilia (Mia Farrow), a waitress trapped in an abusive marriage who finds escape from her dreary reality at the movies. Farrow is heartbreaking with quivering vulnerability as she dares to hope that she has finally found love, even if it's with a man who's not entirely real. It's a magical film about the magic of film and why we turn to it, and despite the heartbreak of that answer, it ends on a note impossible with hope.
3. "Annie Hall" (1977): It's just about everyone's favorite Allen film, and with good reason. Who can't connect with the neurotic psychoanalyzing of a failed relationship in an attempt to explain why we bother, again and again, with the messy prospect of romantic entanglements? Allen plays Alvy Singer, the nervy intellectual New York comedian to Diane Keaton's sunny, slightly ditzy dilettante Annie Hall in a film that charts the course of their relationship from beginning to inevitable end. It balances the heartache of that relationship's failure with enough joy to conclude that life is "full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly." It's Allen's most accessible film and, no wonder, his most lauded, receiving Oscars for best actress, best screenplay and best picture.
2. "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989): Moral treatises don't get much bleaker than Allen's most existential drama. Martin Landau plays a conflicted ophthalmologist whose mistress (Anjelica Huston) threatens to make their long affair known to his wife. Unable to accept this upset to his comfortable life, he arranges to have her murdered. Allen, meanwhile, plays a married documentary filmmaker who falls head over heels in love with a co-worker while filming a portrait of a successful TV producer who stands for everything he despises. Things do not turn out the way they do in the movies — the wrong guy gets the girl, the murderer does not get caught, and life chugs ever on. If the eyes of God are watching, they're watching indifferently.
1. "Manhattan" (1979): This is Allen's New York City, gorgeously photographed in black and white by cinematographer Gordon Willis and scored to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." And so it's in a city that has been so essential to his life and to his oeuvre that Allen turns the lens furthest inward on himself, playing a twice-divorced comedy writer in love with his best friend's mistress and dating a 17-year-old girl. It has assumed uncomfortable shades in light of Allen's own personal life in the years since its release, but that adds personal dimensions to his character's selfishness and wrong-headed pursuit of happiness.
Reach the reporter at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8371. Twitter.com/babsvan.