Annie Hall

Woody Allen's sublime comic drama. Read full review

Annie Hall is a movie about a man who is always looking for the loopholes in perfection. Who can turn everything into a joke, and wishes he couldn't. 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

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. Read full review

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

For all of its profundity, it’s just as funny as the gag-heavy likes of Sleeper and Bananas, and while it has some competition for the title of Best Woody Allen Film, few would contest its status as his most beloved. Read full review

There are moments when it seems Allen’s comic muse has temporarily deserted him - but it has been replaced by something much greater.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. Read full review

He invites viewers to laugh with him at him: rather a subject than an object of ridicule, he lances his neuroses preemptively, controlling the exposure. It’s a limited strategy, but still glamorising in its way – if you can’t be Bogart-smooth in all things, such a fund of wisecracks is a start. Read full review

It's a warm, tender movie underpinned by the gentle tug of melancholia. Read full review

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

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. 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]

Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sparkle like a Larry Hart lyric in this comical-lyrical reminiscence of a lost love. The one-liners are more brilliant than ever, and laid-back L.A. will never seem the same again. [04 July 1977, p.40]

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

Woody Allen’s Annie Hall is made of such durable stuff that it’s liked even by many of the filmmaker’s detractors, and yet it had such a troubled production that it’s a miracle it exists at all. Read full review

It's a marvelously quirky film, with not quite something for everybody. Read full review

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. Read full review

Visually and structurally it's a mess, but many of the situations are genuinely clever, and there are plenty of memorable gags. The perpetual problem is that Allen isn't nearly the thinker he thinks he is. Read full review

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