 | Crimes and Misdemeanors
Buy new: $10.99 / Used from: $5.00 Crimes and Misdemeanors is structured like Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, with a operatic main plot constrasted with the serio-comic tale of a man--in Anna Karenina, Levin, a Lev Tolstoy-like figure; here, it's Woody himself--in search of love and meaning. And with this film, Woody finds his best mixture of the serious and the comic.
|
 | Manhattan
Buy new: $13.49 / Used from: $6.75 Widely and justly regarded as Woody's masterpiece, a sumptuous tone poem to the city he loved and its neurotic, pseudointellectual denizens.
|
 | Scoop
Buy new: $8.99 / Used from: $0.64 Making a movie a year lets Woody develop themes over the course of several films. With Melinda & Melinda, for instance, he imagined two directors arguing over how to tell the same story as either tragedy or comedy. He then made two films, set in London, about class and murder, one serious (Match Point), one deliberately trivial (Scoop). Not surprisingly, the comic version works best.
|
 | Love and Death
Buy new: $12.99 / Used from: $5.45 The first full-length feature in which Allen successfully melded absurd comedy with more high-brow concepts. Includes some of the best lines he ever wrote.
|
 | Deconstructing Harry
Buy used from: $8.99 In an earlier meta-textual arc, Woody made this film about a man who is a success as an artist but an utter failure as a human being. Allen then went on to make Sweet and Lowdown, which could have been the novel Harry Block sits down to write at the end of this film.
|
 | Manhattan Murder Mystery
Buy new: $14.49 / Used from: $8.89 One of Allen's most unjustly dismissed films is actually one of his most likeable and endearing, with Allen and Keaton both at their relaxed best as a happily married couple (for a change) suspicious of their elderly neighbour.
|
 | Annie Hall
Buy used from: $8.99 Such a fine film, I forgive it for snatching the Best Picture Oscar from Star Wars.
|
 | Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask
Buy new: $13.49 / Used from: $5.75 This series of blackout sketches is also a primer for the various styles Allen would attempt through the rest of his career, from the European arthouse homages to the tributes to classic Hollywood to the portraits of neurotic Manhattanites. The segment with Gene Wilder (in a piece of bravura comic acting) and the sheep is priceless. I could never look at a bottle of Woolite the same way again.
|
 | Shadows and Fog
Buy new: $13.49 / Used from: $1.98 Widely dismissed on release, this mixture of Kafka, Gogol and German expressionist films is a symphony of Allen's favourite themes as an artist. One for his true fans.
|
 | Bullets Over Broadway
Buy new: $8.49 / Used from: $4.99 Allen's most amusing film not to rely on his presence as an actor.
|
Listmania!
