Slideshow
ANNIE HALL
U.S., 1977
Directed by Woody Allen
Starring Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Christopher Walken
Approx. 94 min. 4K DCP.
“Annie and I broke up, and I still can’t get my mind around that,” admits Woody Allen’s stand-up comic Alvy Singer, and while Diane Keaton’s Annie stammers, stops and starts, laughs nervously, and lah-dee-dahs, he looks back on his difficulties with women (“Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience,” observes Shelley Duvall), narrating, addressing the camera in the midst of a scene, standing in the background of moments of his and Keaton’s past, while administering the ultimate putdown to a movie line pontificator, watching THE SORROW AND THE PITY three times, and getting relationship advice from both pal Tony Roberts and passersby. Allen’s critical breakthrough achieves real poignance and feeling amidst the hilarity, and an elegant visual style in his first collaboration with the great cameraman Gordon Willis (THE GODFATHER). Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Actress, and screenplay, plus Woody’s only acting nomination.
Reviews
“Conceivably [Woody Allen’s] greatest and certainly his most quotable.”
– Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
“THOROUGHLY WINNING! Arguably [Allen’s] best film. A seminal ’70s movie, it holds up beautifully.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
“A signal work of first-person cinematic modernism…Yet 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.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker
“[Keaton] took me by surprise… She blossomed into something more than just another kooky dame – she put the finishing touches on a type, the anti-goddess, the golden shiksa from the provinces who looks cool and together, who looks as if she must have a date on Saturday night, but has only to open her mouth or gulp or dart spastically sideways to reveal herself as the insecure bungler she is, as complete a social disaster in her own way as Allen’s horny West Side intellectual is in his. A fit of misfits, a pair of compatible insecurities, they are the romantic couple of the seventies.”
– Molly Haskell
“This is the link between Allen’s ‘earlier, funnier’ stuff and more probing works like INTERIORS and MANHATTAN. Would that we all could build such masterful bridges.”
– Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York