Woody Allen: Best to worst

"We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But! We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included, in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more."



Woody Allen once said that his films are like novels, which have a form of a film. That is what Crimes and Misdemeanors is all about, its content resemble a novel but its form is a film. This is a very philosophical film, maybe the most philosophical film of all Woody's films. This film is about life, death, meaning of life, religion, truth, love, universe, morality, relationships and evil, but you can still see so much Woody in it. The jokes are just like in any other Woody's film but at the same time this is a film that touch you at the deepest level. Crimes and Misdemeanors is a very pessimistic film. Woody wanted to make a film about morality and evil in people. This film tells that the morality doesn't come from a religion or any other factor, morality comes from human beings.

Alvy Singer: I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.



Annie Hall is basically a love story between two people, Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) and Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), but it tells so much more than just about a relationship between those two. It tells a story about life in general. Keaton and Allen seems like a perfect couple and Allen's humor is at its best.

+ I just love Diane Keaton as Annie Hall

Leonard Zelig: I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women.



Zelig is the most outlandish work of Woody Allen and a very unique fake documentary about Leonard Zelig, a human chameleon, who has the ability to transform his appearance to that of the people who surround him. It has an almost autentic look from the 1920s and to make that the production used actual lenses, cameras and sound equipment from the 1920s. Zelig is a masterpiece, a great parody and satire with two outstanding performances, both Allen and Mia Farrow.

Stardust Memories is one of the favorite films of Woody himself and one of the most misunderstood ones. It was a economic flop that made film critics and audience furious because they thought that the character Sandy Bates was based on Woody Allen himself. Sandy is pessimictic about his career as a film director, doesn't wanna make funny movies anymore and doesn't appreciate his audience at all. Woody has said that Sandy isn't like him at all and it's just a character in a film (Woody Allen on Woody Allen: In Conversation With Stig Björkman). Stardust Memories is about artist and his relation to death. Also it has said that this films resemble Fellini's 8½ but actually it wasn't suppose to be like 8½ and it has more objective depiction of life. Although Allen is a very big fan of Fellini's.

Frederick: You see the whole culture. Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, a talk show. Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.



Hannah and Her Sisters is a very existentialistic film. It's about people who keep searching for their meaning of life and especially Woody's character, Mickey, is in the middle of an existentialistic crisis and is trying to find answers from religion. Hannah and Her Sisters show just how to adjust philosophical questions in real life and that makes it one of the best films from Woody.

Another Woman gives amazingly sharp and interesting introspectical view from the life of a 50-year-old woman, Marion Post (Gena Rowlands), who's facing a mid-life crisis. While writing a new book she comes to realise how unfair, unkind and judgmental she's been to people close to her. The plot is very much same as in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Gena Rowlands gives a great performance as a Marion and this films has one of the most touching dream scenes. Another great performance comes from Mia Farrow who plays a depressed pregnant woman, who also gives another perspective to Rowland's character.

Isaac Davis: When it comes to relationships with women, I'm the winner of the August Strindberg Award.

A love story between Woody Allen (in this film Isaac Davis) and New York City. Like in Annie Hall, Manhattan too is about difficulty of relationships, but in this films it involve more than two people. There's Woody and his 17-year-old girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), his ex-wife, who turned out to be a lesbian, Jill (Meryl Streep), his best friend Yale (Michael Murphy) and Yale's lover Mary (Diane Keaton) who he eventually falls in love with. Manhattan is a film about choices between people, choices that everyone is free to make. Setting brings out the Manhattan the way it is (was) and you couldn't even imagine this film in colours.



+! it has this great scene were Woody Allen records into a tape what he thinks that makes life worth living.

Tom Baxter: I guess I have to get a job.
Cecilia: That's not gonna be so easy either - right now the whole country's out of work.
Tom Baxter: Well, then, we'll live on love. We'll have to make some concessions, but so what? We'll have each other
Cecilia: That's movie talk.



The Purple Rose of Cairo is a clever, touching and also funny in a good Woody way and Mia Farrow is stunning in her role. This is one of the favorite films of Woody himself and Mia Farrow's character Cecilia is someone he can relate to. It's about relationship between fiction and reality. Woody Allen described the message of the movie as "life is ultimately disappointing."

Sonja: Judgment of any system, or a priori relationship or phenomenon exists in an irrational, or metaphysical, or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract empirical concept such as being, or to be, or to occur in the thing itself, or of the thing itself.
Boris: Yes, I've said that many times.



Love and Death makes you laugh your elitist ass off if you've read Russian literature classics like War and Peace or Crime and Punishment, seen Ingmar Bergman's films or if you're familiar with a classical philosophical problems like 'is there a God?'.

Interiors is the first dramatic film of Woody Allen, and that's actually why Allen doesn't also appear as an actor. It's about family relationships and the fear of perishableness and has one of the most beautiful setting from all Allen's films. You can also see the inspiration from Ingmar Bergman in this.

September resemble such films as Interiors and Höstsonaten but also Anton Chekhov's stories. It's about human relationships, especially about mother and a daughter, where the mother is a very egocentric person and daughter lacks self esteem because of the huge shadow of her mother. Allen had to shoot this film twice with a different cast because he wasn't satisfied with the first one. Without Mia Farrow's performance this film wouldn't be as good as it is. Woody Allen has said about this film that it's like september: a transitional time, which ends when something new begins.

Dr. Yang: Love is a very complex emotion. No rational thought... much romance, but much suffering.



Alice is a satire about upper class and their life that's a full of shallowness. It's also a frame tell from a feminist point of view. Alice (Mia Farrow) is a woman who lives in Manhattan, has two children and is married to a rich man. She has nothing but time so she starts to suffer psychosomatic backache and doesn't realise it's only psychological so she goes to see a oriental herbalist in Chinatown. After this the film goes from drama to magical realism, that makes it one of the unique ones from Woody. What he knows best is to depict women's world, ecpecially in Hannah and her sisters.

Clown: We're not like other people, we're artists, you know with great talent comes responsibility.

Shadows and Fog is the most poetic film of Allen. It resemble German expressionist period films but at the same time it's very similar comedy than other Woody's films. It's a story about night time and how it shows that cities and towns are only human creation. The settig is very aesthetic, because of the way Carlo Di Palma uses black and white.

Manhattan Murder Mystery is a funny and thrilling. It's one of the best comedies from Woody, and the last scene, which was inspired by Orson Welle's film The Lady from Shanghai, is terrific.

Husbands and Wives is a film about relationships between upper middle class intellectuals with a great cast and fantastic dialog, but which still lack something that can be seen in such films as Interiors or Manhattan.

A reminiscence about the golden age of radio, which has some characters, places and events from Woody's childhood. Both Keaton and Farrow appears in this film.

Luna Schlosser: Oh, I see. You don't believe in science, and you also don't believe that political systems work, and you don't believe in God, huh?
Miles Monroe: Right.
Luna Schlosser: So then, what do you believe in?
Miles Monroe: Sex and death - two things that come once in a lifetime... but at least after death, you're not nauseous.



Idiotic but still funny sci-fi comedy about future's dystopia. Keaton and Allen once again work great together. There isn't really much to say about this, just watch it and you'll understand.

Allen's first film as a director which already shows how brialliant he can be as a comedian.

Paul: Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.



Owen Wilson plays Woody's alter ego who visits Paris with his girlfriend and her parents. It has great taste of surrealism and fantastic references to a cultural history.

Match Point is a debate with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, where one of the main characters, Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) seems to be a anti-hero Raskolnikov who feels only a little guilt after murdering someone, and the ending is different from the book. Allen argues, unlike Dostoevsky, that there is neither God, nor punishment, nor love to provide redemption. It is very similar by theme to Allen's other work Crimes and Misdemeanors.

At the same time Bananas is a really funny with a clever jokes and annoyingly trying to be a comedy that makes everybody laugh when nobody's laughing. In an interview, Woody Allen was asked why he named the movie "Bananas". His response: "Because there are no bananas in it."

Broadway Danny Rose is a comedy about showbisnes and mafia. The film remind of Allen's own career as a stand-up comedian and his friends hanging on a pub eating, drinking and telling stories after a show. Mia Farrow's character, Tina Vitale, was written for her and she wears glasses almost through the whole films, because Woody thought that her role would be more convincing if she wouldn't show her eyes.

Sweet and Lowdown shows Woody Allen's love for jazz music. The main character is a fictional jazz musician, Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), who's very irresponsible, alcohol-abusing, arrogant but actually miserable. It's a comedy about the music scene in the 1930's, egoistic musicians and biopics made on them.

This is actually based on a book by David Reuben, which contains questions about sex. I would love to see this film showed on school instead of those educational films that only cause shared sense of shame.



+ I love Gene Wilder in this.

A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy is a comedy that Woody described as a dessert. It's something you can enjoy after a masterpiece and that's isn't intented to take serious. It was written by Allen in only two weeks and was shoot along with Zelig. This is the first film from Woody which Mia Frrow was on.

Melinda and Melinda isn't in the group of the best films of Woody Allen and actually it's something I recommend for people who don't need too much to think when they watch a film. But in a some weird wat I really like this film, because its plot is divided in tragedy and comedy, showing the little difference between funny and sad, that actually is the key in Woody Allen's whole work.

Not liking this film is mostly because of my own personal taste in films, but I wouldn't say objectively that this is a bad film, at least I would say it's not even close one of the best ones from Allen.

Boris Yelnikoff (Larry David) is a misanthropic intellectual who meets Melodie (Evan Rachel Wood) who's pretty, stupid and young girl and they fall in love. The film seem to have only one message: whatever works.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger has something from early-Woody in its characters but still it's just a another pointless comedy/drama with a few good jokes and almost the same plot as in some of the others Allen's films.

Woody's trying to make a film that's based on Ancient Greek story about Oedipus but fails horribly. The result is a pointless comedy with a few good jokes.

Here we are in the Woodyland again. Woody is a film director who suffers from psychosomatic blindness but who's still trying to make a film. Since it's Woody he still has some unsolved problems with his ex-wife and the story goes on...

Not clever and not funny crime story.

This is actually hilarious...for five minutes and then the jokes is off.

Anything Else is a film that makes you hate Woody Allen and his taste of humor. Jason Biggs as a Jerry Falk is the worst alter ego for Woody and Christina Ricci plays a character that viewer would be glad to see hit by a bus.

Like we say in Finland: "Paskaa, ei kaupallista potentiaalia".