Woody Allen: 10 Best/5 Worst Movies

BEST 10. Zelig (1983)

A magical, merry-prankster stunt of a film that takes the form of a classic newsreel documentary about Leonard Zelig, a 1920s medical marvel who was able to change his appearance like a chameleon to look and act like whoever he stood next to: presidents, popes, even black jazz musicians. It's a one-joke movie, but the joke is flawlessly told. —Chris Nashawaty

BEST 9. What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

Three years before he made his first live-action comedy, Take the Money and Run, Allen took a bad ersatz-James Bond '60s Japanese spy caper and dubbed in entirely new dialogue — the directorial equivalent of defacing a subway poster. The result may barely be a movie, but it's also one of the most crazily hilarious curios in movie history. There are priceless lines throughout, and Allen turns the Tokyo-a-go-go settings and mugging grade-Z stars into a burlesque on the very notion of how schlock movies are constructed and how we get sucked into them. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 8. Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

Maybe Allen's most poignant morality tale, starring Martin Landau as a respected opthamologist with blood on his hands, Alan Alda as a hilariously pompous TV producer (''If it bends, it's funny''), and Allen as a downcast documentarian (and unexpected conscience of the film). The rare existential comedy that will have you thinking about life long after you leave the theater. —Chris Nashawaty

BEST 7. Sleeper (1973)

With its sleek, brave-new-world look and smorgasbord of smart-aleck sight gags, this carbonated sci-fi comedy stars Allen as Miles Monroe, a '70s health-food store owner who is cryogenically frozen in the 20th century and thawed 200 years in the future, when foods like cream pies and hot fudge are now known to be good for you. There's a fizzy love-hate romance with Diane Keaton, a zany political subplot, and even a large vibrating orb called the Orgasmatron. Twenty-four karat comedy gold. —Chris Nashawaty

BEST 6. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

It may not scale quite the sublime heights of Annie Hall or Manhattan, but the third chapter in Allen's New York trilogy of neurotic romantic comedies is still ravishingly funny and fine-textured, with a wonderfully appealing heel at its center: Michael Caine as a desperate adulterer who wins us over from his very first puppy-horndog confessional voice-over. The movie may also be Allen's deepest dive into the consciousness of women, with Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, and Dianne Wiest turning Hannah and her two siblings into an ever-shifting portrait of delicately balanced loyalties and rivalries. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 5. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)

The most perfect and enchanting of all of Allen's whimsically crafted pop-nostalgia fantasy fables. It's set in 1930s New Jersey, where Mia Farrow, touchingly melancholy, plays a waitress who escapes her drab nothing of an existence by going off to the movies. During a showing of an RKO programmer called The Purple Rose of Cairo, a pith-helmeted archaeologist (Jeff Daniels) — think Indiana Jones meets James Stewart — breaks the fourth wall and walks right off the screen, igniting an adventure that is also a touching meditation on where the fakery of movies meets the reality of life. The whole thing is like a top that never stops spinning. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 4. Bananas (1971)

The very notion of Woody Allen's ''early, funny films'' has been a punchline for so long that there are whole generations who have no idea how ecstatically he once made people laugh. This gonzo satire is about a mild-mannered blue-collar worker (played by Allen in the horn rims and long hair than made him, in the '70s, a kind of hippie-dweeb Harold Lloyd) who ends up leading a Marxist revolution in a banana republic. Counterculture gags aside, you don't have to look too hard to see the real Marxian influence on this movie — it's the most lunatic and inspired Vaudeville-on-acid laugh riot since the heyday of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 3. Match Point (2005)

Stuck in a rut of comic trifles, Allen went to London and had not just a comeback but the most vital return to form for any director since Robert Altman made The Player. This lusciously twisty and lived-in adultery drama is driven by a lust that turns into authentic compulsion. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, with rock-star lips and eyebrows serious enough to rival Montgomery Clift's, plays a young climber who seduces his way into a wealthy friend's charmed circle. Then he meets the friend's fiancée, played by Scarlett Johansson with a looking-for-trouble carnality. Allen makes his hero into an extraordinary weasel, yet the film's power depends on our recognizing what he doesn't: that his ''forbidden'' passion is the real thing. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 2. Manhattan (1979)

Allen's greatest portrait of brainy, artistic, neurotic, and deeply lovestruck New Yorkers. It's an intensely dramatic comedy and, at times, an extraordinarily prophetic one (Michael Murphy's Porsche-coveting professor might by the first yuppie in movie history). Its real magic, though, is that by setting a series of flawed and even scandalous relationships — like the Woody hero's dalliance with a 17-year-old Upper East Side girl, played with dazzling assurance by Mariel Hemingway — against a backdrop of gorgeous black-and-white cityscapes and sublime Gershwin music, Manhattan makes a profound statement about how the romantic dreams of Old New York live on, like bittersweet memories, beneath our contemporary cynicism. —Owen Gleiberman

BEST 1. Annie Hall (1977)

The moment when the early, funny Woody Allen took a jack-knife turn into the more serious, searching films that would vault him from slapstick comedian to world-class auteur. Which isn't to say that Annie Hall isn't hilarious — because it is. But it's also so much more. It's one of the decade's greatest films, as Allen's nebbishy alter ego Alvy Singer falls head over heels for Diane Keaton's neurotically dizzy (''la-di-dah'') nightclub chanteuse. Allen and Keaton's chemistry is pure movie magic. And if you don't believe us, just ask Marshall McLuhan. We happen to have him right here?. —Chris Nashawaty

NEXT: Allen films that didn't fare so well with our critics...

WORST 5. Shadows and Fog (1992)

It might as well have been called Gloom and Doom. In this stultifying gray-and-white period pastiche of artists whom Allen admires (Franz Kafka, Kurt Weill, Fritz Lang, and, of course, Bergman and Fellini), Allen plays a loser who is being hounded by a mysterious pack of vigilantes. He still has plenty of time to deliver third-rate pontifications and ho-hum versions of Woody Allen jokes, and maybe that's because Allen doesn't seem jazzed by much here besides the visual atmosphere: the fog that's equal parts Universal horror film, Threepenny Opera, and ''poetic'' Nazi signifier. —Owen Gleiberman

WORST 4. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)

For our money, the most tepid of all those Allen films that wear their confectionary ''smallness'' on their lapel. Allen plays a cranky insurance investigator who spars with his new overseer (Helen Hunt) and winds up getting hypnotized over the telephone to commit jewel heists, which he then has to investigate, with no awareness that he's responsible for the crimes. It's a wisp of a clever idea, but Allen's prankish touch goes soft here, and for the first time, he seems cosmically deluded about his screen image: At 65, he was simply too old and wizened to be playing a schlub who can still win Helen Hunt's heart. —Owen Gleiberman

WORST 3. Celebrity (1998)

It's a question worthy of a sweepstakes: Of all the actors who have occupied the center of a Woody Allen film by wearing herring-bone jackets and doing a terrible impersonation of Woody's antic wisenheimer rim-shot rhythms and overenunciated stutter, who has done the all-time most annoying — and unconvincing — job of it? The answer is Kenneth Branagh, as a failed novelist who decides to become a celebrity journalist (no, this was not a MADtv sketch). Allen's ''satire'' of the new world of star gossip is so finger-wagging, yet so tone-deaf when it comes to capturing what that world actually looks like or how it really works, that the film seems to have been directed by Mel Brooks' 2,000 Year Old Man. —Owen Gleiberman

WORST 2. Anything Else (2003)

There are few things more painful than the sound of Allen churning out antsy ''neurotic'' dialogue by the yard for actors who are 20 years too young to be delivering it. In this case, the spouters of painfully out-of-date tinpot Woody shtick include Jason Biggs as an aspiring writer and Christina Ricci as the high-strung ''kooky'' girl he falls in love at first sight with. The generic shrug of a title says it all: This is Woody making his yearly movie as placeholder, when he really, at least for the time being, had nothing else to say. —Owen Gleiberman

WORST 1. September (1987)

The perfect storm of unwatchable Woodyisms: It's a fiasco of morose mannerisms made when he was still trying to imitate the moody solemnity of Ingmar Bergman; it's one of his ponderous literary knockoffs (in this case, of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya); it casts Mia Farrow as a suicidal depressive in Coke-bottle glasses and reduces the actress to quivering, disaffected tics; and Allen got into such a control-freak mode when he made it that he actually trashed the first version and shot the entire thing again with a different cast. All the reshoots in the world, however, couldn't imbue September with what it lacks: a shred of life. —Owen Gleiberman