WOODY WEDNESDAY Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 13

The Best & The Rest: Every Woody Allen Film Ranked

This week, Woody Allen‘s 2016 title (for as we all know, there’s one each year), “Cafe Society,” starring Kristen Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, Steve Carell, Corey Stoll, Blake Lively and Anna Camp, opens after a warm reception as the opening film at the most recent Cannes Film Festival. You can read our take from Cannes here, or hang on to scroll through and see where it lands on the list below, but we thought this would be a good time to gussy up our previous sprawling two-part Allen retrospective, and because we’ve been a little harmonious around here of late and miss the sounds of sobbing and breaking crockery, to rank it.

READ MORE: The Best And The Rest: Every Stanley Kubrick Ranked

Weathering personal scandal and coming in and out of fashion like flares, Allen’s been at constant work as a director for five decades now, and “Cafe Society” marks his 47th theatrically-released feature. Which means we have a lot to get through, so let’s get straight to it, shall we? Here, ranked worst to best, are all of Woody Allen’s theatrical features —with any list this long, there’s bound to be massive disagreement, so remember, the comments section awaits your ire. Or your congratulations, on the slim chance you agree with all of it.

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16. “Zelig” (1983)
A curio in a filmography that is distinguished by repeating themes, “Zelig” dresses Allen’s typical gripes and philosophizing up in a pioneering mockumentary package. Presented as a black-and-white documentary on Leonard Zelig (Allen), the “human chameleon”, the film is a portrait of a misfit accepted by society when he discovers the power to literally metamorphose into the people around him. With the use of then still-innovative blue screen tech, Allen hobnobs with Calvin Coolidge and comes within shooting distance of Adolf Hitler. The efforts to make the film look like an authentically aged piece of history are impressive even if they’ve been supplanted by the likes of “Forrest Gump” since, while a romance between Zelig and Dr. Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is sweet if thinly plotted. It’s more likely you’ll enjoy the film for the historical cameos, for the cleverness of the juggling between fact and fiction and for modern-day legends, like Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag who despite not being renowned as laugh-riots, manage to keep admirably straight faces while commenting on the phenomenon as if it really happened.

15. “Take The Money And Run” (1969)
Somewhat obscured by Allen’s more polished films to come, this solo directorial debut could, pound for pound, be the funniest film he’s ever made, because all he wants to do here is make you laugh. Told in the format of a fake documentary, a creative decision well before its time, “Take The Money And Run” follows the story of Virgil Starkwell, a criminal who robs banks in lieu of a successful professional life in the, ahem, legal sector. As Virgil stacks up ignominies, we see the first stirrings of Allen’s romantic side, with a genuine relationship that develops amongst the madcap slapstick with Janet Margolin’s Louise. ‘Money’ manages to have this human center but still emphasizes the gags at the heart of the picture, in some ways establishing a template for heartfelt spoof that would later be credited erroneously to “Airplane!” Allen would go on to make pictures with more weighty ideas and concepts, but bits like the botched stickup attempt, the rainy prison escape with a gun made of soap and the utter slapstick genius of Virgil playing the cello in a marching band are some of the funniest moments ever committed to celluloid.

Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) – Official Trailer

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14.“Manhattan Murder Mystery” (1993)
It’s a strange world: in the throes of devastating personal scandal, Allen turned in his funniest, most optimistic and delightful film in years. In fact, two of the changes made as a result of outside pressures probably improved the film immeasurably: casting a spiky Anjelica Huston instead of a much younger actress to give Allen a slightly more age-appropriate flirtation, and more importantly, replacing Mia Farrow with a beguiling Diane Keaton — against whom a mock-irate Allen subsequently railed for getting more laughs than he does, despite the fact he’d written the material to make him look like the funny one. Actually, they’re both on top form, and the portrait of a long-term marriage that finds much-needed spice when a neighbor dies (finally turning to the murder sub-plot famously excised from “Annie Hall”), is one of the most endearing depictions of an adult relationship that Allen has ever managed. It’s peppered with allusions to classic films, fun until the end when it unashamedly rips one off, but that’s just nitpicking, especially in a movie that sends you giggling into the credits on a final gag worthy of Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond.

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