WOODY WEDNESDAY Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 11

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.

Midnight in Paris (2011) Scene: “You ever hunted?”

Midnight in Paris (2011) Scene: “What are you writing?”/’Hemingway’.

midnight in paris – Fitzgeralds and Hemingway

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS official trailer in HD!

20. “Midnight in Paris” (2011)
Allen’s breezy ode to the City of Lights and to the 1920s Paris literary salon scene, is actually somewhat similar to “Cafe Society” in that they are both films that are nostalgic about nostalgia itself — in love with an idea of love that really only exists as an idea. Superficially quite simple, with an unexplained time-travel hook taking a struggling contemporary novelist (Owen Wilson) and plonking him down amidst his heroes Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein et al, the film is a fond, teary-eyed look at the glamor of the past and the danger of falling for what might have been instead of what is. Peppered with glittering cameos and supporting roles (Marion Cotillard, Corey Stoll, Kathy Bates, Allison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen etc) to our minds with its 4 Oscar nods and its glowing, adoring reviews, it was somewhat overpraised. But even if the reception was more a function of relief that, after a string of disappointments, an off-the-boil Allen seemed to be at least partially back on form, that doesn’t necessarily detract from the pleasures of this solid charmer either.

19. “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008)
It’s more more muskily sensual than is standard for Woody Allen, who usually displays a more intellectualized and ironic approach to sex, but “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is still an enjoyable trifle, a kind of exoticized romp that’s not as deep as some fans like to make out, but doesn’t need to be. With this steamy 4-way love affair between some extremely attractive people, Allen’s migration to unfamiliar shores bears fruit, even if stakes remain relatively frivolous. Neurotic Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and free-spirited Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) cross paths with Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) and his tempestuous ex-wife María Elena (a sexy and funny Penélope Cruz, who won an Oscar), and the culture-clashing comedy of manners that ensues is fizzy, awkward fun, until Maria Elena’s passionate nature takes a dark turn. It’s all a bit redolent of the myths about Latin lovers, but Cruz and Bardem have amazing chemistry (no wonder they hooked up afterwards) and the final scene suggests a sadness and a kind of wisdom that for once gives the characters depth as people rather than archetypes, however amusing those archetypes might be.

Related posts:

Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 1

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.

25. “Everyone Says I Love You” (1996)
Lush with the sensation of romance in exotic places, Allen’s modern-day musical (scored with lip-synched 1930s standards) occupies a curious place in his oeuvre, following a family of Giuliani-era Upper East Side New Yorkers in romantic crisis in New York, Venice and Paris. Love has them all tangled up, from impulsive engagements to old flames flaring up again, that are all backdropped against the brownstones and Central Park foliage of New York or the bridges and waterways of the film’s European locations. But amid a very amiable ensemble (Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Drew Barrymore, Edward Norton, Natalie Portman, etc.) the film falters with Allen himself, who plays a single man who absconds to Venice to meet the girl of his dreams, played by Julia Roberts. The age discrepancy is glaringly unaddressed, and Roberts becomes one of the first casualties of Allen’s mid-period tendency to admire the beauty and vivacity of his younger female stars in lieu of giving them real notes to play. But the untrained and sometimes unsteady singing, which proved the most divisive element on release, might actually be our favorite part.

24. “Radio Days” (1987)
Wedged somewhat awkwardly between one of Woody’s outright masterpieces and his run of explicitly ‘experimental’ fare, “Radio Days” often gets lost in the shuffle of the filmmaker’s busy period during the tail-end of the 1980s, but it merits revisiting as one of his most sophisticated, least ego-driven pictures. It engages in the stuff of romanticized autobiography (comparisons with Fellini’s “Amarcord” and Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” abound) without tipping over into self-aggrandizing neurotica. True, there isn’t much here we haven’t seen before — in being a homage to the long-defunct radio era, it mimics a lot of the concerns of “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” or “Broadway Danny Rose” without ever quite attaining those films’ level of wit and warmth. But it’s still a spritely ode to eccentricity, an aping of the foibles of family life during the ’30s and ’40s, and a work that straddles the divide between the bleaker impulses of his output (Dianne Wiest’s lonely spinster repping here) and the pithy New Yorker humor and self-mockery that are often otherwise the opposing poles of his filmography.

Match Point Official Trailer!

23. “Match Point” (2005)
Given any 47-odd list of films to rank, there are going to be disagreements, and one sticking point we can predict in advance is the relatively low placement of this enduringly popular London-set thriller. But we’re sticking to our guns. Scarlett Johansson, at the very beginning of a run that saw her move from sexpot ingenue to one of our very favorite working actresses, is sulkily luminous, but not given a huge amount to do bar “be a fantasy” and while it should be a good thing that there’s no direct Allen stand-in for once, instead we get an emotionally and psychologically vague Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and an empty-headed love affair that plays out against a London backdrop about as authentic as a series of postcards. Emily Mortimer and Matthew Goode are good value as the foils to the leads, but lacking the wit and snap that characterized the much, much better riff on the same themes that was “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Match Point” is not so much bad as slightly unnecessary, and dour in a way that feels uncharacteristic of even Allen’s most serious work.

Related posts:

Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 1

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.

31. “September” (1987)
Marked by a fabulous performance by Elaine Stritch, who plays an awful, incorrigible, selfish and self-centered mother, Allen’s “September” is a film play, for better and worse, marked by long takes and few cuts. An ambrosial picture about secrets and lies, unrequited love, and crushed hopes, it is a somber, Bergman-esque chamber drama about the deceits and romantic betrayals that occur during a late summer weekend getaway in upstate New York. The bittersweet-but-mostly-bitter drama stars Stritch, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Jack Warden, Denholm Elliott and Sam Waterston, and shows Farrow’s depressive character and others all pining for objects of affection they can never attain. The picture is no “Autumn Sonata” (Bergman’s 1979 late-era masterpiece, which this mother-daughter-centric film vaguely resembles), but it’s not without its powerfully emotional scenes, generally between Farrow, Wiest and Stritch. Interestingly enough, the picture was shot twice, as early attempts with Sam Shepard, Maureen O’Sullivan and Christopher Walken failed to create sparks.

30. “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?” (1966)
Allen receives credit for being an auteur, a filmmaker with a distinct voice and very specific, abstract political views on the relationships between others. But he began modestly, with the aim to make people lose their composure in a flood of laughs, and in his early years, it’s startling how easy that seemed. Allen didn’t “direct” (as in “shoot”) most of “What’s Up, Tiger Lily?,” but the film is an early, brilliant precursor to the “Mystery Science Theater 3000” school of film appreciation. Using footage from two films in a Japanese series called “International Secret Police,” Allen recontextualized and redubbed key moments to turn the spy film into a search for the perfect egg salad recipe. It’s a cinematic mixtape, in other words, a fan-edit of sorts with Allen routinely popping in to remind us that he was a questionable choice by the studio to re-edit the film in the first place. More of a stunt than an actual film, the picture remains remarkably funny today, a testament to how much Allen thoroughly understood film comedy, even with extremely limited resources.

Shadows and Fog

29. “Shadows and Fog” (1992)
Shot in luminous, shrouded black and white by Michelangelo Antonioni cinematographer Carlo DiPalmi, doing his best German Expressionist, G.W. Pabst and F.W. Murnau impression, the appropriately titled “Shadows and Fog” is an ambitious entry in the director’s catalog. Here, Allen takes the starring role in this 1920s-set Kafka-esque story, as a sniveling and cowardly bookkeeper who is caught up in a vigilante group’s search for a local serial killer (major hat tip to Fritz Lang‘s “M“). A second story, which eventually meets up with the first, revolves around a circus clown (John Malkovich) searching for his sword-swallower girlfriend (Mia Farrow) who gets mixed up in the intrigue happening in a nearby whorehouse. All swinging directional lights and scary streets where prowlers and angry mobs roam unfettered, and featuring an excellent supporting cast including John Cusack, Madonna, Kenneth Mars, Kathy Bates, Jodie Foster, Julie Kavner, William H. Macy, Wallace Shawn, and Lily Tomlin it’s a bit of a puzzle why “Shadows and Fog,” with so much going for it, remains so distant and feels so minor.

Related posts:

Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 1

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.

Whatever Works – Official Trailer!

35. “Whatever Works” (2009)
“Whatever Works” came out the same year as Ricky Gervais’ “The Invention of Lying,” a vanity picture some took as a latter-day incarnation of one of Allen’s high-concept comedies of the early 1970s. The film was, much like Gervais himself nowadays, a proud bore that asked you concurrently to pity it whilst taking it for the most hilarious thing ever made, evoking Allen’s legacy by stealing his favorite font (Windsor-EF Elongated, typography fans) for its opening titles. Audiences would have done better to check out Allen’s own work, which promised a return to New York after a muddled European caesura, a reworking of a lost script from the 1970s (a screenplay originally intended forZero Mostel) and one of Allen’s heirs apparent in the lead role. It doesn’t even come close to following through on that sublime set of circumstances, but “Whatever Works” is still fun for dyspeptic atheists everywhere: pitting the lacerating Larry David as a failed physicist against a world of “submentals” and “inchworms.” The Bible Belt hicks are way too broadly drawn, and a romance with Evan Rachel Wood brings in extraneous (and icky) autobiography, but “Whatever Works” is at the very least better than its reputation suggests.

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MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT (2014) Official HD Trailer

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34. “Magic in the Moonlight” (2014)
If not among the ranks of the very worst Allen films, then certainly one of the twee-est, this unconvincing but essentially well-meaning story sees Emma Stone and Colin Firth — both charming actors who do summon a little chemistry, though it’s far more platonic than romantic — lark about in a very poorly plotted mess of spiritualist malarkey. Wearing very pretty clothes — we’ll give it that — and decked out in appropriately lush Downton Abbey detailing, the warmed-over plot concerns a spirit medium (Stone) and the skeptic (Firth) whose determination to debunk her is complicated when he develops feelings for her. Words like “frothy” and “insubstantial” can often be turned into minor compliments, but here we mean them in the not-so-positive sense: “Magic in the Moonlight” is clearly supposed to be as feathery as gossamer and as ephemeral as moonlight, but there’s a fine line between airy effortlessness and treading water, and sadly it’s a line Allen crosses here. Still, it just about passes muster on a long-haul flight.

Related posts:

Ranking Woody Allen’s 47 movies!!!! Part 1

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.

Scoop Official Trailer #1 – Scarlett Johansson, Hugh Jackman Movie (2006) HD

41. “Scoop” (2006)
Coming after what many considered a late-career triumph in “Match Point,” there were those who were disheartened to see Allen return to madcap slapstick. And even those who were happy he wasn’t revisiting damp thriller territory with his next London-set, Scarlett Johansson-starring film were dismayed by “Scoop.” Involving a beleaguered junior reporter tailing a handsome potential serial killer thanks to clues from a ghost, this film is exactly as silly as that sounds, and there’s little the attractive pairing of Johansson and Hugh Jackman can do to save it. Without a clean balance between the chaotic supernatural elements of the story and the main serial killer narrative, the film feels wildly uneven in plotting as well as tone. It’s the sort of diversion that, if it had gone right, its formulaic tendencies and thin plotting would have been disguised with catchall terms like “effortless” and “breezy.” But since it doesn’t, the film feels more involuntary and rote, a supremely uninspired entry from Allen that shows all of his laziest late-period impulses.

40. “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” (1982)
You’d think a movie called “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” would not be boring. But you’d be wrong. This often agonizing grind of a film is loosely based on Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night,” but the witty reinvention impulse seems to peter out after the (admittedly kind of brilliant) title. Despite or maybe because of Allen’s reverence for Bergman, he can’t seem to make this homage catch fire —everything about it is dull, including its period setting, its straightforward philosophical discussions that border on rote dissertations and the flat cinematography. Even the talented cast (including Mary Steenburgen, Tony Roberts and Jose Ferrer among them) can’t do much to up the energy levels of this hopelessly sleepy movie. Yet the cast provides one interesting footnote when viewed in the context of Allen’s filmography and biography: this was the first movie to star his future ex-partner Mia Farrow. Of all their possible beginnings, it seems in retrospect not to have been the most auspicious imaginable.

39. “To Rome with Love” (2012)
There’s nothing particularly obnoxious about Allen’s de rigeur Italian stop on his tour of the major cities of Europe that brought us a run of mostly ho-hum films over the past couple of decades. But there’s nothing particularly distinguished about it either, and with a cast that includes previous Allen ringers Judy Davis and Penelope Cruz along with fresh faces Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Greta Gerwig and the Eternal City as a backdrop, you can’t help but feel it should be more substantial. Part of the issue is a worse-than-usual melding of the film’s four separate strands, so that jumping from one to the next feels jarring rather than fluid. But this is mostly a story about romantic inspiration and obsession that feels uninspired and oddly cool to the touch, despite the hot Latin passions that the city of Fellini and Mastroianni should surely have evoked in as dedicated a cinephile as Allen. All of his Euro films have in some ways been love letters to their settings, but it’s not really fair that Rome gets little more than this hastily scribbled postcard.

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