Woody Allen (Sight & Sound) Top 10 favourite films (2012)

Heywood “Woody” Allen (1935) is an American director, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. He began his career as a comedy writer in the 1950s, writing jokes and scripts for television and publishing several books of short humour pieces. In the early 1960s, he performed as a stand-up comedian, emphasising monologues rather than traditional jokes, where he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he maintains is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004 Comedy Central ranked Allen fourth on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians, while a UK survey ranked Allen the third-greatest comedian. By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specialising in slapstick comedies before moving into dramatic material influenced by European art cinema during the 1970s, and alternating between comedies and dramas to the present. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late 1970s. Allen often stars in his films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. Some of the best-known of his over 50 films are Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). In 2007 he said Stardust Memories (1980), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Match Point (2005) were his best films. Critic Roger Ebert described Allen as “a treasure of the cinema”.

400 Blows, The 1959 François Truffaut
1963 Federico Fellini
Amarcord 1972 Federico Fellini
Bicycle Thieves, The 1948 Vittorio de Sica
Citizen Kane 1941 Orson Welles
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972 Luis Buñuel
La Grande Illusion 1937 Jean Renoir
Paths of Glory 1957 Stanley Kubrick
Rashomon 1950 Akira Kurosawa
The Seventh Seal 1957 Ingmar Bergman

The Woody Allen Collection, Set 1 (Annie Hall/Manhattan/Sleeper/Bananas/Interiors/Stardust Memories/Love and Death/Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask) DVD
Music From the Films of Woody Allen
The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (kindle)
Posterazzi Sleeper Japanese Diane Keaton Left Woody Allen (Top Far Right) 1973 Movie Masterprint Poster Print (11 x 17)




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