Woody Allen
250 connections found
Filmography
Annie Hall 1977 
Love and Death 1975 
Midnight in Paris 2011 
Magic in the Moonlight 2014 
Wonder Wheel 2017 
Everyone Says I Love You 1996 
Take the Money and Run 1969 
Sleeper 1973 
Vicky Cristina Barcelona 2008 
Zelig 1983 
Whatever Works 2009 
Manhattan 1979 
Crimes and Misdemeanors 1989 
To Rome with Love 2012 
Husbands and Wives 1992 
Anything Else 2003 
Hollywood Ending 2002 
The Purple Rose of Cairo 1985 
Café Society 2016 
Radio Days 1987 
Irrational Man 2015 
Blue Jasmine 2013 
Scoop 2006 
Hannah and Her Sisters 1986 
Celebrity 1998 
Small Time Crooks 2000 
Sweet and Lowdown 1999 
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger 2010 
Cassandra's Dream 2007 
Deconstructing Harry 1997 
A Rainy Day in New York 2019 
Stardust Memories 1980 
Melinda and Melinda 2004 
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion 2001 
Bullets Over Broadway 1994 
Shadows and Fog 1991 
Mighty Aphrodite 1995 
Match Point 2005 
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy 1982 
Interiors 1978 
Manhattan Murder Mystery 1993 
Alice 1990 
Broadway Danny Rose 1984 
Bananas 1971 
Another Woman 1988 View:
Connections, in both directions
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Directed by George Stevens
influenced Match Point (2005)
Plot Visuals Characters
Writer/director Woody Allen ("Melinda and Melinda") tints his own "Crimes and Misdemeanors" with George Stevens's "A Place in the Sun," leaves his beloved New York completely behind for the first time ever and delivers his best film in years.
The electric encounter between Chris and Nola (Scarlett Johansson) over a ping-pong table is Allen's answer to "A Place in the Sun," in which Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor did their mating dance over a pool table.
And like Shelley Winters in George Stevens' "A Place in the Sun," Nola becomes something resembling pure demand.
It needs to be mentioned, though, that Johansson -- even though her character is made out to be more and more a nagging, whining bitch as the movie progresses; she's Shelley Winters in "A Place in the Sun," without any of the compassion shown that character -- survives the picture unscathed.
Yet the more obvious model for Match Point is Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel An American Tragedy, which was made into A Place in the Sun with stars Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters.
Jay Kelly (2025)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Stardust Memories (1980), Annie Hall (1977), Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Themes
What these films, and other noteworthy examples like Stardust Memories and Pain and Glory, have in common is the sincerity and honesty that lies beneath the fiction, taken from real emotions and experiences.
…it comes across as even less insightful a tribute to Fellini than Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.”
Baumbach has wandered into the territory of 8½ and Stardust Memories and he gets a bit lost in the woods…
There are echoes, too, of some of Woody Allen’s more reflective comedies, for instance, 1980’s Stardust Memories, which has similar scenes of celebrities swarmed by adoring fans.
So Baumbach’s film pirouettes into territory already trodden by Fellini’s 81/2 and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories…
If this is in fact Baumbach’s Stardust Memories (and it is, complete with its own reference to Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2) then, when it’s all said and done, it needed a little more stardust to standout.
(500) Days of Summer (2009)
Directed by Marc Webb
influenced by Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Manhattan (1979)
Themes Plot Visuals
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
Speaking of neurotics, this latter-day Annie Hall substitutes downtown Los Angeles for New York (Tom's unfulfilled desire to be an architect provides an excuse to ogle landmarks), and a montage of Euro art house parodies indirectly nods to the film's strong Woody Allen influence.
Annie Hall keeps getting invoked in reviews, though the temporal flea-hopping feels closer to Franois Ozons 5x2, which dissected a relationship by recalling its stages in reverse order.
Then again, Tom’s grounding advice-dispensing kid sister seems mostly a reminder of how much we all love Bottle Rocket, while split-screens and personalized Bergman parodies are stray corridors off Annie Hall.
(500) Days of Summer , like Woody Allen's Annie Hall , dissects a romance that didn't work with a retrospective ache.
Where Annie Hall had the famous subtitled scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton said one thing and thought another, (500) Days of Summer has a similarly clever split-screen segment, with half of the screen devoted to "Reality" and the other to "Expectation."
Queen of Earth (2015)
Directed by Alex Ross Perry
influenced by Interiors (1978), Annie Hall (1977)
Themes Visuals
Perry tears shamelessly from the pages of the hysterical women canon, keying into Polanski's "Repulsion" and "The Tenant," Altman's "Images" starring Susannah York, a sort of proto-"3 Women" about a splintering female psyche, with shades of Bergman and, yes, Woody Allen's own strained Bergman homage "Interiors."
Perry has also cited the influence of Woody Allen 's "Interiors," which was a studious, self-conscious Bergman rip-off.
(Perry himself has also cited Woody Allen’s “Interiors” as a key influence.)
The sense that the two women have exchanged roles, or that in some way, each is the other, is alluded to in shots that show them gazing in the same direction, side by side—echoes not just of Persona, but of a later riff on Bergman, Woody Allen’s Interiors (one of the Seventies influences that Perry has acknowledged, along with Robert Altman’s Images).
It’s like Woody Allen following up the amusing “Annie Hall” with the cold and distancing “Interiors.”
Its close quarters call to mind cinema in enclosed spaces like Woody Allen’s terminally-solemn Interiors or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s classic dramas Martha and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
influenced Irrational Man (2015), Match Point (2005)
Themes Plot Characters
Cue a series of discussions about existential ethics that might seem familiar if you've seen "Match Point," "Crimes and Misdemeanors," Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" or the inside of a liberal arts college dorm room after 11 on a Friday night.
Trying for another Match Point (2005), writer-director Woody Allen grabs a handful of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train and a handful of Crime and Punishment and tosses them into a campus setting, which emboldens him to verbalize his stale philosophical concerns even more baldly than usual.
A riff on Strangers on a Train and Dostoyevsky with some upside.
And he also gives a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”
He plans the perfect murder of the judge, for which he could never be suspected as he would have absolutely no motive (shades of “Strangers on a Train,” though without the quid-pro-quo).
Chris' personal and professional path, along with his prognostications on luck, echoes Patricia Highsmith's fictional Ripley character, Thomas Ripley (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game), an amoral, sociopathic bi-sexual, social climber, thief, and murderer, and the central character in Strangers on a Train, Guy Haines, a tennis pro who wants to marry for love and social mobility.
Frances Ha (2013)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Stardust Memories (1980), Broadway Danny Rose (1984)
Visuals Themes
The movie is shot in black and white by Sam Levy, clearly as a homage to its chief influences: the French new wave (Georges Delerue's music for Truffaut's films is quoted on the soundtrack) and monochrome Woody Allen films such as Manhattan , Stardust Memories and Broadway Danny Rose , though it's obviously Annie Hall , progenitor of the freewheeling "relationship movie", that lies behind Frances Ha.
As a love letter from director to star, the delightful, funny, clever and wise "Frances Ha" surpasses even its most obvious inspiration, Woody Allen's "Annie Hall."
In a comic bit reminiscent of Annie Hall’s lobster scenes, Frances briefly tries to reenact some of the same games she played with Sophie with her new friend—with disastrous results.
Writing with Gerwig, Baumbach has created a fey, sneakily charming generational touchstone on a par with “Annie Hall” and his own Gen Y col-grad comedy “ Kicking and Screaming .”
The New York girl that Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) celebrates with such robust wit, speed and delight in Frances Ha doesn't have to be likened to Annie Hall.
The gorgeous-looking black-and-white film aims to be a hipster “Annie Hall” or a mini “Manhattan,” but those Woody Allen classics had interesting characters with intriguing thoughts.
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Directed by Federico Fellini
influenced To Rome with Love (2012), Celebrity (1998)
Themes Visuals Characters
The film’s Italian-language segments play like vague retreads of Fellini (one of Allen’s favourite directors) – the paparazzi swarming Benigni’s character are straight out of “La Dolce Vita”, while the country couple led astray by big-city temptation is a nod to the Italian director’s first film, “The White Sheik” – only without the wit, lyricism and undercurrent of despair.
The four disconnected stories in the film seem at moments to nod to the Italian New Wave (if more to Fellini's popular La Dolce Vita than to Antonioni's internal L'Avventura), but never in a way that feels particularly thought through.
Alec Baldwin's advice-giving phantom recalls Bogie in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam"; Penélope Cruz's kooky hooker resembles characters in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and "Mighty Aphrodite"; and Benigni's everyman stalked by paparazzi is a shoutout to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
"Paparazzi" is an Italian word derived from a photographer's name in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
Now, in To Rome with Love, he naturally highlights the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps; and in a more resonant moment, he shows us a flirting couple at the Fontana di Trevi, where Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg splashed about in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, more than 50 years ago.
It's La dolce vita soured by '90s pop-culture clichés and Allen's mean-spirited imagination (his satiric eye and savvy are on the level of Entertainment Tonight).
Last Night in Soho (2021)
Directed by Edgar Wright
influenced by Midnight in Paris (2011)
Themes Plot
Yet its power to enchant and enthrall flips once the rose-tinted filter is removed, a theme Wright (who co-wrote the screenplay with Krysty Wilson-Cairns) judiciously develops here, neatly echoing the idea Woody Allen cogently explored in 2011’s Midnight in Paris .
One spoiler can be allowed because the film's trailers highlight it: "Last Night in Soho" initially echoes Woody Allen's nostalgic time-travel yarn "Midnight in Paris" before slowly spiraling into a Dario Argento horrorfest.
Last Night in Soho recalls Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, in which a young man goes to a big city and begins seeing the ghosts of the era of that city that he idealized most—soon to discover that the past wasn't all that perfect.
Taking his title from a 1960s song with the lyrics, “Last night in Soho I let my life go,” Wright and his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns draw inspiration from playful music with a Midnight in Paris love for nostalgia.
There is more—much more—but in essence, “Last Night in Soho” suggests what would result if someone elected to take Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” and reconceived it as a blood-soaked vehicle for the likes of Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci—the restaurant next door may be technically French but the vivid red and blue hues that it fills Ellie’s room with are pure Italian giallo.
Even coming into the film fully knowing it’s horror, you become convinced early on that it’s actually a warm, escapist ode to another time, like “Midnight in Paris.”
Much as “21 Jump Street” managed to simultaneously tip its hat and thumb its nose at its 1980s fourth-network source material, so “22 Jump Street” wears its sequel-ness on its sleeve, from an opening “previously on” recap (including a wry “Annie Hall” homage not seen in the original film) to its inspired closing montage of concepts for future “Jump Street” sequels (culinary school!
Their chemistry crackles around strains in their bromance (look for an "Annie Hall" reference) and the fallout at the precinct from bungling any case they get.
There’s a wonderfully oblique reference to Annie Hall (one word: lobsters) and arguably the most memorable inter-gender melee since Patricia Arquette corkscrewed James Gandolfini in True Romance.
There is even a pretty good “Annie Hall” gag.
Playing around with the vocabulary of cinematic romantic comedies - including an exquisitely random lift of a pair of scenes from Annie Hall , of all target audience-unfriendly films - is part of the fun the film's general game of making jokes out of its own existence, but it's not really mocking the characters, so much as mocking the tropes.
The premise sound encouraging enough in concept, its heist plot setting itself up as a cross between 2000's " Small Time Crooks " and 2008's " The Bank Job "?but with woodland creatures.
The film isn't really witty enough to make adults laugh, although it's chock full of references to 40's noir crime movies (it's like an animated homage to Woody Allen's "Small Time Crooks," which itself reached back to 1942's "Larceny, Inc."), and it's a little plot heavy for little kids, although they'll probably enjoy the adventure (and fart jokes?!).
Marriage Story (2019)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Husbands and Wives (1992)
Visuals Themes
With its intimate camerawork, witty one-liners, drama that draws you in and haunting soundtrack, Baumbach's ( The Squid and the Whale , While We're Young ) tale certainly reminds one of the best of Woody Allen's output (think Hannah and Her Sisters , Annie Hall ).
Marriage Story is rich in both incident and emotion, as Nicole deals with family loyalty — her mother (Julie Hagerty) is fond of Charlie and wants to remain friends with him — while Charlie is forced to regularly fly to the West Coast even as he struggles to mount his latest production on the East Coast (the NYC-LA tug-of-war brings to mind the hilarious turf battle showcased in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall ).
But Marriage Story finds Baumbach in an expectation-confounding mood; rather than a wistful postmortem of a failed romance à la Annie Hall , the movie offers a chronicle of conflictedness, and of how a relationship changes — flails, explodes, evolves — over the course of divorce proceedings.
There are echoes of Annie Hall in the East-West Coast divide and the way it comes to represent not just a gap in geography but in mentality, symbolic of the widening rift itself.
It’s the old New York-vs.-L.A. values debate, the one mythologized in “Annie Hall,” only the way this plays out in “Marriage Story” is far more lacerating.
Much of the film takes place in Los Angeles, and his evenhanded effort slips a bit in his “Annie Hall”-inflected depiction of the city as a New Agey haven for the shallow.
My favorite sequence was a snappy reference to Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece The Exterminating Angel in a hilarious encounter between Gil and the elite director.
Allen tweaks cinematic history by having Gil suggest the plot of "The Exterminating Angel" to Dali's pal Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van, "In My Skin") who fails to see any sense in it while Man Ray (Tom Cordier) finds nothing odd about Gil's tale of time travel ('But you're a surrealist!' replies Gil).
There, he boozes it up with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll, killing it), finds a first reader for his manuscript in Gertrude Stein (Bates), and on a lark pitches future filmmaker Luis Buñuel the plot of the eternally baffling The Exterminating Angel ("But what does it mean?!" Buñuel puzzles after him – indeed).
After the stroke of midnight, Gil is transported to the Paris of the 1920s, where he rubs psyches with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, Luis Bunuel, et al. (There's a playful allusion to Bunuel's classic The Exterminating Angel, 1962).
And it’s in the film’s most irreverent, introspective moment that Gil pitches Buñuel the idea for the Spanish filmmaker’s own The Exterminating Angel , whose story, about upper-class types unable to leave the prison of their own making, is believable as an account of Gil’s own life.
…has been played up in the television ads, which seem to be selling the movie as a combination of "Rain Man" and the Woody Allen comedy "Zelig," which also used archival newsreel footage and computer handiwork to give the impression that the lead actor was actually standing next to a famous person.
That's the cinematic formula for "Forrest Gump," which combines the most interesting elements of "The World According to Garp," Woody Allen's "Zelig" and "Being There."
Dustin Hoffman was an autistic savant in “Rain Man.” Woody Allen shared the limelight with famous faces in “Zelig.”
Related to the newsreels in Woody Allen's "Zelig," only much more elaborate and impressive, the effects--created by Industrial Light & Magic--are showstoppers, presenting Forrest convincingly interacting with several Presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mixing elements of "Rain Man," "The World According to Garp" and Woody Allen's "Zelig," "Forrest Gump" covers 30 years in Gump's life, and reframes recent history by suggesting that one man can leave his stamp -- through blunders, serendipity and simple good will -- on several key historical moments.
Like Woody Allen's character in "Zelig," Forrest shows up in newsreel and TV footage thanks to technological sorcery, so well and hilariously employed by Zemeckis here.
When first ecnountered, playing ping-pong, Nola is dressed in a tight white outfit, generating the kind of eroticism that recalls the first sight of Lana Turner in “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
Pauline at the Beach (1983)
Directed by Éric Rohmer
influenced Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
Themes
In lieu of tackling a straightforward comedy or drama this time, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" takes inspiration from the works of Eric Rohmer (1983's " Pauline at the Beach ") in its naturalistic slice-of-life look at two young women still trying to decide what they want to make of their futures.
La La Land (2016)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by Annie Hall (1977), Everyone Says I Love You (1996), Radio Days (1987), Hollywood Ending (2002)
Visuals Music
Of the many inspirations for La La Land—Chazelle clearly knows his An American in Paris and his Annie Hall, too—none echo so loudly as Jacques Demy’s 1964 masterpiece , Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), as well as its lesser sibling, Les Demoiselles de Rochefort.
Not just old musicals, but the softball humor of Woody Allen's Annie Hall, which joked that LA's only cultural advantage is turning right on red.
The road to resuscitating the Hollywood musical—which is to say, an original screen musical as opposed to an adapted Broadway show, such as Chicago —is beset with honorable failures from major auteurs: Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977) sank beneath its own romantic psychodrama; Coppola’s One From the Heart (1981) eventually bankrupted the filmmaker and closed Zoetrope Studios; Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996) was liked by critics but achieved only semi-liftoff with audiences.
That’s understandable: Sustaining the wit, invention, and exuberance of those old musicals at feature length is incredibly difficult — remember Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You ?
Still, that traffic-jam-party idea had far more kinetic energy when it was done here, on West 46th Street, in “Fame” — and Stone’s levitation isn’t as adorable as Goldie Hawn’s in “Everyone Says I Love You.”
At times, La La Land resembles the missing link between the nostalgic creakiness of Woody Allen’s throwback musical Everyone Says I Love You and the futuristic fluidity of Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi adventure Gravity (not least during a swooning fantasy sequence in the iconic Griffith Observatory).
Beginners (2011)
Directed by Mike Mills
influenced by Stardust Memories (1980), Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979)
Music Themes Visuals Plot
Alternatively, given the filmmaker's background in music videos and conceptual art projects (the film also showcases Mills' painting), this mellow remembrance of things past can be enjoyed as a music video for " Stardust Memories ," crooned by the inimitable Hoagy Carmichael during a flashback.
No filmmaker has managed to reproduce the balance of self-indulgent neurosis and self-deprecatory irony that elevates Annie Hall and Manhattan into the pantheon of the greatest romantic comedies, not even Woody Allen.
Mills keeps things percolating—shades of Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall”—by constantly jumping around chronologically.
By turns, “Beginners” suggests a new age “Jules and Jim” and a rejiggered “Annie Hall.”
A jazz-bluesy score — Hoagy Car- michael, Jelly Roll Morton — gives Anna and Oliver's courtship a hint of Woody Allen circa "Manhattan" and "Annie Hall."
As with Annie Hall and (500) Days of Summer, we know from the top that certain relationships are terminal (Hal has cancer).
The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Directed by Joachim Trier
influenced by Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Themes Plot Visuals
Though of a piece with Trier’s loosely associated “Oslo Trilogy”— Reprise and Oslo, August 31st are the others, all three starring the superb Anders Danielsen Lie—the film plays like a savvy deconstruction of Annie Hall or similarly literate romantic comedies.
There are opaque shades of Woody Allen’s best work, from Annie Hall to Hannah and Her Sisters .
One of the models here, I suspect, is “Annie Hall” (1977), which Trier placed at No. 3 in his roster of favorite movies, when quizzed by Sight & Sound in 2012.
The same could be said for the story of The Worst Person in the World , which owes as much to Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) as 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963) and When Harry Met Sally (Rob Reiner, 1989).
She is a thoroughly modern woman and doesn't need to dress up like Annie Hall.
There are opaque shades of Woody Allen’s best work, from Annie Hall to Hannah and Her Sisters .
There's more than a hint of Woody Allen in the project, from the neuroses of the main character to the Annie Hall-type dissection of a failed romance, but without the stigma that some movie-goers attach to anything Allen does.
All I know is that Cusack’s direct address to the camera and his self-reflective narration of his failed relationships doesn’t seem nearly as effective now, at least in the first part of the film, as Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” which was made 23 years earlier, or Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally . .
Heureusement, plutôt que de se tourner bêtement vers l’utilisation de la fameuse voix off, les quatre scénaristes optèrent pour une solution beaucoup plus créative - et de loin plus brillante - en répétant le même stratagème qui avait fait en grande partie le charme du remarquable Annie Hall de Woody Allen.
Cameos, flashbacks, zany fantasies, scenes repeated with different outcomes: The movie is a slacker's Annie Hall (1977).
British director Stephen Frears does a good job at adapting the cult Nick Hornby novel into a dynamic, free form picture which borrows a few storytelling tricks from Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" (notably how Cusack's character talks directly to the camera) without losing its original flavor.
High Fidelity is practically an update of Annie Hall, featuring fourth-wall breaking, fantasy sequences, a protagonist who has had several relationships, and a realistic ending in which the future is still up in the air.
Compare this performance with her roles in "Elegy" and "Volver ," for example, and you see that Cruz has a much wider range than her eye-candy reputation suggests.
Much of what's best here is brought by the actors, especially sloe-eyed Bardem and the excitingly maniacal Cruz, who's as good as she was in "Volver."
After struggling with English-language crap like Sahara, Cruz has quietly given three stunning performances in Volver (which she should have won the Oscar for), a movie that opens next week that I’m still technically embargo-ed on, and this incredible role.
Cruz has displayed her versatility before -- especially in Volver - and here her fiery Spanish insensibility works perfectly as the catalyst.
Writer/director Woody Allen ("Match Point," "Cassandra's Dream") has assembled one of his most unusual casts for his latest, European set film and his combination of recent favorite (Scarlett Johansson, "Scoop," "The Black Dahlia"), new discovery (Rebecca Hall, "Starter for 10," "The Prestige") and local blood (Javier Bardem, "No Country for Old Men" and (Penélope Cruz, "Volver") sizzles and sparks.