Annie Hall is not your typical romcom, and that much is obvious right off the bat. We start with Woody Allen, in character as Alvie Singer, looking right at the audience and telling jokes. Allen is a natural at this, having started as a stand-up comedian, and so it’s no surprise that the jokes hit as well as they do. The picture then moves forward to a flashback of Singer as a young child, discovering girls for the first time and getting chastised for kissing a random classmate. This leads to a classic “Where Are They Now?” bit where the children, representing their older selves, leading to an inappropriate punchline (“I’m into leather”) that’s Allen’s bread and butter as a comedy writer.

It’s hard to watch an Allen film and not picture the man himself as his characters. He rarely gives in-depth interviews so the audience has very little to go on in relation to his life, and so for all we know, Woody Allen might indeed be Alvie Singer, and vice versa. That said, his characters are so well written and defined that it’s not of much consequence. No one plays a neurotic, death-obsessed nebbish like Allen, and here he gives his best performance in a role/mode he’s become famous for. Always playing a riff on the same basic caricature, whether in this, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, or Manhattan Murder Mystery, if it ain’t broke, clearly Allen shouldn’t fix it.