Woody Allen’s Films: Why His Cinema Still Matters

Woody Allen is a complicated person to write about.

For more than half a century, he has been one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. He is also a deeply controversial figure whose private life and relationships have been discussed, criticised and dissected almost as much as his films. His relationship and later marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of his former partner Mia Farrow, became one of the most controversial chapters of his public life.

None of that disappears simply because we start talking about cinema.

But this article is about the art.

Not because the rest doesn’t matter. It does. And whatever you think of Woody Allen’s life choices and relationships, everyone has to decide for themselves what that means for the way they engage with his work.

What interests me here is the filmmaker.

Allen has made around fifty films across more than six decades, and somewhere along the way he achieved something surprisingly rare: a cinematic language so specific you recognise it almost immediately.

An Allen universe.

I was lucky enough to be born into a family that adored culture and films.

Films, not movies.

And yes, I realise how terribly pretentious that sounds.

But cinema was never just popcorn and soda in our house. Films were watched, argued about and taken apart afterwards. The director mattered. The writing mattered. What you thought about it mattered.

By the time I was ten, I had seen more Woody Allen films than was probably age-appropriate. I didn’t understand half of what those anxious adults were talking about. Adultery, psychoanalysis, failed marriages, mortality. Not exactly standard material for a ten-year-old.

But something stuck.

My relationship with his films comes in phases. I can go five years without watching a single one. Then something happens and I’m back. One film becomes three, three become six, and I start hunting for one I haven’t seen, or returning to one I probably understood very differently fifteen years ago. Anyone who has seen my Top 100 Films list probably already knows that cinema tends to work like this for me.

You don’t watch Annie Hall at 20 the same way you watch it at 40. At twenty, you watch two people trying to figure out whether they belong together. At forty, you notice all the things happening underneath that question: timing, compromise, memory, disappointment, and the uncomfortable fact that loving someone and being able to live with them are not the same thing.

I’ve grown up with these films, disappeared from them and returned to them. Every time I come back, the universe is still there.

I wrote about this strange Allen effect recently in my review of The Invite, a film that reminded me just how recognisable his cinematic language really is.

I’m not a drinker, my body won’t tolerate… spirits, really. I had two martinis New Years Eve and I tried to hijack an elevator and fly it to Cuba.

Woody Allen

The Allen universe

Someone is overthinking love in a beautiful apartment. Jazz is playing. Two intelligent adults are having a conversation that somehow covers adultery, Dostoevsky, death and where to have dinner.

Somebody is deeply unhappy despite an objectively lovely life.

You are probably in a Woody Allen film.

His characters have education, culture, beautiful homes and interesting friends. Naturally, they are miserable.

And behind the comedy sit the same questions Allen has returned to for decades: love, death, sex, morality, guilt, luck, and whether any of it means anything.

Preferably discussed over dinner.

Groucho Marx meets Ingmar Bergman

Woody Allen was born in Brooklyn in 1935 and started as a comedy writer before moving into stand-up, theatre and cinema. He turned 90 last December.

His influences include Fellini, literature, jazz and old Hollywood, but two stand out, and they shouldn’t really fit together: the Marx Brothers and Ingmar Bergman.

Groucho gave him absurdity. Bergman gave him death.

Put them together and you get people discussing mortality while deciding where to eat.

That’s why calling Allen a comedy director misses so much. Even his funniest films are obsessed with loneliness, betrayal and the uncomfortable possibility that the universe has no plan for us at all.

The women are allowed to be human

For a filmmaker so closely associated with one type of man (neurotic, intellectual, permanently analysing himself), Allen has given a remarkable amount of space to strong women.

And by strong, I don’t mean perfect.

Quite the opposite.

His women are rarely saints or sinners, good girls or bad girls. They are not polished fantasies placed beside a complicated man to look beautiful and understand him.

They have lived, and you can see it.

Sometimes one scene is enough to show the miles behind them: the love, the bad decisions, the compromises.

Diane Keaton in Annie Hall is independent but insecure, wonderfully funny but vulnerable, certain of herself one moment and completely lost the next. The characters Mia Farrow played can be fragile but manipulative, loving but selfish. Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is magnetic but destructive, strong enough to dominate a room and vulnerable enough to fall apart inside it. It’s also a film that found its way into my Top 100 films. Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is sophisticated but delusional, cruel but desperately fragile, privileged and completely broken.

That but is important.

Because people are full of buts.

A woman can be strong but frightened. Intelligent but capable of a spectacularly stupid decision. Independent but desperate to be loved. Sexual without being reduced to sex. Ageing without becoming invisible. Broken without becoming weak.

Allen’s best women have contradictions rather than categories.

They are not there to represent Women.

They are people.

Perhaps that’s why actresses have found such extraordinary performances in his films. He gives them room to be unpleasant, funny, selfish, ridiculous, wounded and powerful, sometimes within the same scene.

He gives strong women a voice without requiring them to behave like strong women.

That distinction matters.

Strength is not perfection.

If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ll feel I’ve done my job.

Woody Allen

When he is bad, he is really bad

Let’s not romanticise fifty films.

Hollywood Ending feels tired. Scoop turns familiar Allen ingredients into something much thinner. To Rome with Love has a glorious city and several ideas without knowing what to do with any of them.

The mannerisms are there.

The magic isn’t.

That’s the danger of a voice this recognisable: eventually you can start imitating yourself.

But at his best:

Annie Hall. Manhattan. Whatever Works. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Midnight in Paris. Blue Jasmine.

And then there is Match Point.

If I had to choose one Woody Allen film, that would be it.

It is not the obvious choice. Annie Hall is the classic, and Midnight in Paris seems to be the one almost everyone loves. I like Midnight in Paris. It’s charming, clever and ridiculously easy to fall for.

But Match Point is something else.

It is colder, darker and less obviously Allen. There is less of the familiar neurotic comedy and more moral unease.

Love becomes obsession, privilege becomes protection, and luck becomes something almost terrifying.

And perhaps that is exactly why I love it.

It proves that the Allen universe is bigger than jazz, Manhattan apartments and intellectuals worrying over dinner.

Sometimes it can be an opera playing over a very bad decision in London.

At his best, Allen can articulate the complexity of the human mind without making it feel like a lecture. He takes death, infidelity, guilt, jealousy and moral failure and makes them light enough to laugh at without making them meaningless.

That is much harder than simply being serious.

He understands that people can love someone and hurt them. That we can know exactly what’s wrong with us and keep doing it anyway. That tragedy and comedy are usually happening in the same room.

At his best, he isn’t really a filmmaker about New York or neurotic intellectuals.

He is an interpreter of humanity.

Why does he still matter?

Sometimes I can spend longer choosing something to watch than actually watching it. Hundreds of films, endless recommendations, everything apparently selected just for me, and somehow so much of it feels interchangeable.

Then you put on an Allen film.

Within minutes, you know exactly where you are.

That is what a voice does.

We live in the age of content. Algorithms decide what we might like, and AI can generate film-like material in seconds. Everything is available, and somehow that makes a genuine artistic voice feel more important, not less.

You can dislike a Woody Allen film. But it’s remarkably hard to mistake one for somebody else’s.

The jazz. The literary references. The morally questionable people. The refusal to make everyone likeable. The assumption that an audience can sit still and listen to two people talk.

That almost feels rebellious now.

Give a damn about cinema

Maybe this is the part I inherited from my family.

You don’t need a cinema degree. You don’t need to catch every Bergman reference. Nobody hands out medals for watching something in black and white without checking your phone.

But care.

Care who directed it. Notice the writing, the music, why the camera stayed still. Ask why the ending annoyed you. Disagree with it. Talk about it.

Don’t reduce everything to content consumed between two other pieces of content.

Watch a film.

Allen’s career is complicated for reasons far beyond cinema, and everyone has to decide for themselves what that means for how they engage with his work. But purely as a filmmaker, his influence is hard to ignore.

And remarkably, he isn’t finished. His 51st film is reportedly set to shoot in Madrid, with a 2027 premiere in sight.

Different decade. Different city. Different actors.

Same questions.

Some directors make films. Some make great films. A much smaller number create a universe.

Woody Allen created one.