1Annie Hall (1977)
Written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman
Funnily enough, Woody Allen was trying to break away from being so funny. He and Marshall Brickman wanted to call their film Anhedonia (psychiatric term meaning the inability to experience pleasure). “I wanted to do a movie that might not have anything funny in it for a minute, or five minutes…but you would still not be bored by the movie,” Allen told Richard Schickel in Woody Allen: A Life in Film. There are so many memorable moments in Annie Hall that it’s easy to skip over how modern cinema’s greatest semi-autobiographical relationship story begins: with Alvy Singer addressing the camera straight on, establishing both character and trust. “It sets up the idea of the film,” Allen said in Woody Allen on Woody Allen. “I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them.”