My all-time top five Woody Allen movies just because...




5. Sleeper (1973)
Two of the films in my five are co-written with Marshall Brickman, as crucial a collaborator in Allen's work as Diane Keaton, Mia Farrow, Zhao Fei or Gordon Willis. The comedy is authentically demented, while the science-fiction production design is plain eerie. Diane Keaton has never been more cuckoo, and Allen's slapstick tendencies (rarely his most sure-footed moments) are distilled beautifully in the giant banana-peel gag. I love it for the retro view of the future, Joel Schumacher's costumes, the Orgasmatron, Allen's Blanche DuBois impression, his perky jazz score and the fact that it was the first movie of his that I saw, age 11, on late-night TV. I reeled off the gags at school, and people looked at me like I was an alien, except for one cool teacher - she knew, man.