In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.
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Vincent Canby in his review for Zelig in The New York Times (17 July 1983)Woody Allen
With the possible exception of What's Up, Tiger Lily (1966), the schlocky Japanese spy movie to which he attached his own, sidesplitting English soundtrack, no Woody Allen movie has ever been more or less serious than another of his works. He's always been serious. It's the audiences who have been frivolous.
In Zelig he reassures us that he can still be funny and moving without making the sort of insistent filmic references in which he delights but which can be infuriating to others. Zelig is a nearly perfect — and perfectly original — Woody Allen comedy.Woody Allen
Woody Allen says at the end of Annie Hall that we’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s so difficult in real life [...] if we can accept Allen’s as a definition of art, then sabermetrics is absolutely an art. And, just as Kalkman notes, it’s an art whose practitioners are bent on seeing justice done — in baseball, if nowhere else.
Carson Cistulli
For me, a director is more important than a big banner. A great director can do wonders. Of course, banners do matter because, ultimately, after all the hard work you put it, the film must release. This will happen only if you work with a good banner or a producer who markets your film well, gives the director whatever he wants, and releases the film.
Rani Mukerji
"I was talking to a friend about it recently and I told him that the thing about making that film that upset me most was how cruel Lars is to the woman he is working with. Not that I can't take it, because I'm pretty tough and completely capable of defending myself, but because my ideals of the ultimate creator were shattered. And my friend said "What did you expect? All major directors are "sexist", a maker is not necessarily an expert in human rights or female/male equality!
My answer was that you can take quite sexist film directors like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick and still they are the one that provide the soul to their movies. In Lars von Trier's case it is not so and he knows it. He needs a female to provide his work soul. And he envies them and hates them for it. So he has to destroy them during the filming. And hide the evidence. What saves him as an artist, though, is that he is so painfully honest that even though he will manage to cover up his crime in the "real" world (he is a genius to set things up that everybody thinks it is just his female-actress-at-the-moment imagination, that she is just hysterical or pre-menstrual), his films become a documentation of this "soul-robbery". Breaking the Waves is the clearest example of that.
bjork."Bjork Guomundsdottir
Khan is played as a cauldron of resentment by Ricardo Montalban, and his performance is so strong that he helps illustrate a general principle involving not only Star Trek but Star Wars and all the epic serials, especially the James Bond movies: Each film is only as good as its villain. Since the heroes and the gimmicks tend to repeat from film to film, only a great villain can transform a good try into a triumph.
Roger Ebert
Allen, Woody
Allende, Salvador
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