Woody Allen's Greatest Hits

Woody Allen's career has been a strange one. As a director he goes all the way to the heyday of the so-called American auteur-the 1970s-and he has won his fair share of critical accolades. Public outpouring of love for Woody Allen has not been as forthcoming, of course. Even Annie Hall was hardly a runaway blockbuster. Woody started out making deceptively silly movies before Annie Hall and Manhattan turned him into a "serious director." So jarring was the leap between something like Bananas to Manhattan to most people that there still exists this ridiculous bifurcation between Woody Allen's "funny" movies and his "serious" comedies. (We'll put such direct dramas as Interiors and Another Woman aside for the moment.) Of course, anyone looking closely at movies like Sleeper and Take the Money and Run can find serious themes throughout; in fact, Sleeper should be taken far more seriously than Interiors which is basically just third rate Ingmar Bergman.

10. Shadows and Fog.

Maybe it's because I love black and white B-horror movies and German expressionist cinema or maybe it's because I'm a big fan of Franz Kafka or maybe it's because Madonna is only in it for about two minutes, but I absolutely love this movie. From the simply stunning 380-degree sequence in the bordello to the hilarious sequence involving Woody's problem with the drink, this is without question one of Woody Allen's most ridiculously underappreciated movies. Most people have probably never even seen it, not because it was the recipient of the typical underwhelming marketing campaign of a Woody Allen movie but because it was slammed by critics who-just as they did with Zelig-failed to understand that serious doesn't necessarily equal BIG. This is a small movie, but with many big ideas. Netflix it for sure.

9. Hannah and Her Sisters.