'romance in all its many insane stages...'.

Rating: 10/10 (24 August 2005)

The more you watch this, the more you realize that nothing changes. Captures the absurdity of love and, as well, the heartbreak after it's over. So many pieces to this have been analyzed, it would be pointless to re-hash them. You either get them or you don't. Falling in love is as complex as it gets in life. And this has to rank right up near the top as one of the best relationship pictures ever made. The anger, bitterness, jealousy, frustration, manipulation, selfishness, wonder, awe, beauty; everything is shown and dissected with Allen's superb use of the "cut up" technique. Fragments all bunched together in different time frames and points of view. To make up a whole. The humor found here inevitably somehow always turns sad. It's the first of Woody's comedies that casually mixes the funny with the poignant, so you're left both choked up and amused. Probably his best cast, with a glowing Diane Keaton at her daffy infectious peak. A shame she had to be up against Marsha Mason in the Goodbye Girl the same year: 2 of the best female roles of the 70's.