(1986) “I had a great evening. It was like the Nuremberg Trials.” It’s a warm, happy mob scene at the annual Thanksgiving dinner that omnicompetent Hannah (Mia Farrow) puts together practically solo, the first of three that mark two years in the lives of Hannah, recently triumphant in her return to the stage in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; and her sisters: drifting AA member Barbara Hershey, who lives with misanthropic artist Max von Sydow, and excoke sniffer, insecure actress/caterer/writer wannabe Dianne Wiest (Oscar, Best Supporting Actress). Yes, Hannah’s got it all, except that her second husband, financial consultant Michael Caine (Oscar, Best Supporting Actor), can’t stop thinking about sister-in-law Hershey, who’s getting restless with the older von Sydow; Wiest engages catering partner Carrie Fisher in a who’ll-get-dropped-off-last duel after a ride around town with available widower Sam Waterston; and parents Maureen O’Sullivan (Farrow’s actual mom) and Lloyd Nolan constantly bickering about drinking and decades-old infidelities. Oh, and ex-husband TV producer Woody Allen battles hypochondria and existential angst so severe he contemplates Catholicism, Hare Krishnaism, Wonder Bread, and a rifle in his desperate search for answers to the ultimate questions. Arguably Woody’s richest work, with enough material for half-a-dozen films; one of his most formally experimental — the lengthy voiceovers and interior monologues often contradicting the action on screen; and his romantic ode in color to New York, with the camera endlessly tracking beside and ahead of walkers and runners through the most picturesque of neighborhoods— with, startlingly, his most positive ending ever. (“I don’t see it as optimistic. I see it as vaguely hopeful” – Woody.) “The penthouses have been replaced by SoHo lofts, West Side labyrinths, but the preoccupations are pretty much the same as those faced by romantic New Yorkers from Fred and Ginger to Kate and Cary. . . There is the invigorating lilt of spring in the air, and love and the Chrysler Building are just around every corner.” – Richard Corliss, Time. “It’s apparent that Mr. Allen has become the urban poet of our anxious age — skeptical, guiltily bourgeois, longing for answers to impossible questions, but not yet willing to chuck a universe that can produce The Marx Brothers.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times.
AN MGM RELEASE.

Available at Amazon:

CONVERSATIONS WITH WOODY ALLEN by Eric Lax

Eric Lax, author of Conversations with Woody Allen (Knopf),
will introduce the 7:40 pm show on Friday, December 14.

"Hannah and her Sisters has since come to represent everything this filmmaker did well. Here was Allen’s Gotham, not romanticized in Manhattan’s chiaroscuro, but stripped down to a natural, multiseasoned beauty."
—Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York

"MAGNIFICENT!
Allen’s warmest, most forgiving film, and absolutely one of his best."
– New York magazine

"One of Allen's richly photographed love letters to upper-bourgeois New York."
– David Denby, The New Yorker