Annie Hall A later "Guardian" critic, Peter Bradshaw, named it the best comedy film of all time, commenting that "this wonderfully funny, unbearably sad film is a miracle of comic writing and inspired film-making". John Marriott of the "Radio Times" believed that "Annie Hall" was the film where Allen "found his own singular voice, a voice that echoes across events with a mixture of exuberance and introspection", referring to the "comic delight" derived from the "spirited playing of Diane Keaton as the kooky innocent from the Midwest, and Woody himself as the fumbling New York neurotic". "Empire" magazine rated the movie five
Annie Hall argues that Allen's devices in the film, including the subtitles which reveal Annie's and Alvy's thoughts "extend and reinforce "Annie Hall" 's winsome ethos of plain-dealing and ingenuousness". He muses that the film is full of antimimetic emblems such as McLuhan's magical appearance which provide quirky humor, and that the "disparity between mental projections of reality and actuality" drives the film. His view is that self-reflective cinematic devices intelligently dramatize the difference between surface and substance, with visual emblems "incessantly distilling the distinction between the world mentally constructed and reality". In his discussion of the film's relation to modernism, Thomas