<p> Whether or not Woody Allen wins any Oscars on Sunday, his 2011 contender, <em>Midnight in Paris</em>, will stand as a remarkable accomplishment. Can you name any other director who made as many feature films over as long a time as Allen? After more than 40 years in film, he enjoyed his greatest ever success at the box office with <em>Midnight in Paris</em>. Along with the <em>Midnight in Paris</em> DVD come a number of recent releases, including an exceptional new documentary on Woody Allen and Blu-rays of <em>Annie Hall </em>(1977) and <em>Manhattan</em> (1979). </p> <p><em>Annie Hall</em> represented the next stage in Allen's evolution from a director whose films were comprised of a string of hilarious gags to an artist telling human stories whose humor rose from the characters and their situations. <em>Annie Hall</em> remains familiar to anyone who remotely cares about cinema, while <em>Manhattan</em> is less remembered and may strike some contemporary eyes as the more eccentric of the two films. For one thing, <em>Manhattan</em> was a symphony in black and white, endowing New York during its troubled period of high crime, blackouts and bankruptcy with glamour and excitement. Allen played his usual protagonist with a twist. He was a neurotic TV gag writer having an affair with a 17-year old (Mariel Hemingway). Nowadays this would raise hackles left and right, but <em>Manhattan</em> was made at a time when rock stars toured with teenage girlfriends in their baggage train and Roman Polanski was genuinely surprised to be prosecuted for his relations with Samantha Geimer. </p> <p><em>Manhattan</em> can be seen as a series of smart conversations among articulate, educated people on a raft of themes dear to Allen: love and lust, marriage and divorce, feeling and thinking, classic Hollywood cinema and the meaning of life. In a lesser director's hands the result could have been interesting if dull, but as underlined in the two-disc <em>Woody Allen: A Documentary</em>, his origins in stand-up comedy and Dixieland jazz have served him well. The documentary's director, Robert B. Weide, reveals much about his subject through interviews with Allen as well as family, friends, colleagues and admirers. A sense of rhythm and timing permeate his films, whose autobiographical details are magnified and distorted in the funhouse mirrors of his imagination. Weide also shows that Allen's success has been predicated on hard work, persistence and a knack for making movies on slender budgets without looking cheap. Actors love working with him, as attested in the documentary by Sean Penn, Diane Keaton, Antonio Banderas, Scarlett Johansson and others. </p>
