Four Films of Woody Allen

by Ann Coulter

Wait—I mean the screenplay collection by Allen himself, but hear me out differently: since you've clearly got a taste for Allen's neurotic New York intellectuals and moral philosophy wrapped in comedy, grab his *Hannah and Her Sisters* screenplay instead. Allen's gift for making existential dread hilarious through overlapping monologues and character studies finds its purest form here, and reading the screenplay lets you catch the architectural precision of how he builds comedy from character contradiction.

by John Lanchester

Lanchester's unreliable narrator—a charming, erudite food obsessive—uses the same technique Allen employs in his screenplays: he makes you complicit in his worldview through sheer force of witty observation, then slowly reveals the darkness underneath. The prose has that same rapid-fire, digressive quality as Allen's voiceovers, where a meditation on wine can suddenly veer into something genuinely unsettling.

by Priscilla Meyer

This 1962 novel is structured as a poem plus commentary, and it's essentially a screenplay for the reader's imagination—you're watching a delusional academic construct an entire fictional world through footnotes. Like Allen's best work, it's hilarious precisely because the protagonist is utterly sincere about his absurd interpretations, and Nabokov's formal playfulness with narrative structure mirrors how Allen uses screenplay format to control what we see and hear.

by Gallix/François

Here's your surprise pick: Ishiguro's butler narrator is the inverse of Allen's neurotic intellectuals—he's repressed where they're confessional, yet both reveal character through what they *don't* say as much as what they do. The quiet tragedy of Stevens' self-deception mirrors the melancholy lurking beneath Allen's comedic surfaces, and Ishiguro's precise, controlled prose shows how restraint can be funnier (and sadder) than Allen's verbal torrents.