While Manhattan is Woody Allen's most accomplished film, Annie Hall is his warmest, a love poem to both New York City and Diane Keaton (real name Hall).

Basically a series of loosely strung sketches illustrating Allen's views on love, death, psychoanalysis, movies, religion and sex, Annie Hall is still one of cinema's great romances; Allen and Keaton making an impossibly sweet, yet utterly plausible Manhattan couple, going through the usual trials of meeting up, loving up and breaking up.

Allen is in light mood here, giving us the hilarious cocaine snorting gag, lobster cooking and spider hunting, plus a string of corking one liners, including the legendary, "Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love."

Bizarrely, for such an autonomous director, the film was shaped by test audiences, who singled out the love story, originally a subplot, as their favourite element of the early, rambling rough cuts. Allen has claimed three others film could come from Annie Hall's deleted scenes.

Whatever the story, Annie Hall is a timeless classic, a New York light years away from Scorsese's mean streets, but a stunning depiction of the city, and one pretty woman in it.

Rob Daniel