A “minor character” steps off a movie screen and into Depression-era New Jersey, stranding his fellow characters while offering perfect (but imaginary) love to an abused housewife. Woody Allen’s best film (even he regards it as the most successful of his efforts) is a delightfully comic exploration of the difference between movie fantasy and harsh reality, and of the way fantasy can be both a form of escapism and a form of inspiration; but it is also a remarkably canny parable about a created world that is deemed good yet loses its sense of purpose once its inhabitants “chuck out the plot.”
—Peter T. Chattaway