Rating: 
Summary: Nearly perfect in many ways
Review: There is a scene near the end of this film where Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters Holly (Dianne Wiest) n"Lee(Barbara Hershey) meet over lunch and the camera slowly circles them as they engage in a heated emotionally charged conversation that is one of the most poignant moments I have ever seen on a screen. All 3 of these actresses are just outstanding in this movie. Mia Farrow has some scenes where her emotions are so vivdly expressed in her words and her facial expression that it is in my opinion one of the finest performances ever.
The secondary story line features Woody Allen as Hannah's ex-husband who is completely neurotic and obsessed with iiness and death. However Allen is able to twist this to great comic effect. The story weaves back and forth between the emotional upheaval in the lives of Hannah, her husband(Michael Caine) and her sisters to Allen and his character's search for spiritual fullfillment. All of the characters are fully realized people , none perfect, and yet basically well meaning. (with the possible exception of Caine's character).
I believe this is one of Woody Allen's finest films and have viewed it repeatedly over the years. The only weakness is the ending which is a bit contrived but that is easily forgivable in a film that is entertaining, thought provoking and funny at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: Woody Allen's best and one of my all-time favorite movies...
Review: HANNAH AND HER SISTERS was recommended VERY, VERY highly by a fine arts teacher when it was first released in '86. He couldn't say enough good things about how wonderful the casting, the story and the humor made the movie a real treat. 15 years and at least a couple dozen viewings later, I couldn't agree more. This movie is like comfort food. I have connected with the characters, Holly in particular (played wonderfully by Dianne Wiest, who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this role)so many times that they are literally like old friends. The themes are common to everyday life and family, which doesn't make them a cliche, but more meaningful every time I watch. There are moments in the film you can replay in your memory time and again: my favorite is the taxi scene when Holly is ruminating over her awful "date" with her friend April (another great performance by Carrie Fisher) and the architect, David. I think this is one of the most well-cast films made by anyone, American or foreign directors included. Michael Caine, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Max von Sydow form a perfectly blended ensemble. The DVD transfer is of average quality. The picture is crisp enough, but it doesn't look enhanced in the DVD format. It would be nice if the studio had included more than a skimpy essay on the film's production that is included as a two-page liner/note on the inside cover. HANNAH AND HER SISTERS will make a great holiday gift for everyone, friends and family included this season!
Rating:
Summary: Oh Woody!
Review: Most reviewers have already done a great job critiquing one of Allen's best. I have to add this movie has one of my favorite lines in a movie...it is actually profound. Michael Caine is contemplating what in the world to do about his marriage and his affair with his wife's sister...He states, roughly:(not exact quote) "With all my education, with all my success, I can't fathom my own heart." That pretty much sums up the movie!
Rating:
Summary: The finest film of Allen's notable career
Review: Woody Allen's "Hannah and Her Sisters" is the finest of the neurotic writer-director-actor's pictures. His prowess in weaving together complete characters and compelling storylines is as intricate as Altman, as artful as Renoir. Yes, those are "big movie terms," but are warranted in describing this bitersweet marvel. Allen's command of the medium results in some terrific photographic shots, including the classic "camera-revolving-around-the-table" sequence featuring Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters (Barbara Hershey and dynamite Oscar-winner Dianne Wiest), whose lives all seem to be going through very adult mid-life crises with their husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, and families. Michael Caine's work in this film also shines, and Allen himself is in his prime. The ensemble cast in this film creates an atmosphere that has you really believing you're watching friends and family, and not simply actors acting, reciting lines, a problem even the better "ensemble films" often face. All of the elements in this picture --- cinematography, classic jazz tunes, nearly-musical dialogue --- are on ample display in a film rich with human warmth and big laughs. Although Allen's films are not for all tastes, this is a film that should very easily be enjoyed by nonfans and especially film students who can get a chance to see a virtuoso talent at the top of his form, not conforming by traditional storytelling and filmic norms.
Rating:
Summary: Nearly perfect in many ways
Review: There is a scene near the end of this film where Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters Holly (Dianne Wiest) n"Lee(Barbara Hershey) meet over lunch and the camera slowly circles them as they engage in a heated emotionally charged conversation that is one of the most poignant moments I have ever seen on a screen. All 3 of these actresses are just outstanding in this movie. Mia Farrow has some scenes where her emotions are so vivdly expressed in her words and her facial expression that it is in my opinion one of the finest performances ever.
The secondary story line features Woody Allen as Hannah's ex-husband who is completely neurotic and obsessed with iiness and death. However Allen is able to twist this to great comic effect. The story weaves back and forth between the emotional upheaval in the lives of Hannah, her husband(Michael Caine) and her sisters to Allen and his character's search for spiritual fullfillment. All of the characters are fully realized people , none perfect, and yet basically well meaning. (with the possible exception of Caine's character).
I believe this is one of Woody Allen's finest films and have viewed it repeatedly over the years. The only weakness is the ending which is a bit contrived but that is easily forgivable in a film that is entertaining, thought provoking and funny at the same time.
Rating:
Summary: Great film, great story.
Review: This film is considered by many to be Allen's comic masterpiece. The ensemble cast includes the best in the business during the mid 80's: Michael Cain, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Carrie Fisher and an extraordinary performance from Max Von Sydow. We have all the Allen concerns in this film - death, love, religion, ethics and the comic situations that arise in family relationships when its members choose the wrong path. The adulterous (Michael Cain) husband falls in love with his wife's sister, whom also happens to be involved in a relationship with an older man, (Max Von Sydow) which, ironically, in the end, frees her from this affiliation because of its smothering nature. Cain puts in a magnificent performance, as the guilt-ridden adulterer who cannot keep his impulses under control. The way he goes about instigating the affair is adolescent-love-struck-infatuation- behaviour at it most laughable form. Allen plays Allen, of course, but at his most charming and funny best. As a hypochondriac, he needs his pseudo illnesses in order to have meaning in his life. After a simple physical, the doctor hints that he might have something seriously wrong him; soon Allen suspects that he could have a brain tumour (the size of a basketball) and frets and frets until almost having a nervous breakdown. Later, to his great relief, he's told he's fine, but his life changes and now must discover life's 'true' meaning. This is true to the mark because after a 'close call' some of us do in fact go on a 'what's the meaning of life' journey. This of course is a natural thing to do. He tries everything from Nietzsche to Catholicism and finally discovers something very simple. This is a family saga that is at once tragedy and comedy where you'll be laughing one second and crying the next. All the characters are searching for one meaning or another except Hannah. In the eyes of her family she's perfect. But she's anything but perfect and comes to realize this ... Mia did a wonderful job playing Mia and I had a great amount of sympathy for the character by the end of the film. This is a film that one never grows tired of - it is undeniably a work of genius.
Rating: 
Summary: Amusing but not his best
Review: This movie, "Annie Hall", and "Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" are very fun to watch, cute and fluffy, but ultimately shallow. As for this movie, I honestly feel that its funniest aspect is its Harry James soundtrack, which cracked me up. But it just doesn't hold a candle to some of his deeper, more ironic, and better realized movies, such as "Crimes and Misdemeanors" and "Bullets Over Broadway".
Rating:
Summary: "woody allen's film hits the jackpot!"
Review: In one of woody' best film, he is able to captivate the lives of 3 totally different sisters (and a hypocondriac husband) into an oscar winning film! The first sister is of course Hannah, the kind nurturing mother/ wife, who has remained good friends with her ex (allen) and her new husband (Michael Caine in an oscar winning role) who finds her hard to live with, because she gives so much and expects so little in return. The other sister is Lee (Barbra Hershey who is great) the beautiful, but emotionally sad sister, who wants to escape from her college professor boyfriend, and eventually falls in love with Hannah's husband.
The last sister is Holly (Dianne Wiest in an oscar winning role) the eccentric original person, who strives to find herself, while accidentally bringing down her sister hannah, and her rival April (Carrie Fisher). But by the end of the fillm they have all found happiness. Hannah has become more close to her husband. Lee has shrugged off her affair with Hannah's husband (who has fallen back in love with Hannah), and found new love. woody Allen (who has converted to Catholicism, but then tries several other religions) becomes lesser of a hypocondriac,and Holly & woody allen have married. And Allen (unable to have a child with hannah has a child with Holly)! crackerjack cameos by Maurren O' sullivan, and Daniel Stern! A great film all around! A+!
Rating:
Summary: The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants
Review: Eerily paralleling Woody Allen's defense of the indefensible (his relationship with Soon-Yi), his alter ego in this movie whispers into the neck of Dianne Wiest, "The heart is a resilient, little muscle." He says this while nuzzling Holly, the Wiest character, his brand-new bride who was once upon a time his sister-in-law. Yes, Mickey (the Allen character) is a man who is celebrating his good fortune for having married twice into the sprawling, entertaining, extremely attractive family of Hannah, Holly, and Lee. When I saw this film originally in a Manhattan movie theater on the East Side of New York, I was physically right in the middle of Woody's world. I was quite young, just into my 20s, and I recall literally floating on air when this film was over. I even believe that the whole audience of jaded, sophisticated New Yorkers broke into spontaneous applause as the credits rolled. It was that kind of film. I rented it recently on DVD to recapture that sheer exuberance and cozy familiarity that I have always associated with this flick. The DVD doesn't offer much enhancements; it relies totally on the film and its script to justify the purchase. However, watching it now, nearly 16 years later, I was still bedazzled by the acting, the film score, the way the movie seems to unwind like a great novel rather than a 90-minute film. It was as great an ensemble piece as I recalled, but with a few disturbing elements. There is an underlying immorality to the whole interconnections of husbands, wives, sisters, brothers-in-law, etc. The fact that the film does end on a happy, uplifting note doesn't erase for me now the infidelities, deceptions, and carnal betrayals the sisters and their men perpetrate against one another. Because all of the cast members are so polished, so civilized, so professional, their assaults of the conscience come across as mere affairs of the heart. However, if you sit down and think about the marital bed swapping going on here, it rivals "Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice," a hedonistic comedy of errors. I have to admit that I am still a sucker for the romantic standards that play in the background, the visual valentine to the Manhattan of my youth, but I am disturbed that the seeds of Allen's real-life amorality seem to be sown here, right before Mia Farrow's and the public's eyes. Additionally, there are slaps against the Catholic faith--really just to elicit belly laughs and guffaws--and this antagonism against people of the papal persuasion pops up all too frequently in Allen's films over the past 15 years. "Hannah and Her Sisters" must be a great work of cinema because I would watch it this very moment if it were popped into the DVD player. However, as a caveat to any new viewer or returning watcher, just ask yourself: "If the cast wasn't so amazingly sophisticated and charmingly neurotic, would their behaviors be benignly accepted? Would this be a sweet-natured testament to the folly of love if it played out in a trailer park? Or would it be a typical installment of JERRY SPRINGER." Watch with this viewpoint and see how differently the movie unspools.
Rating:
Summary: After Annie Hall, possibly best Woody
Review: I am a self-proclaimed Woody Allen fan but even for those of you who do not take to his exaggeratedly stammering, quivering, uber-NY personality ...this is a must see-movie. There is much lesser of the typical Woody you are used to -- the neurotic vocal tics, the dry white whine -- and a lot more of story in this movie than others I have seen of him. This is also NOT your archetypic semi-comic semi-profound study of contemporary relationships (e.g., Manhattan, Crimes & misdemeanors etc) in terms of stylistic treatment, which is quite refreshing. I hesitate to regurgitate the script as other reviews have done so already, but I can bet you'll leave with several enduring scenes from the movie, including one where Micky (Woody's character) ends up in a movie house watching the Marx Brothers and realising the value of life, or the depiction of his hypochondria (a trait not uncommon among most urban city denizens, esp. New Yorkers). Other brilliant moments emerge when Mickey vows to convert to a religion that provides him the answers to life's big questions such as "what am I doing here?". So he wavers through a wide range of options from catholicism (much to the chagrin of Jewish parents and his interludes with his father are hilarious) to Hare Krishas dancing in parks and airports (which he decides to give up for fears of handing out flowers with a shaved head). The acting all-round is superlative and as others would confirm this is one flick where you'll get to see a Michael Caine behind the cold British veneer that he is typically associated with otherwise. His promiscuity between two women is outstandingly potrayed. Most people familiar with Woody Allen would still rate Annie Hall as the pinnacle of Woody, or Manhattan as his most iconoclastic, but this is a charming, funny, deep and entertaining film and a close second/third to Annie. Highly recommended. (And contrary to some reviewers, I absolutely love the ending. Why should every story have a feel-goody ending?)
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