Crimes and Misdemeanours displays a rare trait in Woody Allen’s work: a willingness to take risks. As an artist with such a prolific and tonally consistent output any variations in his formula are noticeable. Much is as usual of course: Allen directs, writes and plays a major role in the film; it is set in New York; it features intellectuals, reflections on art, Judaism and affairs. But it is in Allen's subtle will to experiment that this film becomes great. For one, Crimes and Misdemeanours is not all that funny. This isn’t an attack on Allen's writing — I don’t think the film is meant to be all that funny. But neither is it a true ‘serious’ Woody Allen film. It’s a sort of hybrid.

Allen's character serves largely as the comic relief in the film but even in his usual neurotic nattering there is an underlying admission that it is a futile distraction from the strife and violence inherent in the marriages and relationships the film examines. It’s in some ways the other side of the coin from the charm and whimsy of Annie Hall, Manhattan and their ilk. Furthermore, Allen is at his most directorial in this picture. Here there are several scenes which contrast his usual stripped back, simple style of directing. At one point Judah (played excellently by Martin Landau) exchanges a guilt-ridden back and forth with a rabbi friend of his who isn’t in fact in the room at all. Later, he visits his family home (in an undisguised homage to Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries) and engages in a fanciful conversation with his family, many of whom have deceased. This is bold stuff from Allen's point of view and it is handled with great self-assuredness.

It’s certainly a more difficult film to watch than many of his others; it features murder and suicide and betrayal and guilt. But it lasts long in the memory -- the moral questions it proposes work their way deep into the audience's psyche. One of Allen’s boldest and best. 

EveryFilmIWatch is multi-channel film review project run by Sebastian Cox, ScriptUp co-founder. Further reviews can be found on Instagram.