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Stardust Memories (Woody Allen, 1980)
“I took one course in existential philosophy at New York University, and on the final they gave me ten questions and I couldn’t answer a single one of them. I left them all blank. I got a hundred.”
By the mid-’70s, Woody Allen was known primarily as a comedy director: Take The Money And Run (1969), Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973) were all broad comedic films with easily quotable jokes. Then he got serious: he made Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979), and many fans of his “earlier, funnier works” got up in arms.
So, in 1980, he made Stardust Memories, a part tribute to and part parody of Fellini’s 8½, about a self-doubting filmmaker attending a retrospective of his own work. What could’ve been a morose self-reflection actually ended up as one of his funniest films — pilloried at the time, it was recognised years later as one of his finest works.