Masters of cinema: Woody Allen

Forty-four features over 48 years, nearly a film a year for five decades. That's a lot of cinema to emerge from the mind of one man. Woody Allen's approach to filmmaking shares more in common with the routine, unfussy classical studio era than modern auteurism. Not counting a dubbed Japanese spy movie, he began directing in the 1970s and is still making films today.Allen has a reputation for discarding each film as it passes him by, not bothering to reflect on their importance or worry about their legacies; his attentions are drawn to what's next so quickly that he hardly has time to bother with his own history. The canon cries out for rejuvenation, and so we draw up a list of his greatest hits.