Are we underestimating Woody Allen?

'Introverts often grow up thinking themselves invisible — a fear perhaps but a strangely comforting one, and something of a sustaining fantasy should you become famous.  These days, Allen has the invisibility of his own ubiquity, noiselessly producing a film every year, for critics to take a whack it: is it good Woody or bad Woody?  He is a figure occluded by the scandal and speculation given off by his private life, which still manages to send tabloid geiger counters crackling, some two decades after his break with Mia Farrow. It could almost be the subject of a Woody Allen film, were it not that Allen has already made it: Zelig, whose chameleonic hero is, you will remember,  “sued for bigamy, adultery, automobile accidents, plagiarism, household damages, negligence, property damages, and performing unnecessary dental extractions,” before finding redemption with some Lindberghian derring-do — an uncannily accurate forecast of Allen’s own return to crowd-pleasers in the mid nineties.  Except that Zelig was released in 1983.  On the rise and fall of Woody Allen, Allen, it seems, was there first.' — from my article on WA for The New Statesman

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