At age 75, Woody Allen is still out there, making his annual movie like clockwork, on his own terms and following his distinct muse. While he’s rightfully associated with a specific sensibility -- neurotic New Yorkers self-analyzing themselves half to death -- a look back at the entirety of his career reveals a surprising amount of versatility, as this review of his 10 best films indicates.

1. Annie Hall, 1977: There’s a temptation to go outside the box and put something at the top other than Allen’s one Best Picture winner, but why fight it? Annie Hall has held up terrifically -- even its intellectual references don’t come across as pretentious, perhaps because this was the film where he debuted his soon-to-become-stock modern urban neurotic character. While it’s the chronicle of a beautiful relationship that was destined not to last (because as in most of Allen’s films, his co-stars eventually outgrow his quirks), it epitomized the romantic comedy in the 1970s.

2. Manhattan, 1979: True, the plot point involving the Woody character’s relationship with a teenager (Mariel Hemingway) was icky even at the time, and seems more so post Soon-Yi. But this is easily the most gorgeous to look at of all Allen’s films, and with a romantic soundtrack that may be without equal in movie history, even though Manhattan isn’t a romantic comedy in the usual sense of the term. Less funny than Annie Hall but more realistically bittersweet, it’s the perfect film to see after a breakup.

3. Hannah and Her Sisters, 1986: Allen’s biggest box-office hit ever gave several fine actors, most notably Michael Caine, the role of their careers. Woody himself has perhaps his best post-1970s role as a deeply neurotic (even for him) dilettante who eventually falls for the sister played by Dianne Weist. One can tell that Allen had to have been at a rare happy stage of his life to produce this film, which has little of the bitter overtones that tend to color even his most lighthearted work. But he’s rarely seemed so carefree since.

4. The Purple Rose of Cairo, 1985: It had a normal enough romantic comedy conceit (a swashbuckling film character leaves the screen to enter into the real life of a lonely woman), but like most of Allen’s better films, it had the courage to leave the audience without the expected ending, and with its heroine unfulfilled. Allen isn’t a sentimentalist about love or the ability of movies to change our lives, but there’s little question his relationship with Mia Farrow was impacting his work in a major way by this time. Too bad none of it could last.

5. Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1989: Allen capped a great decade with this blackest of comedies, about a doctor (Martin Landau) who little by little finds himself in a situation where he’s arranging for his scorned mistress to be murdered, because he’d rather that he and only he realize he’s a murderer than have everyone know he has affairs. Allen stars in the other main plot opposite a smarmy Alan Alda, whose career as an ace supporting player truly began with this film. He’s never been one for happy endings, but they rarely got this bleak.

6. Deconstructing Harry, 1997: This doesn’t qualify as his funniest movie, but with its very R-rated screenplay, it’s clearly the funniest that doesn’t seem much like it was made by Woody Allen. He plays controversial writer Harry Block, who is about to get an award from the college that once expelled him. But Block finds himself blocked as a writer, and is now late in middle age having alienated friends, family, and ex-wives. It’s unlikely he could have made this film before he became a subject of mass controversy; the other characters in the film talk about Harry in a way that mirrors how Allen himself was pilloried.

7. Sleeper, 1973: This is the film that made it seem like Woody might become a slightly more highbrow version of Mel Brooks -- someone who made conventional comedies for mass audiences. His career ended up going in a different direction, but Sleeper, a true box-office hit by the standards of the day, proved Allen could do zany, in this story of a man who is awoken after 200 years in a deep freeze and finds that America is now a badly run dictatorship. “Fish out of water in the future” is a story we’ve all seen, but it’s rarely been funnier than it is here.

8. Zelig, 1983: Allen’s films have almost always garnered more attention for their screenplays than their overall look, but this story of a “human chameleon” who is utterly mediocre as himself (Allen) but can take on the demeanor of whoever he’s around was considered groundbreaking in its day. A “mockumentary” prior to This is Spinal Tap, and a film that inserts its main character into news footage 10 years before Forrest Gump, it had some signature Woody gags, but the character study had real poignancy.

9. Everyone Says I Love You, 1996: A film that some dismissed out of hand -- Julia Roberts and Edward Norton in a musical! Does he think critics will just accept anything he puts out? -- could probably stand a good re-evaluation. While it’s not really at the level of the classic old musicals that Allen must have seen as a boy, it’s never less than charming, and the Venice and Paris settings are stellar. Kudos to Woody for seeing that Norton and Drew Barrymore (who at that time had done virtually nothing interesting since “growing up”) might make a believable lead romantic couple.

10. Radio Days, 1987: Allen hasn’t often resorted to nostalgia, and in his days doing stand-up he told as many jokes about his upbringing as any other Jewish comic of that generation. But the wistful and wonderfully shot Radio Days switched things up, following a boy (Seth Green -- yep, the same one who went on to hang out with Buffy) who escapes his loud if loving family and the hard times in the outside world via the voices who come over the airwaves. Those old shows may have been corny, but you never forget what you loved as a kid.