[Woody Allen in Annie Hall] is—delightfully—in top form exposing the cultural stereotypes and clichés, the pretensions, fatuities, and hangups, and above all the jargon, of urban American pseudo-intellectuals…. His Alvin Singer brilliantly expresses the absurdity of a contemporary Everyman trying to enact the role of l'homme moyen sensuel in the form of an inadequate, self-deprecatory paranoid runt. ("I'm the only guy I know who suffers from penisenvy.") Woody repeatedly reminds us that the modern American male is a reductio ad absurdum quivering helplessly under the combined weights of Sigmund Freud and Women's Lib….

Annie Hall's satiric barbs lance a multiplicity of contemporary targets, but the film's essential concern is with the reworking of the old myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. At first, Annie forces a relationship with the reluctant Alvin; but gradually, despite his evident inadequacies, he assumes control and begins to transform her into an educated and self-confident woman. Soon the increasing success of the transformation produces a crucial dilemma: love or independence?…

The film offers some novel and topical variations on the old myth…. Woody Allen's "Pygmalion" is a divorcee who makes absurdly fumbling efforts to pass himself off as a latter-day worldly-wise Casanova. And while Alvin Singer is not destroyed by his "creation," his involvement with Annie Hall does, in fact, reveal his many weaknesses in contrast with her growing strength. Shaw's Pygmalion shows the gradual elevation of Eliza to equality with Higgins, but Annie Hall offers us instead a new Galatea nonchalantly turning her back on a Pygmalion who seems too ridiculous even to be pathetic. (p. 54)