Love and Death strikes me as majestically funny: the most shapely piece of cinema that Woody Allen has yet made, and one of comedy's hardiest ripostes to extinction.

It sparkles with an unremitting succession of terrific moments, if not the soaring, sustained stretches of Sleeper.

It’s good-natured laughter, too, deriving in large part from simply sharing in Allen’s sheer pleasure in travesty, in being slightly disrespectful to what we have learned to revere.

It is a fun Allen film all told, giving his original comic sensibilities one of their final hurrahs, while pointing to a more interesting and sophisticated writer/director in the future.