He doesn't appear on screen for many minutes, but everything has his name on it, including of course the black and white credits that acknowledge him as writer and director and actor. His signature appears everywhere else as well: the “sultry” trumpet of You Made Me Love You that opens the film and immediately breaks into “an up tempo jazz number,” the use of titles that no other director would try in quite that way, the voice-over as the first spoken words in the film, the perfect gag lines. And yet things are also different. Hannah and Her Sisters can be seen as a metaphor for the Woody Allen canon. It is the same and yet different, literally achieving a new plateau of artistic range and unity. A culmination of all his other work, Hannah and Her Sisters includes elements from most of Allen's major films – the comedic but creative schlemiel, the focus on serious women characters of Interiors and Manhattan, complex characterization and narrative, the exploration of ambiguous personal relationships and moral issues, the fusion of comedy and drama, self-conscious cinematography, and visualization; but it also represents a transformation. For those critics who see in Allen's work true milestones in the history of American cinema, Hannah and Her Sisters realizes the creative potential of all of his important films as well as the fulfillment of a promise about his artistic values and objectives that he has made throughout his mature years and repeated in his interview with Eric Lax for the New York Times.