Most critics like Crimes and Misdemeanors, and the praise clusters around the same thing: Allen’s decision to run a murder melodrama alongside a comedy and let the two stories comment on each other. Several reviews rank it among his strongest work for that reason, crediting the writing and direction with holding the halves together and the ensemble with making each side convincing. Alan Alda’s Lester is the performance most often singled out, and the moral contrast between the two plots is what the more admiring critics keep returning to.
The reservations are about balance. Variety finds the blend of melodrama and comedy uneven and thinks Anjelica Huston is let down by an underwritten role, though it too considers Alda ideally cast. Slant, reviewing much later, admires the film’s self-criticism more than it admires the disc it arrived on. The spread is otherwise narrow: no review dismisses it, and the mixed verdicts read as qualified respect rather than complaint.