Film Forum

(1979) Dumped by wife Meryl Streep for another woman, Woody Allen now dates high-schooler Mariel Hemingway – but pal Michael Murphy’s mistress Diane Keaton sure looks good. Backed by a Gershwin score and shot by Gordon Willis in ravishing b&w, this is one of the greatest odes to New York. 35mm. Approx. 96 min.

Reviews

“I like to think that one hundred years from now, if people see the picture, they will learn something about what life is like in the 1970s.”
– Woody Allen

“The city leaps out with caricatural precision even as Allen constructs it piecemeal from his own urbane aesthetic. Turning experience into art and vice versa, converting disappointed ideals into existential crises, Allen offers a nostalgic vision of New York that was utterly of its time and that remains as strong as its reality.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Allen’s best film: the most grown-up, most technically accomplished, most securely pitched.”
– Foster Hirsch

“Woody Allen’s writing isn’t just persuasive; it cuts like a laser through the gorgeous black-and-white valentine he constructs to the city. His one-take scenes and ingenious tracking shots etch an indelible portrait of a community in slow decay and are no less breathtaking than Renoir’s Rules of the Game.”
– Neil LaBute

 “WORLD-CLASS BLACK-AND WHITE CINEMATOGRAPHY! Manhattan fiddle[s] with a wide range of levels, roaming freely between the screwball experimentalism of Annie Hall’s sketch-autobiography and the considerably more subdued oceanfront tragedy that [Allen] made in the wake of his Oscar triumph… The shape-shifting city sets the tone for all that happens in it; it exerts an irresistible draw on our hero, never failing to provide the perfect background image, sidewalk cafe, or lunch counter to enable (but never to judge) his good and bad decisions.”
– Jaime M. Christley, Slant Magazine

“Framed as a loving tribute to neurotic New York, it’s funny and sad in exactly the right proportions.”
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

“A masterpiece that has become a film for the ages by not seeking to be a film of the moment.”
– Andrew Sarris