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Manhattan (1979)

A Little Romance

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Romantic Comedies

A Little Romance

A Littte Holiday Cheer

A diverse assortment of Valentine’s treats that offers something for everyone. from traditional romantic comedies to more adventurous fare

by the Cineluxe staff
updated January 20, 2024

While not everything in our quirky roundup falls within the more formulaic definition of a romantic comedy, all of the picks display a common lineage and fit comfortably under the something-to-watch-for-Valentine’s-Day umbrella. But it’s a beyond sad sign of the times  that of the hundreds of reviews we’ve done, we weren’t able to find any recent films that even remotely fit the required bill, so we had to rely solely on classics instead. Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Play It Again, Sam are rightly included here, but we flirted with also including The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and even Mighty Aphrodite and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy since almost all of Allen’s best films are romantic comedies at heart. As for the fringier choices: Carnal Knowledge is far more pungent than sweet but offers a biting take on romantic conventions—as does Godard’s surprisingly accessible A Woman Is a Woman. And Casablanca, of course, isn’t a comedy. But it’s undeniably a romance, and pairs nicely—if a little obviously—with Allen’s Sam as a satisfying movie night. 

“Forget that this is supposed to be a romantic comedy. Forget about its Oscars. Forget about the well-heeled mob of Hollywood conformists bleating for Woody Allen’s blood. Approach Annie Hall as an adventurous and innovative and unusually honest piece of filmmaking and you’ll get the chance to experience—or re-experience—one of the best American films of the final quarter of the last century, the movie that helped start the wave that brought New York back from the dead, for better or worse.”    read more

“I can’t say I love this film, but I do admire it, and I found the experience of filtering the past and present of the culture through it if not enjoyable exactly, then intriguing and unsettling and ultimately gratifying. You should watch The Apartment, if you haven’t seen it or haven’t seen it in a while. It’s got some real meat on its bones; and it’s an invaluable snapshot of a both tangible and illusory but undeniably decisive, invigorating—and I would argue, squandered—moment in time.”    read more

“It’s a little too obvious to begin a review of Tiffany’s with Audrey Hepburn, but how can you not? What she does with her character is still breathtaking, somehow managing to stay true to the depth and nuance of Truman Capote’s original conception of Holly while shepherding her through all the standard-issue Hollywood attempts to blandify her, emerging with a conception that’s somehow able to synthesize and transcend both.”   read more

“Since Knowledge isn’t considered a ‘big’ movie, who knows if it will ever receive the restoration or 4K bump-up it more than deserves. But there are classics of the marketing-driven, ‘I loved that when I was a kid’ kind, and then there are true classics, as in legitimate works of cinematic art. Carnal Knowledge falls solidly in the latter camp and ought to be on the short list of films worth seeking out for anyone who hasn’t yet encountered it.”     read more

“I don’t have much to say about the movie itself since countless volumes, most of them paperweights, have already been written about it and trying to counter the consensual view would be like trying to push water. But I would like to emphasize how sophisticated—mature—Casablanca is, like many of the films of the ’40s—far more so than their counterparts today, which show little interest in rising above the adolescent wallowing that’s the basic price of admission to contemporary cinema.”     read more

“If you’ve never seen Love Actually and you need a little silly and adorkable escapism this holiday season, this is well worth the price of a download. Will it change your life? No. But if you don’t find yourself guffawing through tears by the time the end credits roll, you’ve got the heart of a Grinch.”   read more

“Woody Allen has said his biggest regret is that he’s never made a great film. I’m not sure what his criteria are for determining that but by any yardstick I’m aware of, Manhattan is a great film, undeniably (to use a much abused and poorly understood term) a classic. It’s so strong it might even survive the efforts to erase his career, even though it’s frequently waved around as Exhibit A in the culture wars.”    read more

“This is a decidedly minor movie made in the somewhat frivolous style director Herbert Ross (The Goodbye GirlFootloose) was known for, and all involved had to have known they were devoting their energies to what was basically a throwaway. But Play It Again, Sam is still well worth watching 50 years on, partly because the lines still deliver but mainly because it was the incubator or springboard (pick your metaphor) for everything that would be great about Woody Allen’s later work.”     read more

“This is the closest Jonathan Demme ever got to doing a really good movie, and it succeeds mainly because of a rock-solid script and still astonishing performances by Jeff Daniels and newcomer Ray Liotta and, to a lesser degree, Melanie Giffith. If it were possible to scrape away all the hip-political gingerbread Demme spread indiscriminately over the proceedings, Something Wild might just possibly qualify as great. But all that utterly extraneous gunk is now so congealed and ossified that you constantly have to peer around it to discern the movie’s strengths.”     read more

This isn’t technically a review but instead Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld’s thoughts on shooting this seminal romantic comedy for Rob Reiner and his reflections on how his work as cinematographer fared in the recent 4K release of the film.    read more

“There is really only a handful of movies that qualify as true classics, a number small enough to rest comfortably in the palm of your hand; films that transcend the zeitgeist, fleeting emotional attachments, and the aura created by relentless marketing and that tap into far deeper and more sustaining currents than the vast majority of fare. This is one of them. But given the aversion, which still persists, to foreign films—or at least to the ones that don’t try to ape American films—it’s necessary to make the case a little more forcefully here than you have to for the Hollywood standards. So let’s try this: You can’t say you know and love movies if you haven’t at least tried Godard. And possibly the best place to begin that journey is the current release of A Woman Is a Woman.”     read more

© 2024 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Manhattan

Manhattan (1979)

review | Manhattan

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Woody Allen’s most ambitious and fullest film looks just fine in HD but cries out for a 4K reissue

by Michael Gaughn
January 31, 2021

Woody Allen has said his biggest regret is that he’s never made a great film. I’m not sure what his criteria are for determining that but by any yardstick I’m aware of, Manhattan is a great film, undeniably (to use a much abused and poorly understood term) a classic. It’s so strong it might even survive the efforts to erase his career, even though it’s frequently waved around as Exhibit A in the culture wars.*

Manhattan is Allen’s most ambitious work, the film where he completely rose to, and exceeded the level of, those ambitions. It and Annie Hall are his fullest movies. No matter how good any of his subsequent efforts have been, they’ve never been as generous, don’t have that same sense of flowing over. In no other film has he been as close to or confident with the material.

And yet Allen pleaded with United Artists not to release Manhattan. He’s never really explained why. It could just be that he doesn’t have a good perspective on his own work, which would help explain (and I’m not being facetious here) the shortcomings of many of his films.

While this is his fullest movie, nothing really happens in it—or it at least it seems that way if you’ve become addicted to melodrama and its crippled stepchild, adventure. But if you focus intently on each of the characters and can establish some common ground with them, their decisions and actions become significant and the film becomes a kind of intimate epic, with Manhattan, fittingly, as its landscape. 

In any other city, this congruity between a handful of people and the totality of the urban environment would seem forced, but Manhattan being confined to an island allows Allen to put a frame around the action—literally. Doing a comedy in both 2.39:1 widescreen and black & white ran the risk of being gimmicky, but Allen and Gordon Willis pull it off partly because it’s a constant reminder of the city’s island status and mostly because it firmly establishes everything in the film as an extension of the Allen character, sealing the connection between individual and larger environment. 

And the variety of the widescreen compositions is dazzling, ranging from macro—an elaborate fireworks display in Central Park South to Park Avenue in the snow to the justly famous image of the 59th Street Bridge at dawn—to micro: a group of creatives chatting at a reception at MOMA to the long take of Allen and Mariel Hemingway strolling through SoHo with Diane Keaton and Michael Murphy to Allen glimpsed at a distance through the slats of Venetian blinds as he sits on his terrace. By each composition being so apt and by creating such a seamless flow between them, Allen creates the sense that these people are New York (or at least best embody a certain, admittedly romantic, notion of the city.)

Maybe the most successful composition is the post-coital one of Hemingway laying on a couch in a pool of light from a lamp, bottom frame left, as Allen comes down spiral stairs almost in silhouette frame right. He and Willis turn a typical upscale apartment into both a stage set and a kind of palace without losing any of the intimacy—no small feat.

Their evocation of the city at night, of walking down deserted streets with most of the businesses closed for the evening as taxi cabs continue to stream down the avenues, is so convincing it’s uncanny. No one has ever done a better job of capturing the energy constantly simmering behind the quiet, that sense of possibility, of New York after dark. 

This was Allen’s first comedy with traditionally structured scenes and a sustained narrative structure, and he applies the experience gained in the labored Interiors well. He was still learning the ropes of being an actor’s director, though, so while he and Keaton have no problems holding the frame, Murphy, Hemingway, and Anne Byrne (In a woefully underwritten role) don’t register as strongly as they should.

But those are quibbles. The film is so dynamic and so spot-on that it has a life of its own that makes its flaws seem inconsequential. That’s exceedingly rare in movies, and in a more just world, only those films where the cup runneth consistently over would ever be considered classics.

And now to the awkward part: Being able to savor Willis’s cinematography is a big part of the experience but Manhattan is in HD, and watching it on a 4K display will only make you ache to see it properly presented in UHD. Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film (with one glaring exception). But that montage is so essential that it’s hard not to wince every time a large, uniform bright area in the frame becomes a crawling gnat infestation. 

That glaring exception: The last three shots of Allen and Keaton walking through an exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium are so contrasty and over-processed they look like community-access chromakey. This isn’t even close to how these shots appear on film. Many of Allen’s movies deserve to be upgraded to 4K HDR but, given his current pariah status, that might take a while. When it finally does happen, though, Manhattan should be at the top of the list.

I know I’m a broken record about this but what can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes, offering a blissful retreat from the aural assaults we’ve unfortunately come to prize from surround sound? The all-Gershwin score sounds fine—although I wish Allen had been able to get just about anyone but Zubin Mehta to do Rhapsody in Blue.

The big question about Manhattan is why, having developed his character, his persona, and the city so fully, in a way that suggested so many more creative opportunities, did Allen essentially retreat? After Annie Hall and this film, he never really went down that path again. His character is in the forefront of Stardust Memories, but that’s not really a New York film. And while he explores similar territory in Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Husbands and Wives, he reduces his character to secondary status, to a kind of comic relief that almost makes him superfluous. I’m not saying he should have just kept churning out Manhattan retreads, but there’s an unshakeable sense that we all lost something vital when he decided to close that door. 

(* I’m going here reluctantly, which is why I’m relegating these comments to a footnote, but the whole “You shouldn’t watch Manhattan because Allen’s character has a relationship with a 17 year old” thing has become such a flashpoint that you can’t mention—let alone praise—the film without addressing it. Let’s just leave it at this: There’s been a lot of smug commentary along the lines of “Audiences at the time of the film’s release didn’t have a problem with that relationship but we, from our morally superior viewpoint in the present, do.” First off, contemporary audiences did have problems with that relationship, which Allen deliberately introduced into the film to make them squirm and to get them to rethink what defines a relationship—something we no longer seem capable of doing unless it’s framed in terms of a bland and stultifying androgyny. Second, when a certain entitled subset of society hopelessly confuses fiction with reality and then feels it can put fetters on expression and decide what can and can’t be portrayed, we are indisputably at the end of empire.)

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | Once you get past the opening montage, the irritating distractions of the upsampled high-def presentation are minimal and you rarely find yourself pulled out of the film.

SOUND | What can you really say about the sound in a movie where people basically just talk to each other for 90 minutes?

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