Film

Seeing Manhattan at Film Forum is just about the most New York thing you could do, unless you were to also buy an egg cream (they make them there), take a date with you—preferably one in a floppy sun hat—and then walk down the street discussing the movie with the camera tracking along beside you. “What camera?” you ask. Ha. The one right behind you. Woody Allen’s movie, inarguably his most nostalgic, has a way of making you feel cinematic no matter what. All you have to be is here, in the city we call home.

Suffused with Gordon Willis’s chocolaty b&w cinematography and the equally velveteen tones of George Gershwin, Manhattan is the ultimate portrait of late-’70s Gotham sophistication. At that point, Allen was running hard against the nascent Star Wars aesthetic; with 1977’s Annie Hall, the comic was suddenly serious (e.g., not afraid to make a joke about Kant), and this picture sealed the deal. The dialogue rambles in a babbling brook of pop-intelligentsia minutiae, thoroughly modern then, and now the default form of ironic gab. Much of it is issued by Allen himself, here in peak form as a fortyish TV writer staving off his insignificance with a fling with a teenager (Hemingway). Spare us the stale Soon-Yi jokes; this is a deeply self-critical film about immaturity and the gift of real love. Many films can be said to put an epitaph on the decade, but few remain as relevant.