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DVD Details
- Rated: R
- Closed captioning available
- Run Time: 1 hours, 36 minutes
- Video: Black & White
- Encoding: Region 1 (USA & Canada)
- Released: July 5, 2000
- Originally Released: 1979
- Label: Mgm (Video & Dvd)
Performers, Cast and Crew:
Starring | Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy & Mariel Hemingway | |
Performer: | Meryl Streep, Anne Byrne, Karen Ludwig & Michael O'Donoghue | |
Directed by | Woody Allen | |
Edited by | Susan E. Morse | |
Screenwriting by | Woody Allen & Marshall Brickman | |
Composition by | George Gershwin | |
Produced by | Charles H. Joffe | |
Director of Photography: | Gordon Willis |
Entertainment Reviews:
Rating: A- --
I don't know if I can think of a Woody Allen film that looks as good.
Full Review
rachelsreviews.net
Rating: A+ --
Manhattan (1979) was an acclaimed, mature, B/W masterpiece enhanced by a George Gershwin score (performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Zubin Mehta), telling about infidelity, entangling romances and situations...
Full Review
AMC Filmsite
The Gershwin-laden soundtrack is sumptuous and the black-and-white cinematography by Gordon Willis is dazzling...
Premiere
Allen serves up a nostalgia that was utterly of its time; he incarnates an idea of the city that, even now, remains as strong as its reality and refracts his disappointed ideals into high existential crises.
New Yorker
More classic than ever, Allen has finished a work of rare perfection... [Full review in Spanish]
Full Review
El Pais (Spain)
[P]iquant, perceptive and plain funny...
Uncut
What George M. Cohan did with the Stars and Stripes in 1919, Allen is doing with neurosis in 1979: waving it, telling us that as long as we're proud of it, we're all pretty damned OK. That's the real romance of Manhattan.
Full Review
The New Republic
Product Description:
Woody Allen finished his first decade of filmmaking, the 1970s, with one of his greatest and most deliberately artistic films, the love song to his home city MANHATTAN. Allen plays Isaac Davis, another one of his thinly veiled self-portraits, who finds himself suffering from a mid-life crisis. Unhappy in his career as a variety show comedy writer and newly divorced from a woman who has since come out as a lesbian, Isaac waffles between two relationships: that with emotionally honest and open, but far too young, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway in an Academy Award nominated performance) and with pseudo-intellectual, neurotic Mary (Diane Keaton). Allen uses these two women to contrast the naiveté and lack of pretension of youth with the growing cynicism of middle age.
Although the acting and writing is some of the sharpest of Allen's filmmaking career, what is truly memorable and endearing about MANHATTAN is its romantic view of New York. Whereas the character relationships in the film are largely dysfunctional and fueled by a vision of perfection, by contrast the city itself is envisioned by Allen as an object of perfection. In order to create aesthetically pleasing images of the city, Allen and his longtime cinematographer Gordon Willis decided to shoot the film in black and white and in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, the first time that Allen had used either format. The images are backed by the songs of quintessential New York composer George Gershwin, setting a tone of romanticism and grandeur that underlies Isaac's (and Allen's) inherent dissatisfaction with the mundane aspects of his life. The magnificence of the city of New York is the backdrop to the search for a similar splendor in human relationships in MANHATTAN.
Although the acting and writing is some of the sharpest of Allen's filmmaking career, what is truly memorable and endearing about MANHATTAN is its romantic view of New York. Whereas the character relationships in the film are largely dysfunctional and fueled by a vision of perfection, by contrast the city itself is envisioned by Allen as an object of perfection. In order to create aesthetically pleasing images of the city, Allen and his longtime cinematographer Gordon Willis decided to shoot the film in black and white and in the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio, the first time that Allen had used either format. The images are backed by the songs of quintessential New York composer George Gershwin, setting a tone of romanticism and grandeur that underlies Isaac's (and Allen's) inherent dissatisfaction with the mundane aspects of his life. The magnificence of the city of New York is the backdrop to the search for a similar splendor in human relationships in MANHATTAN.
Description by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment:
Nominated for two Academy Awards®* in 1979 and considered "one of Allen's most enduring accomplishments" (Boxoffice), Manhattan is a wry, touching and finely rendered portrait of modern relationships against the backdrop of urban alienation. Sumptuously photographed in black and white (Allen's first film in that format) and accompanied by a magnificent Gershwin score, Woody Allen's aesthetic triumph is a "prismatic portrait of a time and a place that may be studied decades hence" (Time). 42-year-old Manhattan native Isaac Davis (Allen) has a job he hates, a seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), he doesn't love and a lesbian ex-wife, Jill (Meryl Streep), who's writing a tell-all book about their marriage and whom he'd like to strangle. But when he meets his best friend's sexy intellectual mistress, Mary (Diane Keaton), Isaac falls head over heels in lust! Leaving Tracy, bedding Mary and quitting his job are just the beginning of Isaac's quest for romance and fulfillment in a city where sex is as intimate as a handshakeandthe gateway to true love is a revolving door.
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Product Info
- UPC: 027616851154
- Shipping Weight: 0.25/lbs (approx)
- International Shipping: 1 item