To me, this movie is perfection.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I loved this film in my teens and twenties. Then I got to be married, have kids, deal with the real ups & downs of making a long term relationship work, and then I realised the only decent character in this film is 17yo Tracy who is completely dominated by her creepily older partner who stops her from having a proper life of her own. The message being- it's important for Isaac to have his romantic whims, even at the cost of any sort of stable home life. Really- there is nothing to admire about this film but the shots of NY and the music. The rest is pure self indulgence on Allen's part.

My main objection to this film is that I just cannot accept Woody Allen as a desirable lover. I think he's ugly and that the character he portrays is highly unsympathetic. However, this doesn't seem to worry most people who have seen the film and thoroughly enjoyed it. The boys seem to feel that if Woody Allen can make it with the girls, there's hope for them too, and the girls seem to argue that Woody is such a mental giant and such a celebrity it would be an honor to be seen in his company!Once you accept the romantic scenes as perfectly natural and even desirable, and once you accept the Woody Allen character as the sympathetic hero he obviously wants you to accept him as, then the whole film falls into place and you laugh at all the jokes and you become emotionally involved in all the situations and you identify with the hero in his battles against the other characters and against the city itself. Identification completed, the Gershwin music, the skilfully framed, large screen, black and white photography, and the playing by all the other members of the cast (particularly Michael Murphy, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep and Mariel Hemingway) is then meshed by writer/director Allen into a very satisfying and entertaining whole. But I just cannot accept Woody Allen that way. I like him the way he was in "Bananas" and "A Walk with Love and Death" or even "Play It Again Sam" — the perennial fall guy!

Isaac (Woody Allen) is a twice-divorced 42-year old TV screenwriter, dating a 17-year old girl, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway). His best friend is Yale (Michael Murphy) who is married to Emily (Anne Byrne Hoffman) and is having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton). Isaac finds himself drawn to Mary and when Yale and Mary split up, they start seeing each other. Things seem to be going swimmingly, but...Okay but not overly engaging, interesting or profound. Really just a romantic-drama, and nothing more. The clever humour which usually typifies Woody Allen movies is very few and far between and what there is generally doesn't quite have the some intelligence and zing as his usual stuff.So that just leaves it as a drama, and, as mentioned, it's just a romantic drama, so nothing too profound can come from it. There are some decent intrigues to sustain the movie, but that is about it.The 42-year-old-with-17-year-old was also a bit creepy. This aspect of the movie seemed to be explained well and the issue gotten past, but then the conclusion wrecks that. Very unsatisfactory ending, and undoes a lot of the progress that came before it.On the plus side, there were some good jabs at the pretentiousness of New York society. The cinematography is great too: filmed in black and white with some wonderful, loving, lingering shots of New York skylines and landmarks. Can't fault the performances either. Woody Allen does what he does best - playing himself. Diane Keaton is the pick of the bunch as the intelligent, over-analysing, knowingly-beautiful, self-obsessed Mary. Meryl Streep, in only her third feature film (her second was The Deer Hunter), is great in a supporting role.

I'm nineteen years old and I've watched this film through the eyes of a girl of the 2015. I can honestly say that I've been very impressed by the detached and ingenious sarcasm with which Allen depicts a generation, his generation. In Manhattan I've seen first of all the portrait of a generation, the generation of those who lived their forties in Manhattan, the symbol of everything that could be achieved in the 80s. And the portrait depicted is not softened at all, since every single adult in this movie is a neurotic mess. There are adults afraid of cancer, adults that plan to write books they will never end, adults that put their life in the hands of LSD-addicted analysts, adults that talk about orgasms, adults devastated by dull, mediocre men imagined as "gods", adults that waver between homo, bi and heterosexuality, adults that pretend to be intellectuals and try to judge Mozart, Bergman and Scott Fitzgerald, adults whose relationships are stable just as the weather is, adults that act like they believe in the highest values but that in the end need a seventeen-year-old girl to find their balance. And those are the same adults that despise the generation brought up by the TV and the pill. This show of absurdities is well hosted by Isaac Davis, Woody Allen himself, that unprejudiced as always, hides all these paradoxical situations behind a good amount of irony. If I had to make a comparison with a more recent movie, I would say that what Allen did with his generation has been done by Tony Servillo with the current fifty-year-old Roman VIPs, in his latest work La Grande Bellezza. Irony, good acting and a good soundtrack always make a movie worth watching. And this movie can boast the best of everything.