David Denby

“No longer trapped in Woody's fantasies as beautiful girls who might go to bed with him or turn him down, most of the women characters have become fully rounded too… Mariel Hemingway… is a marvel…. When she finds her voice, she could become a wonderful actress.

“And Diane Keaton gives her boldest, most interesting performance to date. She and Woody have really captured something this time--a new woman, as startlingly fresh as some of Godard's heroines a dozen years ago. Shrill, torturously self-conscious, uncontrollably eager to impress, her journalist is a hustler and a bit of a faker, yet terribly sympathetic all the same. Like so many women now who race ahead on guts and willpower, she constantly needs to reassure herself that her success isn't a mirage. "I'm a beautiful woman; I'm young; I've got everything going for me," she retiterates angrily, shaking off the specter of disaster like a witch doctor waving a charm. Manhattan is Woody's baby, his dolorous love poem to New York, but for the first time Diane has pulled even with him as an imaginative creation in her own right. She gives the movie a large part of its restless, unhappy soul.”

David Denby
New York, d-d-d-date ?