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Before there was Sleepless in Seattle, there was neurotic in New York. Woody Allen wrote, directed and starred in Manhattan, a wry comedy about a depressed writer Isaac (Allen himself), falling in love with Diane Keaton's abrasive intellectual. Less a film about relationships than about Allen's own relationship with the Big Apple, it makes the most of its distinctive black and white cinematography and a majestic Gershwin score. Allen's cinema of insecurity has never been more sure of itself.

From Bleeker Street to Bloomingdale's, Central Park to the Brooklyn Bridge, this is cinema's answer to a living, breathing picture postcard. New York has never looked so beautiful, a nighttime horse and trap ride capturing the towering grace of its skyscrapers. Allen is also at his best, a wisecracking, highly-strung culture vulture with an opinion on everything from Ingmar Bergman to lingerie ads. Characters talk endlessly, just for the sake of it ("I've always been repelled and attracted by the male member"), an incessant self-analysis stoked by off-screen sessions on the psychiatrist's couch.

"A LIVING, BREATHING, PICTURE POSTCARD"

They're self-absorbed to the point of terminal callousness, as the film's string of betrayals and infidelities only prove. Isaac's relationship with his seventeen-year-old girlfriend (Mariel Hemingway) is heartbreakingly careless, dumping her for shaggy-permed Keaton one minute then running to try and stop her leaving for London the next. As Isaac races through the streets - scored by Gershwin - Allen undercuts the usual climax of a romantic comedy with a self-mocking wit that's all too aware of its hero's fatal flaws.