Woody Allen's Manhattan has materialized out of the void as the one truly great American film of the '70s. It tops Annie Hall in brilliance, wit, feeling, and articulation, though it is less of a throbbing valentine to a lost love, and more of a meditation on an overexamined life. As a carnival of the sexes, it can be mentioned in the same breath with such previous masterpieces as Max Ophuls's Madame de …, Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story….

Manhattan is comparable to such epiphanies of my movie-reviewing career as Luis Buñuel's Viridiana in 1962, Richard Lester's and the Beatles's A Hard Day's Night in 1964, and Eric Rohmer's My Night at Maud's in 1970. At a time when even the most discerning film critics seem to be mesmerized by gaudy...