The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

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.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Until it hit its first land mine (more on this later), I was very willing to do something I rarely do when seeing a movie with story flaws, overlook the small unreal moments. I did this because virtually every character in the movie resembled someone I had known (or knew about) during my tenure of 25 years of living in Manhattan during which I went from being an unmarried man to getting married and having a child. The characters writer/director Kollek created have been described as 'quirky' but when people like this are your friends, lovers, acquaintances.....when they are people who you learn about, intimately and otherwise.....then they are people of great variance in their experiences and are not seen to the life you lead as 'quirky'. I should add that there were people I met/experienced who initially might appear to be odd. But getting to know folks who became good friends, getting to know lovers (and the amazing and wonderful stories told during pillow talk time), I learned that 'quirky' is actually quite 'normal'. The movie handled it's characters and their converging stories very well until the first I.E.D.; when Manhattan was reduced to a small town of 1000 with one taxi in it. That is, when Bruno picks up his fare Emily. Which is then followed by their going to bed together. This "coincidence" wounded my concentration/belief in the story being told and though in a lesser film I would have ended the viewing right then, I stuck around until the second major explosion, Bella's windfall (which some people have erroneously labeled as magic realism) of an almost $9 million inheritance from a character never mentioned or referred to previously. In conclusion, I feel very bad that the film derailed itself as it went along because it had begun as a startlingly honest look at a group of very human, very conflicted people, who, as difficult as they made life for themselves goes, also were visited by something we all have to deal with, life's misunderstandings about the vital center of our emotional being when we engage ourselves with other people.

At first, Anna Thomson's bot-ox lips, nose job, and silicone distracted me. I notice that this look is big in Hollywood, the bee stung lips of so many movie stars, their big boobs on a starved stick of a body makes the young guys pant, but the girls can't possibly match the impossible can they? Anna is an educated woman that has rejected Wall Street to work as a waitress in a diner. She's 35 and her mom's applying the pressure. Her Broadway paramour, a married man has strung her along since she was 23. Enter Jamie Harris, starving taxicab driving, failed novelist. Suddenly ex-wife dumps Jamie's kid plus one on him. Naturally through a series of unlikely big city moments, Anna and Jamie hook up, lose each other, and love.Then there's the autumn autumn match of still spry, 70 year old Robert Modica and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, ex-Woodie Allen wife Louise Lasser. This relationship of seasoned citizens so rare in film took the show away from the yougen's. We cared whether or not sweet, only had sex with someone he loved, Modica can get it up for willing Lasser. We hoped the drugstore was stocked with Viagara.The screenplay offered some silly city shtick, New York City hip, but these scenes fall flat; nevertheless, this one, the babe and I enjoyed.

This film ran through the art house circuit so quickly most people missed it, and that's too bad. Now it's finally beginning to show up on cable, and I hope it gets a larger audience. Amos Kollek's other films are also hard to come by in the U.S. -- I know I'D like to see more of them, after having seen this one, but this seems to have the lightest touch, from what I can tell.Among the many things it has going for it, is the incomparable Anna Thomson (Levine), a character actor I've followed since her days in the rep company of the original Tracy Ullmann Show on Fox television, through her unforgettable role in Clint Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN, to this interesting role of Bela.Magical Realism is a kind of sub-genre I always enjoy, and when it plays against the gritty, wonderful city of New York (my home town), I sit up and take notice. This is the kind of dark underbelly of one of my favorite (also underappreciated) TV shows, Jay Tarses' "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd." If you knew and liked that, and can do with something darker and more sexually explicit, you'll probably like this.Bela triumphs, and so do her strange friends, in this pretty unique film, which is slow paced, as slice-of-life character studies are, so be prepared for that. If you tend to criticize films for being "too slow" or not having enough plot, you might not like this, but if you are happy examining characters and living with great dialogue and situations, hang in there. If you like "Smoke" or "Blue in the Face," you'll probably love this.

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen! I saw it at the Toronto film festival and totally regret wasting my time. Completely unwatchable with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.Steer clear.