New York Stories

New York Stories (1989) — watch online on iFILM, an anthology film where three directors share one city and nothing else. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen each directed a short, bringing entirely different sensibilities to the same Manhattan streets.

Scorsese leads off with "Life Lessons": Nick Nolte plays a painter consumed by his own greatness, unable to let go of a younger protégée played by Rosanna Arquette. Coppola follows with a fairy tale gone sideways — a precocious twelve-year-old rattles around a luxury hotel while her globe-trotting parents stay absent. Allen closes the trio with pure absurdist comedy: a middle-aged man's overbearing mother refuses to stay out of his life, eventually becoming a literal apparition hovering over the New York skyline.

Each segment reads like a short story from a different shelf. Together they sketch a portrait of a city that holds every kind of obsession. Stream New York Stories (1989) on iFILM.