Cruzando la calle

Interesting, touching movie about appearances vs. outcomes. Amy Irving effectively plays an insecure woman who prefers the company of "art" people because she thinks it makes her a better person. Her mother thinks she knows better.

I like that this movie takes its time without being boring. Riegert is excellent and has an understated charisma, but his character is a little too metaphorical to make the story work. And the choice Irving has to make is solved a little bit too conveniently for my taste. But it's so sincere and sweet without being sappy that its faults don't matter all that much.

A winning movie with wonderful contrasts, excellent cast, and a terrific soundtrack. Peter Riegert (who makes far too few movies) is great as an ordinary joe with more going for him than it first seems. Amy Irving is equally good as the "ambiguous" bookstore manager and maybe best of all is her grandmother who wants her to meet a nice jewish man. Delancey is a metaphor in a movie with quite a bit of subtlety without being pretentious.

This is my favorite movie of all time with an unbelievable cast of great character actors. I remember a New York reviewer at the time calling Amy Irving's performance "lukewarm" and I could not disagree more. Irving's performance and character epitomize the thirty-something single New York working woman trying to move up in the world. Irving's character is completely enraptured by the experience of being the book manager of a very prestigious uptown neighborhood book store and falls for the good-looking, European writer who is completely enraptured with himself! Riegert is the nice "pickleman" who any girl knows would make a great husband but the fireworks just don't go off for the girl. Any woman can definitely relate to the dilemma of being attracted to the charming, good-looking rogue but when you get right down to it, it is the everyday "picklemen" who stay true and truly make the world go round.

And I must say that this film captures the city better than any movie I have yet to see complete with crazy singing woman in crowded narrow hot dog joint, midage man struggling to play handball in local park, elderly women learning self-defense at community Y. Classic New York stuff! I could go on and on but do note far out performances by Sylvia Miles as the tacky matchmaker and Rosemary Harris, the great English actress, in a cameo near the end.

This movie strikes me, even after all this time, as being better than it was given credit for. The slow unfolding of the developing relationship is very well done, the characters are interesting and believable, and the grandma is fantastic. My only complaint - it would be really interesting to see how those two people handled an ongoing relationship. Talk about two worlds coming together -

Funny, but most of the comments here are raving about the movie, yet somehow

it only scored 6.7 stars at the time of this posting. To me, Crossing Delancey is one of the best romantic comedies ever made and ranks highly among my favorite movies in general.

Reizl Bozyk's performance as Bubbie Kantor is priceless. Amy Irving and Peter Riegert have amazing chemistry and all of the characters are very well defined and well portrayed, although I think the matchmaker was just a tad over-the-top, even for a yenta. But that's okay, The storyline is paced just right - a great flick to do popcorn by.

Though I would ordinarily give it an 8.5, I rated it 10 stars to bring the average closer to what the reviews (and my personal opinion) reflect.