of their grace and sweetness, their balance between Allen's yearning romanticism and his tough eye for the fatuous and sentimental – a balance also expressed in his best screen play [sic] yet." In his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, who gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four, wrote, "Diane Keaton gives us a fresh and nicely edged New York intellectual. And Mariel Hemingway deserves some kind of special award for what's in some ways the most difficult role in the film." Ebert included the film in his list of The Great Movies. Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune awarded a full four out of four stars, calling it "a remarkable motion picture. 'Manhattan' may turn out to be the year's best comedy and drama." Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film "extraordinarily fine and funny" with "superb" performances from Keaton and Hemingway. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it "harder, harsher, crueler, deeper-going, more assertive but in the end no less life-affirming than 'Annie Hall,'" and declared Manhattan "even better" than that film. Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic wrote, "Manhattan is a faulty film, but it's moderately amusing". Alexander Walker of the London Evening Standard wrote: "So precisely nuanced is the speech, so subtle the behaviour of a group of friends, lovers, mistresses and cuckolds who keep splitting up and pairing off like unstable molecules". In 2007 J. Hoberman wrote in The Village Voice: "The New York City that Woody so tediously defended in Annie Hall was in crisis. And so he imagined an improved version. More than that, he cast this shining city in the form of those movies that he might have seen as a child in Coney Island—freeing the visions that he sensed to be locked up in the silver screen." In October 2013, readers of The Guardian newspaper voted it the best film directed by Woody Allen. Accolades New York Film Critics Circle named Allen best director for Manhattan. The National Society of Film Critics also named Allen best director along with Robert Benton, who directed Kramer vs. Kramer. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Mariel Hemingway) and Best Original Screenplay (Allen and Marshall Brickman). It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film and the César Award for Best Foreign Film. In Empire magazine's 2008 poll of the 500 greatest movies