Movies like A Rainy Day in New York

Why it's similar — Alan Arkin's 1971 adaptation of Jules Feiffer's play is the same Manhattan-as-character postcard A Rainy Day in New York would later try to write, but soured: the city as a place where the cabs don't run, the lights don't work, and the love story is staged against an urban backdrop that keeps refusing to cooperate. The rhyme is the use of New York's weather and infrastructure as antagonists for a young couple.

Why it's similar — Peter Bogdanovich's 2015 screwball comedy is the closest contemporary cousin to A Rainy Day in New York in formal terms — both films deploy a daisy-chain of mid-twentieth-century romcom mechanics (an interview that becomes a date, a mistaken identity, a director with one too many entanglements) inside a Manhattan setting, and both have aging male directors quietly working through their own anxieties about the form.

Why it's similar — Allen's own 1996 musical operates in the same Manhattan upper-middle-class register as Rainy Day — the wealthy extended family, the Central Park strolls, the Edith Wharton interiors — and uses the city's weather and architecture as the structural device that lets the romance work. The rhyme is the way both films treat the city itself as a character whose moods choreograph the love story.

Why it's similar — Todd Strauss-Schulson's Rebel Wilson vehicle is built around the same critical insight as Rainy Day — that romantic comedy is a genre about the gap between the version of love its characters narrate to themselves and the version their actual life delivers — and explicitly turns that observation into the engine of its premise. Both films are about characters trying to live inside a movie they have memorised since adolescence.

Why it's similar — Arthur Hiller's 1984 Steve Martin comedy walks the same Manhattan-as-amplifier-for-romantic-misery beat that Allen's film leans on, and uses the same wandering-the-city-after-being-dumped device to give its protagonist time to think. Both films treat the rain-soaked solo walk as a structural cue that a romantic-comedy lead is about to figure out something about himself.