A trio of short films, all set in New York, by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen, who launched this 1989 feature. Whether it happened by chance or design, the sketches have more than just New York in common: all three have something to do with middle age, as well as with romantic relationships. Scorsese’s sectionrelatively weak in plot, but very strong in style and characterstars Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette, both at their best, as a painter and his disaffected mistress and apprentice; Richard Price wrote the script. Coppola’s epsiode, scripted by Coppola and daughter Sofia (then 17), stars Heather McComb as the precocious daughter of a well-to-do flute player (Giancarlo Giannini) who tries to reunite him with her mother (Talia Shire). The most experimental of the three segments but also the most arch, the film contrives, though set in the present, to give us a fairy-tale Manhattan out of the 40s and the world of Noel Coward populated mainly by children. Allen’s episode, which he wrote and stars in, is a welcome throwback to the purely comic, pre-art-house Woody, following the psychoanalytical history of a lawyer (Allen) menaced by his aggressive mother (Mae Questel); Mia Farrow and Julie Kavner also star. 123 min. (JR)