New York movies:The 100 best films set in New York

More funny than scary, this schlock-horror Z flick articulates a primal NYC fear harbored by anyone who’s ever peered down a sewer grate: Who (or what) is living below? Not the homeless, not alligators, but cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. As the poster of a shimmering Manhattan skyline warned, “They’re not staying down there, anymore!” —Joshua Rothkopf

An essential New York band plays a landmark NYC venue (MSG) as 50 fans capture the event for posterity; only the Beastie Boys could turn a crowdsourced concert movie into a time capsule, a tour of the city’s musical styles (hip-hop, punk, Latin funk) and a tribute to the power of Gotham’s DIY spirit. RIP, MCA. —David Fear

James Toback’s giddy ensemble drama transforms the city into an urban playground where rich white kids play-act ghetto fabulousness, criminals consort with moguls and Brooke Shields sports dreadlocks. It’s a bold think piece on the malleability of class and race in NYC, spiced with the single most sizzling sex scene ever set in Central Park. —David Fear

Brian De Palma’s darker-than-dark comedy stars Robert De Niro as a XXX-rated filmmaker wanna-be who peeps on his neighbors. The no-budget film captures porn-theater-era New York at its seediest; it also features an astonishing sequence satirizing downtown experimental theater, in which a white-bread audience is viciously humiliated (and they love it). —Keith Uhlich

Larry Cohen’s sci-fi chiller about a detective investigating murderers who claim to be carrying out God’s will is the surreal B-side to Taxi Driver: a nightmare vision of the city’s repressed rage that starts with cameoing Andy Kaufman gunning down the St. Patrick’s Day parade and ends with our hero becoming what he was trying to stop. —Alison Willmore

Stanley Kubrick’s polarizing swan song takes place in a Manhattan of the mind, specifically the sexually frustrated brain stem of Tom Cruise’s upper-crust physician. The film’s fantasy Greenwich Village, populated by taunting fratboys, a hard-sell hooker and a Lolita-like teen is especially weird—and disquieting. —Keith Uhlich

Long before it was cool to go green, Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh helmed this environmentally conscious (though still pretty damned scary) werewolf movie. The South Bronx provides some memorably decayed, practically postapocalyptic terrain, and a number of vertigo-inducing scenes are shot atop the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.—Keith Uhlich

Indie filmmaker Ramin Bahrani provides an eloquent, empathetic backstory to a pushcart vendor so street-corner standard, he’s all but invisible to passersby. Bahrani explores the fictional man’s past as a Pakistani rock star and his lonely, lowly present in a New York that’s both beautiful and coolly indifferent to his Sisyphean struggle.—Alison Willmore

Michael Almereyda transposes William Shakespeare’s seminal tragedy to the world of high finance as Ethan Hawke’s brooding prince goes up against his slick CEO stepfather. The modern-day setting—moving from grungy streets to antiseptic boardrooms and even that cylindrical mousetrap the Guggenheim—adds thematic heft to the greatest of all plays.—Keith Uhlich

Filmed at the peak of Hollywood’s political paranoia, this CIA thriller captures a tense, spy-saturated NYC that would reappear in The Bourne Ultimatum. Choice local touches include Robert Redford’s clandestine office on 77th Street at Madison, a quiet Brooklyn Heights getaway (occupied by sultry Faye Dunaway) and a WTC window overlooking the intrigue.—Joshua Rothkopf

Set in the “very early 1980s,” Whit Stillman’s evocation of a dying Manhattan nightlife brings back the coke-laced dance palaces—including a club similar to Studio 54—and the desperation that would have the party go on forever. Another old-NYC gesture: Our young heroines, Chloë Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale, are up-and-coming editors at a publishing house. Today they’d be bloggers.—Joshua Rothkopf

The definitive visual document of the early CBGB scene, Amos Poe and Ivan Král’s out-of-sync home movie captures a who’s who of NYC musical royalty—Tom Verlaine, David Byrne, the Ramones—as they plant the seeds of punk rock. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the moment when downtown found its sound: rough, raw and revolutionary.—David Fear

Joan Micklin Silver’s tribute to Jewish-diaspora life in the 1890s makes you feel as if you’ve stepped through a time portal. Her black-and-white re-creations of the avenues where an insulated community tried to assimilate to its new home bridges the gap between New York’s history and its present—an immigrant song straight from our city’s heart.—David Fear

Dino De Laurentiis’s lascivious production infuses the animal magnetism of the 1933 original with a pervy sensibility (the overgrown primate literally fingers a visibly aroused Jessica Lange). And with a double phallus like the World Trade Center as a final setting, there’s no better city for a big ape to be a swinger.—Stephen Garrett

The Bronx represents in Spike Lee’s ominous reconstruction of the 1977 David Berkowitz serial-killer panic, taking root in a city plagued by blackouts, racial tensions and—vividly rendered—a sweltering, inescapable heat. Lee imparts a hometown boy’s feel for pizzerias, hair salons and punk clubs (including the departed CBGB).—Joshua Rothkopf

This sexy vampire tale takes place mostly in a ridiculous realm of spacious townhouses filled with smoke and coffins. But we include it for its opening scene alone: Bloodsuckers David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve prowl a sweaty, downtown nightclub for sweet young things, while Bauhaus pounds through its classic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” It’s a goth NYC we remember with a tear.—Joshua Rothkopf

The poverty chic of the early-’80s Lower East Side is romanticized these days, but Susan Seidelman’s drama drops its art-world-wanna-be heroine into an LES full of self-centered dilettantes, obnoxious opportunists and predatory perverts. It’s a snapshot of an era that doubles as its own epitaph, one that smashes hipster nostalgia into shards.—David Fear

The iconic Greenwich Village courtyard over which a convalescing Jimmy Stewart looks out and spots something he wasn’t meant to see perfectly encapsulates the subjective blindness that allows New Yorkers to lead parallel lives in such close quarters. Hitchcock’s thriller also captures what it takes to bring those imaginary boundaries crashing down.—Alison Willmore

Adapting Jules Feiffer’s Obie-winning play for the screen, director Alan Arkin (yes, that Alan Arkin) steers Elliott Gould through a metropolis where random shootings are the norm and there’s a heavy breather on the end of every phone line. Welcome to Horror City ’71, where every day is an endless absurdist farce.—David Fear

New York City becomes a bored housewife’s erotic playground in Brian De Palma’s funny, suspenseful chiller. A luscious Angie Dickinson wanders through the Metropolitan Museum in pursuit of a flirty stranger (a quickie in a cab follows). Later, inquisitive hooker Nancy Allen shares a too revealing lunch with übernerd Keith Gordon at WTC’s Windows on the World.—Keith Uhlich

A 12-year-old boy makes a wish and wakes up as 30-year-old Tom Hanks (though still with a child’s mind). Off to the big city he goes, where he turns a Grand Street apartment into a tween’s paradise (trampoline!) and, most memorably, plays “Heart and Soul” on a foot-operated keyboard at FAO Schwarz.—Keith Uhlich

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s peerless backstage Broadway drama uses the bright lights of the Theater District to illuminate a Darwinian world of competition, insecurity and backstabbing—one in which the fan waiting in the alleyway for a chance to meet the star would just as eagerly devour her and take her place as the lead. Not much has changed.—Alison Willmore

Subversively, this police thriller is actually a lurid NYC Western that recasts the cops as the cavalry fighting in “a hostile territory.” (The producers later added an apologetic disclaimer.) But seen today, this Paul Newman vehicle offers a period-piece Polaroid of a borough that was struggling to shake off its reputation as a crime-ridden cesspool.—David Fear

Once protested by the gay community, William Friedkin’s thriller serves as an unintended snapshot of a narrow slice of the pre-AIDS Village scene, with sequences filmed at the legendary leather club Hellfire. Al Pacino serves as the audience’s enigmatic window onto S&M culture, playing an undercover cop who may be repelled by (or drawn to) everything he’s seeing.—Alison Willmore

Disparities of class and temperament are keenly observed in James Gray’s underseen NYC drama, starring a pre-freakout Joaquin Phoenix (never better) as a suicidal Brighton Beach bachelor living with his worried parents. With the arrival of an alluring neighbor with expensive tastes (Gwyneth Paltrow), the movie sets off for swanky midtown locations—and a cautionary shiska romance.—Joshua Rothkopf

Taking her camera into Harlem’s streets, independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke (The Connection) turned a story about a tough kid looking to move up a local gang’s hierarchy into a vérité-like view of the neighborhood itself. Few films have captured the area (circa the mid-’60s) with such a keen journalistic eye.—David Fear

The Jazz Age comes to thrilling life in Alan Rudolph’s ensemble drama about caustic wit Dorothy Parker. Among the many triumphs of this lovingly detailed period piece are the sequences set at the Algonquin Hotel, where the gabsters gossip around the most famous table since King Arthur and his knights.—Keith Uhlich

Darren Aronofsky’s unsparing adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s rough-edged tale of drug addiction finds seedy poetry in its Brooklyn locales: Brighton Beach has seldom seemed so hellishly sunbaked, Coney Island so unbearably decrepit and the Atlantic Ocean—an alluring nirvana—so entirely out of reach.—Keith Uhlich

unkie officer Harvey Keitel shakes down punks for stolen cash, sexually harasses teen drivers and just can’t understand why that raped nun forgives her attackers. Abel Ferrara’s incendiary look at a corrupt cop’s Catholic guilt is consummate art-house grindhouse, typifying New York’s wide appetite for cathartic highbrow cinema and Times Square raunch alike.—Stephen Garrett

A spoiled Manhattan WASP (Beau Bridges) buys a Brooklyn tenement and learns some hard (but hilarious) life lessons from his primarily black tenants. Director Hal Ashby, making his feature debut, vividly captures the rough-and-tumble neighborhood that was Park Slope, long before it became stroller-mom central.—Keith Uhlich

Technically dazzling but emotionally brittle NYC dancer Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) becomes Swan Lake’s prima ballerina, but repressed passions sabotage her sanity—until they become a font of inspiration. Darren Aronofsky turns Lincoln Center’s rarefied campus into a Grand Guignol of power, lust and ambition, all in the name of artistic perfection.—Stephen Garrett

It’s a day in the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, as the street artist is evicted, sells a canvas to a rich uptowner and hangs out at the Mudd Club. Rife with heavy-hitter cameos—Fab 5 Freddy, Glenn O’Brien, Debbie Harry—this scrapbook nails the moment when the punk, hip-hop and art worlds coalesced into a single scene.—David Fear

A brutal NYC classic (one its star, Charles Bronson, had an uneasy time defending), this vigilante thriller crystallized the dangerous Beame-era Manhattan in the minds of millions. The pivotal scene goes down on a grungy subway car, where a furious Upper West Sider takes nickel-plated, .32-caliber vengeance on a pair of hapless muggers. Life would imitate art.—Joshua Rothkopf

“Looking head to toe, would you know?” Drag queens in Harlem and the Bronx form gay street gangs (and surrogate families) on the ball circuit, where outsize personalities like Venus Xtravaganza compete based on the “realness” of their mock-straight sartorial splendor. Jennie Livingston’s essential gender-reinvention documentary brilliantly extols the city’s outcast resilience.—Stephen Garrett

Don’t worry—you’ll be seeing plenty more Woody on this list. This comedy, starring a transformed Mia Farrow as an Italian mob widow, deserves promotion from minor to major. Bookended by coffee klatches in the landmark Carnegie Deli, the b&w lark also touches down on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (Underdog float!).—Joshua Rothkopf

Silent icon Harold Lloyd epitomizes Gotham’s scrappy go-getters as Harold “Speedy” Swift, who fights to save the city’s last horsecar from merger-happy street rail men. Lloyd’s laffer also boasts thrilling on-location tours of a bygone New York—particularly when the multihyphenate takes Babe Ruth on a high-octane taxi ride to the Bronx’s Yankee Stadium.—Stephen Garrett

Drug-dealing Priest (Ron O’Neal) schemes to retire early, provided he can outwit the Man. Harlem never looked so gritty and pushers so suave as in this classic from blaxploitation scion Gordon Parks Jr. A dope soundtrack, courtesy of Curtis Mayfield, and that customized Cadillac Eldorado don’t hurt, either.—Stephen Garrett

Lionel Rogosin spent months pounding the pavement before he began filming this singular docu-narrative hybrid, which cobbles together a skeleton of a story to unite the neighborhood’s lushes and lost boys (one of whom died only weeks after the premiere). The result is a bleary portrait of the city’s Skid Row.—Alison Willmore

Raoul Walsh’s silent tale of a poor kid who grows up into a criminal bigwig not only gave birth to the gangster movie, it was one of the few films to use actual New York City locations (specifically, the rough-and-tumble tenements of the Bowery) to add authenticity to its gritty rise-and-fall parable. It’s the first genuine NYC movie.—David Fear

Dustin Hoffman plays a down-on-his-luck NYC actor who lands a soap-opera role by posing as a prim Midwestern woman. Local landmarks include the National Video Center (now home to luxury apartments and the Signature Theatre) and the Russian Tea Room (where Hoffman reveals his ploy to his agent); even Andy Warhol makes an appearance.—Keith Uhlich

Romantic dissatisfaction and a very Gothamite certainty that there’s always someone better out there shape Mike Nichols’s damning portrait of former college roommates (Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson). They navigate 25 years of shifting urban sexual mores but never find what they’re looking for.—Alison Willmore

Noah Baumbach’s razor-edged semiautobiographical dramedy is set in a 1980s Brooklyn intellectual community that’s since devoured half the borough. For its cathartic image (see title), the movie revisits a childhood memory likely shared by any impressionable museumgoer of a certain age.—Alison Willmore

Kenneth Lonergan’s ragged masterpiece, haunted by personal and municipal trauma, showcases better than any film the flux of 8 million individual stories going at once. It also captures the way that a life-shaking, permanently altering experience for one teenager (the riveting Anna Paquin) can be just another glittering point in the kaleidoscope of the city.—Alison Willmore

Jane Fonda won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a cynical actor (this town is full of them) moonlighting as a Big Apple prostitute. After she’s caught up in the mysterious disappearance of a business executive, director Alan J. Pakula and cinematographer Gordon Willis turn the city streets and alleys into a shadowy paranoiac’s nightmare.—Keith Uhlich

Robert Benton’s tale of a brutal custody battle is set during a specific, privileged era on the Upper East Side, the place to where upwardly mobile professionals aspired. It becomes Manhattan’s answer to the idyllic suburbs of other movies, beneath the surface of which lie all kinds of trouble.—Alison Willmore

Alan Parker’s body-electrifying tale of High School of Performing Arts students trying to hit it big makes prime use of Gotham venues, from a thrillingly turbulent Times Square to the now-defunct 8th Street Playhouse’s midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.—Keith Uhlich

After a casual run-in at Shakespeare & Co., an orgasmic conversation at Katz’s Deli and long walks through Central Park, a Jersey-born Jew (Billy Crystal) realizes the high-maintenance shiksa (Meg Ryan) he resented since college is actually his soulmate. Director Rob Reiner and screenwriter Nora Ephron capture Manhattan romance with splendiferous anxiety.—Stephen Garrett

Truthfully, the city where it takes place is unspecified, but it’s impossible for us not to include Jim Jarmusch’s hip-hop fantasia, scored to the sinuous beats of Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA. Forest Whitaker cruises late-night streets in a stolen car, motivated by a solemn code of honor and capable of violent deeds.—Joshua Rothkopf

Histrionic bunny-boiling revenge overshadows what is an unusually well-located NYC psychothriller—from Michael Douglas’s Upper West Side domestic stronghold to Glenn Close’s Meatpacking District loft, a fitting spot for an illicit fling with a hot dish of crazy. Subtly, the hurtful nature of five-boroughs trysting is tweaked.—Joshua Rothkopf

An office peon (James Murray), hitched after a night at Coney Island, struggles to raise a family in the tiny Murphy-bed confines of a tenement apartment and reconcile his outsize aspirations with the noble modesty of blending in with the urban masses. King Vidor’s stunning silent is a chronicle of crushed hubris.—Stephen Garrett