A-List: Five Best Movies About New York City
By J. Don Birnam
August 5, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com

White people are funny.
I recently had a chance to see Begin Again, by John Carney, who won an Oscar for Best Original Song back in 2007 for the move Once. While I enjoyed Once as a romantic epopee, there was something uncomfortably sentimental about its overall tone for me. Not so for Begin Again, starring a delightful Keira Knightley (the first time I’ve ever written that about her) and the reliable Mark Ruffalo. One of the many things I enjoyed about this touching and sincere movie was its New York City settings - from Central Park to Union Square to Brooklyn and Queens, the director made spectacular and effective use of the Big Apple. It’s always nice to recognize a movie’s setting, particularly when the movie is meant as a realistic life drama. But how often has one gone to the little obscure villas that are featured in movies like, say, Before Midnight or Vicky Cristina Barcelona? Not often. The thing with New York movies is that, at least for someone who has lived in the City, settings will be easier to recognize.

This was pretty much my line of thinking as I left the theater after Begin Again and then I thought (almost regretfully now): what are the best movies that feature New York City as a character, essentially? I say regretfully for two reasons: if you sit down and think about it, the list is impossibly long, and the task of winnowing it down to my artificially constructed five is nothing short of daunting. The second reason is that even defining when a movie is “about” New York or “features” New York is hard. Is Blue Jasmine, with its sharp commentary about certain pedantic segments of Northeastern society a movie that is, at least in part, about life in New York? Perhaps. But it can get tricky.

To make it somewhat easier, I adopted the following (still malleable and imprecise rule): if the movie makes notable use of New York City landmarks on more than passing occasion (so, a destruction scene in a disaster movie does not count), or, alternatively, if it explores the relationships of people vis-à-vis the City environments in which they are set, then it is eligible here. It is not enough that a movie be merely set in whole or in part New York City (think, for example, the Day After Tomorrow), it has to actually have something to say about the interaction between the city and its characters. Begin Again clearly classifies under the rules: the main project the characters embark upon involves recording set pieces in different places of the City. While none of the chosen scenarios is necessarily unique to the City, the City becomes a part of the story.

So, with one of the problems inherent in making this list somewhat tackled, let’s take on the bigger one: making the list itself. It took forever, and the list is necessarily imperfect. You will criticize me, rightly, for several omissions. This list could be 20 or 30 movies deep. Alas, I do have five clear favorites and in the end I was somewhat satisfied with my choices.

The honorable mention list will be longer than the list itself: the rom-coms abound and are delightful. Meg Ryan has no fewer than three New York-themed movies that I enjoy: You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, and Addicted to Love. All rely on uniquely New York elements (the crowded apartments, the small markets, the little bookstore) to further the plot. Martin Scorsese has a whole New York library that you could arguably include here: The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver are all set in New York City and arguably feature the City as a main character. Yet their qualification under my rule was disputable enough that I chose to leave them out for clearer contenders. But, don’t worry, a Scorsese movie will be among the finalists.

Then there are the Best Picture winners: The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, All About Eve and Kramer vs. Kramer. These are some of the most amazing Best Picture winners of all time. Again, however, it is not clear that New York City is a character there - in the first two the setting is the City but I don’t know that the movies rely on the City as such. Eve does, as it critiques Broadway and features it as its focal motif. Yet another Best Picture winner is much more to my liking, and made the finalists atop Eve. And then there is the quintessential New York movie: King Kong. But I must admit I’ve never been a big fan of the big ape in the Big Apple.

So, what are my top five favorite movies featuring New York City? Here we go.

5. Home Alone 2

I can hear the scoffs now; the lesser sequel to the cute and simpleton slapstick children’s comedy being picked above dazzling movies like I Am Legend, timeless movies like Wall Street and Fatal Attraction, a cadre of Best Picture winners, and Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre. Yeah. Sorry.

As a kid, the Macaulay Culkin classic was one I could watch essentially on an infinite loop. It made me want to visit, be in, live in, and take in all of New York. The movie clearly features the City and uses several of its iconic landmarks deftly, with key scenes playing out in Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and the Plaza Hotel. Smartly, they omit Times Square. And while the movie is of course repetitive and derivative of the original, the booby traps and plot twists are amusing enough to give us a better-than-most sequel. In any case, one of my childhood’s favorite movies had to make one of these lists one day, and the chance finally arrived.

4. Requiem for a Dream

I hesitated a bit before putting this movie on this list because, of the five, it is the one that lives in the grayest area of whether it should even be included on a list alongside movies about New York City. But I was convinced for a number of reasons. Darren Aronofsky’s brilliant, stunning, and harrowing masterpiece about addiction relies heavily on New York features for the story. While the story is not as much about the City as others like Home Alone are, it certainly uses it as an important backdrop.

Thus, Coney Island and other parts of Brooklyn form the backdrop, as does a notably humid, unforgiving summer outside, another New York specialty. And, more than any other movie on this list, Requiem explores the dark underbelly of the city: the lives destroyed by drugs, the rich businessmen who use it as a playground, the cutthroat nature of capsuled living. In doing so, Requiem delivers some of the best performances by any actors in the year (nay, decade) it was released (2000), one of the most stunning and memorable soundtracks of all time, and one of the most unforgiving denouements in movie history.

I know few movies that stay with you and that are as haunting as Requiem is and, if you look closely, it subtly but clearly sends the message that life in this City can be as brutal and devastating as it can be rosy.

3. West Side Story

After only a few A-List columns you will inevitably discover that West Side Story is among my favorite movies of all time, top three for sure. And, I know that a “Best Musicals” A-List is in the making. But it only makes it to number three on this particular list because, as you shall see, the two remaining movies are even more about New York than West Side Story is, and that’s saying much.

But the Best Picture winner (and winner of nine other Oscars; only three movies have more) is no slouch. It features an award-winning cast, and a simply stunning use of New York City neighborhoods. Indeed, the opening sequence is a panoramic view of the city that is stoic as it is illuminating. Better yet, the movie captures in time moments that are now lost to the ages in New York’s West Side. The once rundown neighborhoods featured in this film are no more, gentrified beyond recognition. But the powerful love story West Side Story tells, timeless yet recognizable as it is, takes on a new and powerful twist unique to New York in the 1950s and 1960s - the beginning of class and economic struggle between different immigrant groups, old and new. This struggle remains a landscape in the city today in different ways.

Thus, West Side Story is both timeless and aged regarding the City it portrays. The sequences through neighborhoods, streets, playgrounds, and rooftops feel and are real. Most exist today. And the movie is a fantastic flick to boot.

2. Gangs of New York Of all of the masterpieces by Martin Scorsese that could have arguably made this list, the one with the clearest shot is - no surprise - the one with New York in its very title.

As I’m sure you know, this movie tells about a conflict in Lower Manhattan, 100 years before the conflicts that roiled the west side in my previous entry on this list. It is interesting, of course, that the movies have that in common, and how struggles of this sort - between different racial, religious, and economic backgrounds - define a city. Scorsese’s entry into the list is thus not only a stunning drama about human psychology (as all his movies are), it is a movie about human struggles as old as time, and as enduring.

In addition, of all the movies I could have picked, this is one of the few that tells a story of a much older New York, a much different one than we see today. But what is brilliant about this movie as a movie about New York is that it weaves that past and subtly tells us how it influences the present. In geography, in socioeconomic structure, and in feeling. The movie is thus heightened in its awareness of the historical lessons it provides.

This movie was infamously shut out after receiving 10 Oscar nominations - I guess the New York crowd of the Academy is not as strong as some may think, at least not as strong as the L.A. crowd. No matter. Oscar recognition or no, Gangs of New York is entertaining, dark, difficult to watch yet compelling, impeccably acted, and a superb movie about New York itself.

1. Manhattan

But the top spot in a list about movies about New York has to go to the master of New York, one of the kings of the city, Woody Allen. Several of his movies, from Manhattan Murder Mystery to Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters could have been included, as they all explore an aspect of New York City that is as much a part of its fabric as its landmarks: the somewhat offbeat individuals who inhabit her. But Manhattan is an ode, pure and simple.

From the opening sequence, where Allen pans through the glittering night of several boroughs, covers Yankee Stadium, and explains his view on the allure of the city, to the misty, iconic shots on the East River parks, the bridges, and the benches, the movie is one long New York City orgasmofest. In between the paeans and the innuendos, the flattery and the bombastic crescendos about life in Manhattan, there is a somewhat loose plot about love, anxiety, and success for an underclass of New York denizens: writers, artists, and others who believe in free love and inspired feelings.

I suppose those do form a part of one slice of the City, a microcosm if you will of at least certain individuals’ experience. But, regardless of whether Manhattan or other Allen films portray fair, complete, or accurate depictions of what life in New York is like for the majority of the citizens (or the average citizen), one thing is undeniable: his representations are sincere and heartfelt. His experience, no doubt, is shared by some, and constitutes a complex, multilayered relationship between the self and the other citizens of the city.

Few movies are even made that are meant simply as a celebration of a city (although Allen has tried it with some European cities - unsuccessfully, I might add) but when Woody Allen sets his mind to it, he hits it out of the park if it comes to New York.