The 10 Best New York Movies

DecMon 2009 Filed in: I'm a New Yorker! I Knew That

10. "West Side Story" Although filmed mostly on Los Angeles soundstages, this remains the greatest musical ever made about New York. Many other New York-based musicals focus on Broadway and show business -- "West Side Story" took utterly different issues (ethnic tensions and Upper West Side youth) and grafted the basic plot of "Romeo and Juliet" to them. Add brilliant music, unforgettable choreography and Robert Wise's inspired direction, and the results are pure magic.

9. "Do the Right Thing" New York is often called the biggest melting pot in the world, but it's sadly true that once in a while that pot boils over. Spike Lee's third film poured all the city's racial tensions into one small Brooklyn block, added heat and stirred. The result was one of the most provocative and controversial films of its time, if only because Lee makes each viewer question his or her own feelings on what "doing the right thing" actually means. Perhaps the best movie about racial relations ever made.

8. "Wall Street" The New York financial industry can bring a person to dizzying heights and crushing lows. Just ask Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), who is corrupted by all that power and money as he works his way into the web of corporate raider Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). Director Oliver Stone captured the electricity of the New York Stock Exchange and gave us a peek at how wealth changes hands in the city, where tens of millions of dollars can disappear just like that -- and often do.

7. "Saturday Night Fever" Not every great New York movie takes place in Manhattan. In director John Badham's 1977 film, Brooklyn boy Tony Manero (John Travolta) and his pals escape their dead-end jobs and lives every weekend by dancing at the local discotheque. The movie put disco, the Bee Gees and Bay Ridge club 2001 Odyssey on the map. For Tony, Manhattan might as well be Mars -- a dream land of opportunity that's just a bridge too far for many in the outer boroughs.

6. "King Kong" Yes, only the last 20 or so minutes of the original 1933 "King Kong" take place in New York, but the movie's third act is still the gold standard for a giant beast rampaging through the city streets. Aside from an apocalyptic tidal wave film called "Deluge" released the same year, "Kong" was the first in a long line of movies that featured destruction in the streets of New York as a plot point. The final images of Kong climbing the Empire State Building, both haunting and beautiful, elevated the building's iconic stature.

5. "When Harry Met Sally ..." Enough with the crime already! Sure, New York is tough, but it's also got a streak of romance as wide as the Hudson River. To paraphrase the Beatles, I don't know where all the lonely people come from, but a lot of them end up in the Big Apple. Two of them found their way into this 1989 Rob Reiner comedy in the form of Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, both at the top of their games. For modern love among neurotic New Yorkers, this one's hard to beat. And New York diners were never the same after the famous "I'll have what she's having" scene.

4. "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II" The first movie is, of course, a classic look at New York mob life in the 1950s and its infiltration into every aspect of the city, from its wealthiest to its most working-class environs. The second film, with its flashbacks to Don Vito Corleone's early days in Little Italy, is a still-stunning re-creation of the immigrant experience in the United States during the early part of the 20th century. There had been great gangster films before and there were some after, but until "The Godfather" came along, there was no such thing as a gangster epic.

3. "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" This funky, edgy, cynical saga of a subway hijacking is another great slice of New York life in the 1970s, embodied by cranky Transit Authority cop Walter Matthau, whose daily routine is shot to hell when four men take over a Lexington Avenue train and demand $1 million in ransom. Matthau is dead perfect, and New York's hustle and bustle is effectively captured in Joseph Sargent's no-nonsense direction and David Shire's groovy score. New York's subways have never seemed so ominous, and the city's ongoing dance with crime never so pervasive.

2. "Taxi Driver" / "Mean Streets" These are two of Martin Scorsese's earliest and best, which set the template for so much that came afterward. "Mean Streets" (1973) was a perfect snapshot of life in Little Italy and the low-level hoodlums trying to make a name there, while "Taxi Driver" caught the alienation, loneliness and danger of New York life in the 1970s. It doesn't get any grittier than these.

1. Annie Hall Has any filmmaker had a longer love affair with New York than Woody? From the early 1970s right up until 2005, nearly every film he shot was set in the city -- or least Woody's idealized version of it.