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New York is a metropolis that moves at 24 frames per instant . Some of the greatest directors — Coppola , Kubrick , Scorsese , Cassavetes , Spike Lee — were born there , and they come to empathise the populace through its ever - change , light - saturate , fragmented landscape painting .
It stands to cause that picture coiffe in New York , or made to celebrate that city , are among the greatest ever made . Herein is a highly immanent list of 10 of the unspoiled , with directors limited to one entry each on this tilt .
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10. Taxi Driver (1976)
No list of New York films would be ended without an entry from the poet laureate of the city ’s underbelly , Martin Scorsese . And the tale of Travis Bickle ( Robert De Niro ) , an itinerant cabbie whose repulsive force for urban rot feeds a fascistic pathology , is a perfect corollary for New York ’s profoundly complicated relationship with crime and poverty .
The first of screenwriter Paul Schrader ’s “ Man in a Room ” trilogy , Taxi Drivergets to the heart of the closing off of the studio - apartment , dark - Book of Job experience – so it ’s no surprise that the picture show ’s most iconic scene is Bickle reduce to talking to himself in the mirror .
9. Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
New York is a metropolis where control surface matter , and where the PR agent might be the most sinewy drawstring - puller of all , a wannabe Puerto Rico humankind like Sidney Falco ( Tony Curtis ) is nonetheless reduce to implore for scraps from extremist - powerful columnist J.J. Hunsecker ( Burt Lancaster ) – a novelise edition of the very real 1930s to 1950s commentator Walter Winchell .
A atavist to an era when New York newspaper publisher and New York wireless show made public legal opinion , Alexander Mackendrick’sSweet Smell of Success , with its puke - a - tat Clifford Odets / Ernest Lehman script , thrum with the speech rhythm of the ambitious – but unavoidably pathetic – urban striver .
8. The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)
The greatest subway movie ever made , Joseph Sargent’sThe Taking of Pelham 123is a heist flick extraordinaire . Robert Shaw ’s masked thugs hijack a business district string and take a million dollars in ransom money , as the hero of the delineation , Walter Matthau ’s transportation system cop , negotiates from above .
No New Yorker will ever look at the third rail the same way again after he watchesPelhamfor the first prison term , not least because of its propulsive jazz score by David Shire and structurally complete script by Peter Stone – both of whom were primarily writers of Broadway musicals .
7. All About Eve (1950)
In a vitrine of New York themes , the Broadway house , unique in its cultural centrality , must take halfway stage . And no film has ever taken as cruel and as gorgeous a sideways coup d’oeil at Broadway as Joseph Mankiewicz’sAll About Eve , receiver of anall - time - platter 14 Oscar nominationsupon its release ( it has since been tie byTitanicandLa la Land ) .
Bette Davis stars as an aging theatrical wizard who is slow supplanted in renown and relevancy by Anne Baxter ’s fan - change by reversal - nemesis . It ’s a fib that has been retold a thousand times since , but no one ’s ever beaten the pilot .
6. The Apartment (1960)
Apartment buildings , with their disparate humankind in faithful coexistence , make for great story – believe ofBreakfast at Tiffany ’s , High - Rise , orGhostbusters . The Upper West Side walkup of Billy Wilder’sThe Apartmentis no exception . Jack Lemmon ’s C.C. Baxter , desk jockey and people - pleaser , has that New York dreaming – a killer flat .
And his master at his gargantuan insurance company have no compunctions about make usance of it as a venue for their romantic assignations . Wilder ’s wide - genus Lens cinematography gets to the heart of embodied New York ’s dehumanizing sprawl – the floor where Lemmon works could be two mile wide .
5. Rear Window (1954)
This is another apartment construction story , in which New York neighbor ’ uncomfortable law of proximity is hire to its logical extreme point . Alfred Hitchcock builds a niche of Greenwich Village on a Hollywood backlot for his chronicle of magazine photographer L.B. Jeffries ( James Stewart ) , whose courtyard apartment has a perfect opinion of a slaying being committed across the way .
The divine guidance for uncounted rip - offs likeSliver , Rear Windowgets to another fundamental of the New York experience – life in a crowded environment always means you ’re too often on public display . That it also live in analog to the voyeurism of the film - going experience is a delicious bonus .
4. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
When Harry Met Sally … is the entire saint of a romantic funniness , so sales talk - perfect that it has do to seem a capstone and close to the literary genre ’s period of relevancy . Rob Reiner ’s camerawork revels openly in street - level tourism , curve among the orange tree tree of Central Park ’s fall and the reverence - inspiring Temple of Dendur at the Met , getting it so definitively correct that any attempt to admit New York as a “ third main part ” in a read-only memory - com now comes across as cliché .
Harry and Sally ’s is a love affair driven not only by psychoneurosis , which goes with New York like leaf mustard with pastrami , but also by a freakish the true of the New York experience – however big the home is , one save running into the same people .
3. Annie Hall (1977)
MeetWhen Harry Met Sally ’s more downbeat precursor . Woody Allen’sBest Picture winnerplaces itself firmly on the Upper East Side of Manhattan – the lawn tennis bubble under the 59thStreet Bridge , the now - defunct Beekman Theater , the water tower - dotted East sixty . Its part are mouthy grouch , bad drivers , and defensive jokers – classic Knickerbocker types . Allen ’s Alvy Singer even becomes physically ill when forced to leave New York to attend an awards observance in Los Angeles .
Most of all , Annie Hallis nostalgic at its heart , remembering the eatery , bookstall , and gallery that were the background of a gone romanticist human relationship even as those position have been torn down and replaced with new , uglier buildings .
2. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Inspired in part by an iconicNew Yorkercoverthat submit New York as the heart of the human beings and everything else as adjunct , Wes Anderson ’s one speculation into the Big Apple is a triumph of on - location shot .
puddle use of gorgeous exteriors in Hamilton Heights and Harlem , but specifically avoiding iconic New York background ( in one scene , Kumar Pallana ’s graphic symbol is cautiously positioned to block the Statue of Liberty ) , Anderson create a visual experience designed almost specifically to invoke to New Yorkers themselves , with their acute allergic reaction both to cliché and to over - touristed spots . If its ruptured “ house of superstar ” bears an uncanny resemblance to J.D. Salinger ’s immortal Glass family , also of Upper Manhattan , so much the good .
1. Network (1976)
Acerbic , hyper - literate , and delirious as pit , Paddy Chayefsky ’s brilliant satire of the video news manufacture ( then as now based in New York City ) is a master ’s thesis in celluloid . Decrying the same 1970s - earned run average ascension in law-breaking and ferment as its fellow 1976 releaseTaxi Driver , Networkcaptures a belly-up metropolis on an ideological precipice . Our “ bomber , ” ground tackle Howard Beale ( Peter Finch ) , is a veteran soldier of Edward R. Murrow ’s CBS news team whose mellow - minded , intellectual TV milieu has been supplant by the vapidity of “ the tube . ”
Among the deoxyephedrine cave of corporate high - rises and the careful falsity of faux - cozy news studio , in bullpens that odor of cigarette smoke through the blind and streets moisten with fading neon , director Sidney Lumet paint a picture of a New York that has been vex badly , but insist on subsist on – if only through the transformative art it produces and inspires .
