From the fiscal crisis of the 1970s to the September 11 attacks twenty years ago to a global pandemic that swept through America’s largest city, New York has seen its share of troubles over the years—but its resilience and vibrancy remain indomitable. Surveying a century of cinematic history, this panoramic celebration of films set in the five boroughs captures the mix of grime, glamour, and anything-can-happen energy that has made the Big Apple an unforgettable canvas for generations of filmmakers. Swoon-inducing romance (THE CLOCK), street-level desperation (THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK), subway snafus (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE), creative cool (DOWNTOWN 81), racial tension (DO THE RIGHT THING), queer liberation (PARIS IS BURNING), criminal ambition (THE KING OF NEW YORK), immigrant struggle (MAN PUSH CART), and moral education (MARGARET)—these are just some of the eight million stories that make up life in the world’s most exciting city.
Directed by King Vidor • 1928 • United States
Starring James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach
King Vidor’s ode to the everyman is one of the crowning achievements of silent cinema. Born on the Fourth of July in the year 1900, John Sims (James Murray) believes himself destined for greatness w...
Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1917 • United States
AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS features a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 film THE IMMIGRANT, which features Chaplin’s Little Tramp as an immigrant sailing for the United States. Director Louis Malle chose this film because “it was an evocation of fr...
Directed by Ted Wilde • 1928 • United States
Starring Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff
SPEEDY was the last silent feature to star Harold Lloyd—and one of his very best. The slapstick legend reprises his “Glasses Character,” this time as a good-natured but scatterbrained New Yorker who ca...
Directed by Vincente Minnelli • 1945 • United States
Starring Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason
Judy Garland received her first serious, non-musical role in this swooning romance exquisitely directed by her soon-to-be husband Vincente Minnelli. While on forty-eight-hour-leave in New Yor...
Directed by Jules Dassin • 1948 • United States
Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart
“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin a...
Directed by Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, and Raymond Abrashkin • 1953 • United States
Starring Richie Andrusco, Richard Brewster, Winifred Cushing
One of the most influential and enchanting films of the American independent cinema, this charming, stylistically innovative fable poetically captures t...
Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1956 • United States
Starring Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews
Lionel Rogosin’s landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film ...
Directed by Vincent Sherman • 1957 • United States
Starring Lee J. Cobb, Kerwin Mathews, Gia Scala
In this gritty noir shot on location in New York City’s Garment District, Korean War veteran Alan Mitchell (Kerwin Mathews) returns home and goes to work for his widowed father (Lee J. Cobb), a gar...
Directed by Leo McCarey • 1957 • United States
Starring Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Richard Denning
Leo McCarey’s sublimely romantic update of his own hit 1939 tearjerker LOVE AFFAIR is the rare remake to have become a beloved classic in its own right. When Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) and Terry M...
Directed by John Cassavetes • 1959 • United States
Starring Lelia Goldoni, Anthony Ray, Hugh Hurd
John Cassavetes’s directorial debut revolves around a romance in New York City between Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), a light- skinned black woman, and Tony (Anthony Ray), a white man. The relationship is p...
Directed by Billy Wilder • 1960 • United States
Starring Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray
Jack Lemmon stars in one of Billy Wilder’s most beloved films as C. C. Baxter, a company man anxious to please his superiors at the New York insurance firm where he works—enough to let his boss...
Directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins • 1961 • United States
Starring Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn
Winner of ten Academy Awards, including best picture, this dazzling musical epic transposes Shakespeare’s ROMEO AND JULIET to 1950s New York, where rival gangs rumble for control...
Directed by Larry Peerce • 1967 • United States
Starring Tony Musante, Martin Sheen, Beau Bridges
It’s next stop terror in this nerve-shredding, New York City–set exercise in pure suspense. It’s 2:00 a.m., but for Joe Ferrone (Tony Musante) and Artie Connors (Martin Sheen, in his film debut), th...
Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows
In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM TAKE ONE, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them t...
Directed by Frank Simon • 1968 • United States
More than forty years before “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” this groundbreaking documentary about the 1967 Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant introduced audiences to the world of competitive drag. The film takes viewers backstage with the contestants as t...
Directed by Robert Downey Sr. • 1969 • United States
Starring Arnold Johnson, Laura Greene, Buddy Butler
The most popular film by Robert Downey Sr. is this offbeat classic about the antics that ensue after Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson, his voice dubbed by a gravelly Downey), the token black man ...
Directed by Ján Kadár • 1970 • United States
Starring Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte, Ida Kaminska
Ján Kadár, codirector of the Oscar-winning Czechoslovak New Wave touchstone THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET, made his Hollywood debut with this unique, long-overlooked adaptation of a Bernard Malamud story, ...
Directed by Arthur Hiller • 1970 • United States
Starring Jack Lemmon, Sandy Dennis, Sandy Baron
Scripted by Neil Simon, this black comedy of mishaps follows an Ohio couple (Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis) as they travel to New York City for a job interview, a doomed thirty-six-hour excursion duri...
Directed by Jerry Schatzberg • 1971 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint
A fragile romance unfolds against the backdrop of 1970s New York in this unsparing look at heroin addiction, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Taking its t...
Directed by Ivan Passer • 1971 • United States
Starring George Segal, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss
J (George Segal), a former New York City hairdresser turned heroin junkie, sees his life spiral out of control as he bounces between committing petty crimes, a new relationship with a free-spirited ...
Directed by Alan Arkin • 1971 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia
The black-comic stage play by writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer provides the basis for Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, a surreal satire of urban alienation and the sensele...
Directed by John Palmer and David Weisman • 1972 • United States
Starring Edie Sedgwick, Wesley Hayes, Isabel Jewell
Warhol superstar and icon of sixties bohemia Edie Sedgwick delivers her final performance in this semiautobiographical look at the price of fame. Fiction and documentary—including...
Directed by Gordon Parks Jr. • 1972 • United States
Starring Ron O’Neal, Carl Lee, Julius Harris
Charismatic Harlem cocaine dealer Youngblood Priest (Ron O’Neal) lives in luxury, drives expensive cars, and plans one last big score to escape his life of violence. But when corrupt cops working for...
