Taxi Driver to Do the Right Thing to Manhattan to Marriage Story. The city as cinema's most-photographed character.
New York City is the most-photographed setting in modern cinema. Almost every American director with a significant filmography has, at some point, made a New York film. The city's specific geographic and social texture — the boroughs, the public transit, the housing density, the racial and ethnic complexity — gives directors structural material that location filmmaking can use without setup.
Our picks of New York-set films, organised by neighbourhood or era.
The structural reason New York is so cinematically productive is its dense visible variety. Within a single subway ride, a director can show high-rise corporate Manhattan, working-class Queens or Brooklyn, immigrant-community Chinatown or Little Italy, and the housing-project geometry of the outer boroughs. No other American city has this density of distinct urban registers within commutable distance.
The city's specific cinematic tradition is also self-reinforcing. New York-based directors (Scorsese, Allen, Lee, Lumet, Baumbach, the Coens occasionally) have constructed a cumulative cinematic vocabulary that subsequent directors deliberately work within. The visual register of Scorsese's Little Italy is now part of any director's working palette when shooting in the neighbourhood. The city is, in some sense, simultaneously a location and a cinematic tradition.