The 212 Best New York City Movies, Ranked

We’re giving love to New York City, baby: the Big Apple, the Greatest City on Earth, the Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made (Oh), and the inspiration for some of the best movies ever made – period. Godfather? Check. Goodfellas? Check. Do the Right Thing? Check. You get the picture.

It’s little wonder that the five boroughs have played background – and often lead – in so many movies. New York is a place overflowing with stories, no matter where you swipe your Metro card. It is, at the southern end of Manhattan, the center of the financial world, where greed has made for great cinema; a short subway ride from that, you’re in the center of global fashion, where the Miranda Priestlys of the world wield their power for high drama and big laughs; zip further north still and you hit the Great White Way, where so many dreams have played out on our screens, from All About Eve to Birdman.

Away from its commercial centers, the city heaves with inspiring communities full of complex and arresting characters, from lovers in Harlem (If Beale Street Could Talk) to bitter divorcees in Park Slope (The Squid and the Whale), from aimless twentysomethings trying to find their way on the other end of the ferry (The King of Staten Island) to tight-knit families in Brooklyn Heights (Moonstruck). It’s also a city known as a place for visitors to wander, wide-eyed, and you’ll meet many fish out of water here, too, from Crocodile Dundee to Giselle, the hapless princess of Disney’s Enchanted.

This collection of the best New York movies includes comedies and dramas, horror flicks and monster movies – hello, Mr. Kong – documentaries and character studies, and plenty of musicals, including new-on-the-block In the Heights, which offers a stunning tour of northern Manhattan’s Washington Heights community and a sharp look at how gentrification is changing it. The guide also includes one or two movies where New York isn’t technically New York (Superman), but in which the essence of the city shines through.

You won’t find movies like Home Alone 2: Lost In New York, Center Stage, or Newsies because – as much as we love them – they didn’t make the cut when paired against our criteria. To make this guide, we gathered an extensive list of movies set in and about New York, and then ranked them by their adjusted Tomatometer, a formula that takes into account their Tomatometer scores but also number of reviews, year of release, and more, to make comparing movies from different eras fairer. (We made an arbitrary rule that each Spider-Man franchise could only have one entry, the film from the series with the highest Tomatometer score; and yes, we know that Rumble in the Bronx was shot in Canada, but still…) The top 212 made the cut, a number chosen because it was the first area code assigned to NYC by AT&T back in 1947.

With all that said, it’s time to explore the five boroughs with our guide to the 212 best New York Movies ever made. Got a favorite? Disagree with the Tomatometer’s ranking? Let us know in the comments.

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