The best New York City-set movies that you’ll find are the ones that give you an honest dose of what Manhattan is really like. Hustle, bustle and thick accents should abound, and the movie’s characters should take you on a virtual tour of their beloved city. If you search for “Best NYC Movies” online, you’ll get a list of classics, like “Raging Bull,” “Rear Window” and “West Side Story.” But the modern movie watcher probably wants to see New York as it is today, not as it was then.
1. Sidewalks of New York
Edward Burns directed, wrote and starred in Sidewalks of New York. Vignettes pull together to create one eternally linking story, ripe with cheating husbands, game-playing daters and one awkward-turned-charming doorman.
2. Serendipity
Kate Beckinsale meets John Cusack one Christmas Eve during a random shopping mishap at Bloomingdale’s. They decide not to exchange names but to leave the future of their relationship up to fate…which never seems to bring them back together. Years later, they both go on a manic search for the other through the streets – and shops – of New York.
3. The Devil Wears Prada
Anne Hathaway takes a job as an office go-to girl for an uber-popular New York magazine. She eventually shapes up and impresses her boss – but not herself.
4. Boiler Room
Giovanni Ribisi trades in running an illegal poker house for working at an illegal stock company.
5. How to Lose a Guy In Ten Days
Kate Hudson tries to scare Matthew McConaughey away by being too clingy and needy while McConaughey tries to get Hudson to fall in love with him.
6. Along Came Polly
Ben Stiller is an uptight newlywed who’s been slighted and Jennifer Aniston is his free spirited gypsy to the rescue.
7. Across the Universe
Set in 1960s Manhattan, “Across the Universe” shows what it was like to be a teenage in the time of peace, love and protests, set to Beatles covers.
8. Unfaithful
Diane Lane starts an affair with a young, handsome foreigner while Richard Gere loses his mind at the thought of his cheating wife. One dramatic scene starts with a good example of what a windy day can be like in the wind tunnel streets of Manhattan.
9. Julie and Julia
Amy Adams takes distraught calls all day long about the fallout of 911 and cooks her way through Julia Child’s cookbook in her tiny NYC kitchen.
10. Vanilla Sky
Tom Cruise lives the high life in a to-die-for Manhattan loft until an accident changes his life – and mind. The empty streets of Times Square aren’t realistic, but they are hauntingly quiet and vibrantly colorful.
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