When I was a teenager, the New York City I saw in the movies seemed attainable, the sort of place to bring big ambitions and a few suitcases. These films weren’t “The Warriors” or “Escape From New York” or anything directed by Martin Scorsese. Instead they starred plucky heroines living on tree-lined streets who donned heels and pencil skirts for their magazine jobs. I envied the dinner parties in creaky, book-filled homes, the pastrami on rye downtown, the piles of books characters clutched alongside rumpled copies of a certain New York newspaper.
New York City looked aspirational and magical and fun. A fantasy, I now know, but an alluring one. I thought about those movies a lot this year, because of the almost complete disappearance of that particular version of the metropolis from Hollywood’s imagination. Though New York was perpetually onscreen, it was a different city.
It was clear in 2024 that the way we watch New York has changed. That’s not too surprising if you’ve walked around Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn lately, which mostly resemble an Instagram feed: store after store selling cool minimalist clothing and pebbled leather bags from retailers who rely on influencers to sell products. Those streets aren’t on the big screen anymore. They’re the playground of vertical video and social media now.
That’s had interesting effects on the movies. Filmmakers are putting different frames around the city these days, and a lot of the time it’s a city that has since disappeared.
James Mangold’s surprisingly good film about Bob Dylan’s very early career, “A Complete Unknown,” is probably the best of the bunch, evoking the early 1960s on the streets of Greenwich Village not just in the setting but also in the color and texture of its image. Watch actual footage from the era and it’s clear how careful the reconstruction was, and the rich camerawork rounds it out. This is a dirty, exciting New York, full of chaos and smoke and possibility down every coffeehouse staircase.
Both “Saturday Night,” Jason Reitman’s lightly fictionalized account of the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live,” and “The Apprentice,” Ali Abbasi’s tale of young Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, aim to evoke the era through their cinematography as well. It’s especially noticeable when “The Apprentice” shifts from the grainy zooms of the 1970s into the 1980s, which seems to have been shot on flatly lit video.
“Saturday Night” and the first half of “The Apprentice” unfold only blocks from one another, though they might as well be worlds apart. The nervy danger of that Manhattan is consistent across them, but on the one side is an aspiring mogul haunting exclusive clubs, and on the other is a bunch of young people trying to upend that stuffy milieu.
This era of Manhattan was captured onscreen in Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” a quintessential New York movie, which was released mere months after the premiere of “S.N.L.” That version of New York is also the setting of the “Joker” movies — yes, it’s technically Gotham, but that’s fruitless hairsplitting — and this year, Todd Phillips’s sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” gave us more of that world. (It’s essentially the Gotham of HBO’s “The Penguin,” too.) There was much less of the gritty city in this one than its predecessor; most of it takes place inside a courtroom or a prison. Yet you can feel the vibe pressing in.
This grimy, disorderly, savage version of New York has attained mythical proportions, which is probably why it’s summoned so much by politicians and network news reporters. Thanks to the movies, this version just seems like it would be right, no matter what the statistics indicate at the moment. Consider, for instance, Natalie Erika James’s “Apartment 7A,” a middling prequel to “Rosemary’s Baby”: it gives us roughly this New York City, centered on a would-be Broadway performer (played by Julia Garner) who, around every single corner, discovers fresh terrors and threats.
Interestingly, one of the best New York movies of the year — Aaron Schimberg’s “A Different Man,” which like “The Apprentice” stars Sebastian Stan — stands outside of time altogether. It seemingly takes place in the present, but the set design and camerawork (there’s the zooms and the film grain again) suggest the 1970s. It’s a dark comedy that struck me as a perfect representation of what it’s like to just be a normal person in New York: The main character lives with serious facial disfigurement thanks to neurofibromatosis, but the people around him barely notice or react. Here, whether you’re a neighbor or a celebrity, you’re just some guy to most people. As long as you’re living your life and you let me live mine, we’re good.
There’s a bit of that same out-of-time sense in Jon Watts’s “Wolfs,” starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney as hit men forced to team up with each other. They’re very much in contemporary New York, but the look of the film is decades older, a nod to genre as much as city. They’re also running all over town, giving us a glimpse of the far reaches of boroughs that your average tourist would never encounter.
And that’s the other detectable frame for New York movies this year. The camera has moved away from the areas of Manhattan that scan as New York to outsiders. A significant part of RaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys,” one of the year’s best films, is set in Upper Manhattan, much of it in a dive bar. Azazel Jacobs’s “His Three Daughters” revolves around a cramped Lower East Side co-op. Pamela Adlon’s “Babes” spends a lot of time in the Queens neighborhood of Astoria, eventually positing that living there is the real aspiration, not the rom-com familiar Upper West Side. In Julio Torres’s delightful “Problemista,” his protagonist lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn, not because he wants to be hip but because he can’t afford anywhere else — and his comically crowded apartment becomes a running joke.
And then, of course, there is Sean Baker’s “Anora,” one of the most Brooklyn movies imaginable. Set all over South Brooklyn — Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Mill Basin — it gives the audience the full range of the region. A pivotal scene even takes place at Tatiana Grill, one of the centers of Russian culture on the Brighton Beach boardwalk and the sort of place that everyone has a story about. The film depends on the culture and vibes of South Brooklyn, as much as “Uncut Gems” did on the Diamond District of Manhattan — and that’s part of what makes “Anora” feel so real.
That’s not to say that the swanky, shiny New York of movies gone by wasn’t on display this year. In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” Nicole Kidman’s silky blouses, glassy offices and Manhattan apartment are plenty recognizable, for instance. In a few other films, like Susannah Grant’s “Lonely Planet,” India Donaldson’s “Good One,” and Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” the city of brownstones and sidewalk restaurants makes an appearance.
But the wildest version of New York on film this year was undoubtedly in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” which had everything: housing projects that were demolished by rich people; Art Deco office space; a celebration at some kind of combination Madison Square Garden and Cipriani arena; and, of course, the Chrysler Building. By the end, New York has been reimagined by its central “visionary” (Adam Driver) as a harmonious, smoothly running metropolis. He and his family celebrate on New Year’s Eve, standing on the platform in Times Square that usually features some nostalgia rock act that night. They smile. Confetti falls. What could be more New York than that?
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