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The honorable mention list will be longer than the list itself: the rom-coms abound and are delightful. Meg Ryan has no fewer than three New York-themed movies that I enjoy: You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, and Addicted to Love. All rely on uniquely New York elements (the crowded apartments, the small markets, the little bookstore) to further the plot. Martin Scorsese has a whole New York library that you could arguably include here: The Wolf of Wall Street, Goodfellas, and Taxi Driver are all set in New York City and arguably feature the City as a main character. Yet their qualification under my rule was disputable enough that I chose to leave them out for clearer contenders. But, don’t worry, a Scorsese movie will be among the finalists.

Then there are the Best Picture winners: The French Connection, Midnight Cowboy, All About Eve and Kramer vs. Kramer. These are some of the most amazing Best Picture winners of all time. Again, however, it is not clear that New York City is a character there - in the first two the setting is the City but I don’t know that the movies rely on the City as such. Eve does, as it critiques Broadway and features it as its focal motif. Yet another Best Picture winner is much more to my liking, and made the finalists atop Eve. And then there is the quintessential New York movie: King Kong. But I must admit I’ve never been a big fan of the big ape in the Big Apple.

So, what are my top five favorite movies featuring New York City? Here we go.

5. Home Alone 2

I can hear the scoffs now; the lesser sequel to the cute and simpleton slapstick children’s comedy being picked above dazzling movies like I Am Legend, timeless movies like Wall Street and Fatal Attraction, a cadre of Best Picture winners, and Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre. Yeah. Sorry.

As a kid, the Macaulay Culkin classic was one I could watch essentially on an infinite loop. It made me want to visit, be in, live in, and take in all of New York. The movie clearly features the City and uses several of its iconic landmarks deftly, with key scenes playing out in Central Park, Rockefeller Center, and the Plaza Hotel. Smartly, they omit Times Square. And while the movie is of course repetitive and derivative of the original, the booby traps and plot twists are amusing enough to give us a better-than-most sequel. In any case, one of my childhood’s favorite movies had to make one of these lists one day, and the chance finally arrived.

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