Directed by Charles Chaplin • 1917 • United States

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS features a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s 1917 film THE IMMIGRANT, which features Chaplin’s Little Tramp as an immigrant sailing for the United States. Director Louis Malle chose this film because “it was an evocation of fr...

Directed by Ted Wilde • 1928 • United States
Starring Harold Lloyd, Ann Christy, Bert Woodruff

SPEEDY was the last silent feature to star Harold Lloyd—and one of his very best. The slapstick legend reprises his “Glasses Character,” this time as a good-natured but scatterbrained New Yorker who ca...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1948 • United States
Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin a...

Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1956 • United States
Starring Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews

Lionel Rogosin’s landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film ...

Directed by John Cassavetes • 1959 • United States
Starring Lelia Goldoni, Anthony Ray, Hugh Hurd

John Cassavetes’s directorial debut revolves around a romance in New York City between Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), a light- skinned black woman, and Tony (Anthony Ray), a white man. The relationship is p...

Directed by William Greaves • 1968 • United States
Starring William Greaves, Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows

In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM TAKE ONE, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them t...

Directed by Ján Kadár • 1970 • United States
Starring Zero Mostel, Harry Belafonte, Ida Kaminska

Ján Kadár, codirector of the Oscar-winning Czechoslovak New Wave touchstone THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET, made his Hollywood debut with this unique, long-overlooked adaptation of a Bernard Malamud story, ...

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg • 1971 • United States
Starring Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint

A fragile romance unfolds against the backdrop of 1970s New York in this unsparing look at heroin addiction, scripted by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne and directed by Jerry Schatzberg. Taking its t...

Directed by Ivan Passer • 1971 • United States
Starring George Segal, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss

J (George Segal), a former New York City hairdresser turned heroin junkie, sees his life spiral out of control as he bounces between committing petty crimes, a new relationship with a free-spirited ...

Directed by Alan Arkin • 1971 • United States
Starring Elliott Gould, Marcia Rodd, Vincent Gardenia

The black-comic stage play by writer and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer provides the basis for Alan Arkin’s directorial debut, a surreal satire of urban alienation and the sensele...

Directed by John Palmer and David Weisman • 1972 • United States
Starring Edie Sedgwick, Wesley Hayes, Isabel Jewell

Warhol superstar and icon of sixties bohemia Edie Sedgwick delivers her final performance in this semiautobiographical look at the price of fame. Fiction and documentary—including...

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1973 • United States
Starring Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning

Margot Kidder is Danielle, a beautiful model separated from her Siamese twin, Dominique. When a hotshot reporter (Jennifer Salt) suspects Dominique of a brutal murder, she becomes dangerously...

Directed by Joseph Sargent • 1974 • United States
Starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam

One of the definitive cinematic time capsules of New York in the good-bad old days of the 1970s, this crackling urban-jungle thriller begins when a quartet of gunmen in trench coats—led by the c...

Directed by Chantal Akerman • 1976 • United States

Following her time living in New York in the early 1970s, Chantal Akerman returned to the city to create one of her most elegantly minimalist and profoundly affecting meditations on dislocation and estrangement. Over a series of exactingly compo...

Directed by Chris Hegedus • 1979 • United States
Starring Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer, Jacqueline Ceballos

On April 30, 1971, a standing-room-only crowd of New York’s intellectual elite packed the city’s Town Hall theater to see Norman Mailer—fresh from the controversy over his essay “The Pris...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1980 • United States
Starring Chris Parker, Sara Driver, John Lurie

Jim Jarmusch’s first feature displays the first hints of the deadpan, minimalist-cool style that he would refine in his breakthrough STRANGER THAN PARADISE. Young, alienated hipster Aloysius Christophe...

Directed by Louis Malle • 1981 • United States
Starring Wallace Shawn, André Gregory

In this captivating and philosophical film directed by Louis Malle, actor and playwright Wallace Shawn sits down with his friend the theater director André Gregory at a restaurant on New York’s Upper West Side, ...

Directed by Susan Seidelman • 1982 • United States

Susan Seidelman established her distinctive vision of New York City with this debut feature, the lo-fi original for her vibrant portraits of women reinventing themselves. After escaping New Jersey, the quintessentially punk Wren (Susan Berman)...

Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1984 • United States, Germany
Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter Balint

With this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at it...

Directed by Tony Bill • 1987 • United States
Starring Jodie Foster, John Turturro, Tim Robbins

Youthful idealism collides with matter-of-fact violence in a working-class Bronx neighborhood in the early 1960s in this captivatingly offbeat urban mosaic featuring an extraordinary ensemble cast. A w...

Directed by Norman Jewison • 1987 • United States
Starring Cher, Nicolas Cage, Vincent Gardenia

A full moon, a New York City night, and love and music in the air . . . One of the most enchanting romantic comedies of all time assembles a flawless ensemble cast for a tender and boisterously funny ...

Directed by Whit Stillman • 1990 • United States
Starring Carolyn Farina, Edward Clements, Taylor Nichols

One of the great American independent films of the 1990s, the surprise hit METROPOLITAN, by writer-director Whit Stillman, is a sparkling comedic chronicle of a young man’s romantic misadven...

Directed by Jennie Livingston • 1990 • United States
Starring Dorian Corey, Pepper LaBeija, Angie Xtravaganza

Where does voguing come from, and what, exactly, is throwing shade? This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African America...

Directed by Greg Mottola • 1996 • United States
Starring Parker Posey, Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber

With its droll humor and bittersweet emotional heft, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Mottola announced the arrival of an unassumingly sharp-witted new talent on the 1990s indie film scene....