10 Best Documentaries About New York City

The 51st New York Film Festival begins this Friday, and ahead of our coverage of the event it would seem appropriate to list some of our most anticipated titles. But there really aren’t a lot of docs at NYFF, and what is there we are excited about entirely. Maybe some films are higher up than others (At Berkeley), but all together we are looking forward to every single nonfiction offering at this year’s fest. That includes some non docs, too, such as Paul Greengrass’s opening night entry Captain Phillips. In place of a NYFF preview, I thought it would be fun to still tie in this week’s list to the event by celebrating New York in nonfiction cinema. The city has been on my mind anyway, as I just visited over the weekend for the first time since moving away almost two years ago, and also thanks to Robert’s initial Shots From the Canon piece on News From Home. In that post, he reminds us of how almost all movies shot in NYC wind up being documentaries of a kind, capturing the place and its people and culture at points in time and offering a cinematic record of its history from the turn of the 20th century’s actuality films (like these) up through this year’s Now You See Me, among others. The following ten titles, though, are more truly documentaries, in part because I don’t need to be filling a Nonfics feature with such various fiction titles as King Kong and Quick Change. Each one of these docs does a phenomenal job of telling and/or showing us a lot about New York, and whether you’ve been there or not or love it or not, they should all impart on you an appreciation for the Big Apple via their distinct approaches to the subject. 10. The Cruise (Bennett Miller, 1998) What better place to begin than with a film about a Manhattan tour guide? In this debut from the future director of Capote, Moneyball and the upcoming Foxcatcher, we meet Timothy “Speed” Levitch, a poet and philosopher who was hosting tourists on double-decker Gray Line buses. When we follow along with him at work, we get a one-of-a-kind history of the city, sometimes with creative license and always with colorful verbiage (ironic since the doc itself is black and white). And when he’s off the bus he goes off on his deeper ideas, like that of the “anti-cruise.” There are a number of brilliant moments in the film, one of my favorites being when Levitch maddeningly describes New York as a “ludicrous” “explosion” and “experiment” that “can not last,” before pointing out a new Ann Taylor store, as seen excerpted in the trailer below. [Watch on Amazon or free on SnagFilms] Source:http://nonfics.com/10-best-documentaries-new-york-city/