Top Ten Tuesday: New York City

While the Cannes Film Festival is currently underway in the south of France, one of the darlings of last year’s fest, James Gray’s The Immigrant, is only just making its way across the pond for a domestic release. Starring Marion Cotillard as the titular Polish émigré who arrives at Ellis Island in 1921, it is just the latest example of cinema taking advantage of the historical beauty of New York City, arguably the most popular metropolitan setting in film history (only Los Angeles, London, and Paris can really dispute this claim). From the earliest days of moviemaking through to the CGI-saturated superhero tales of our contemporary times, The Big Apple and its five boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) have been utilized for all manner of mainstream, independent, and genre cinema. In that spirit, with The Immigrant releasing this Friday, I count down my ten favourite movies set in New York, New York.

Top Ten Tuesday: Disaster Flicks

With the upcoming release of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Pompeii (in 3D!) this weekend, I decided to take this opportunity to discuss some of my favourite disaster flicks. This genre has proved very popular over cinema’s history, peaking in the 1970s with the commercial success of films such as Airport, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno; this latter movie was especially well-received, as it was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture. After a brief lull throughout the 1980s, brought on by the success of genre spoof Airplane!, the disaster film returned with a vengeance in the ’90s, climaxing with the incredible box office returns and eleven Oscar wins of James Cameron’s Titanic. The genre has since remained fairly popular, with costly flops balanced out by enormous hits, but seems to be entering another waning period, with only a handful of high-grossing success stories; in fact, most disaster flicks these days are relegated to specialty TV channels, with increasingly ridiculous titles like Birdemic, Sharknado and the upcoming Airplane vs. Volcano. Whatever the pedigree, though, the template has always stayed relatively the same: large ensemble casts, high-concept catastrophes, and life-or-death stakes.

One final note before I reveal my top ten: I decided to focus only on natural disasters and not those of the man-made or extra-terrestrial variety. While some of the disasters in these movies are eventually revealed to be caused by human actions or interference, they all manifest in nature to begin with.