The 101 best Los Angeles movies, ranked
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What makes a perfect L.A. movie? Some kind of alchemy of curdled glamour, palm trees, ocean spray, conspiracies big and small — and more than a pinch of vanity. From hard-bitten ’40s noirs and vertiginous Hollywood rises (and falls) to the real-life poetry of neighborhood dreamers and nighttime drivers, Los Angeles is always ready for its close-up. The city has long occupied a cinematic place, straddling its gauzy past and a dark, rainy future. Go west, they said, and we came here, a site of fantasy, industry, possibility and obsession.
We asked 17 film writers — staffers, freelancers, critics and reporters — to rank their top 20 movies set in L.A. (not as easy as you think) using a balloting process that blended their painstaking choices to develop this list. Angelenos live among the actual locations in these films; we’ve noted those specific details in each write-up, so you can go out exploring. Of course we didn’t have room for every title. Let us know your favorites, the ones you carry with you. — Joshua Rothkopf, film editor
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‘Babylon’ (2022)
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(Paramount Pictures)
Hear me out: Damien Chazelle’s unfairly derided gonzo epic nails the mania of a town suddenly transforming from an oil-and-oranges hamlet into a mecca for dreamers, schemers, freedom-seekers and wild party animals, including the elephant that rampages through a bacchanal filmed at the United Artists Theatre downtown. Anyone who came to this city to make movies at the dawn of the silent era had to be a little nuts. Even after feature-length productions gave the business a bit more prestige, state censors across the country threatened to shut down Hollywood’s burgeoning motion-picture industry before it took root. “Babylon” begins in 1926, but temperamentally, it takes place in the more unhinged 1910s before the Fatty Arbuckle murder trial triggered a citywide hangover. Factually, it’s nonsense. Spiritually, it’s spot-on.
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‘Dogtown and Z-Boys’ (2001)
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(Sony Pictures Classics)
On its face this is a documentary about skateboarding, but it’s really about a particular stretch of Los Angeles at a particular moment. Director Stacy Peralta looks back at the Santa Monica-Venice borderlands of the mid-1970s, when the old Pacific Ocean Park amusement park was rotting and the area felt largely ignored. A drought emptied backyard swimming pools and a group of kids climbed fences and skated in them anyway. They borrowed moves from surfing and pushed the sport in a rougher, more aggressive direction. The film captures a version of L.A. where new ideas took shape in overlooked spaces before anyone was paying attention.
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‘Death Becomes Her’ (1992)
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(Universal Pictures)
Before there was “The Substance,” there was this comedic look (now a Broadway musical) at the lengths female actors feel they must go to in order to fulfill modern beauty standards. Though some early scenes take place in New York, the bulk of the film is all L.A., where the aging (as in 40-ish) Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) lives in Beverly Hills with her husband (Bruce Willis), whom she “stole” from her friend Helen (Goldie Hawn). When Helen shows up, more lovely than ever, Madeline takes drastic steps that involve a magic potion and many regrettable truths about Hollywood and certain parts of L.A., including the line: “Neighbors? In 12 years in Los Angeles, have you ever seen a neighbor?”
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‘Xanadu’ (1980)
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(Universal Pictures)
I’ve always been charmed by the ELO soundtrack, plus Gene Kelly’s final film appearance represents its own kind of Hollywood history. But this roller disco musical is also a Los Angeles time capsule: The film spotlights the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, an iconic venue that once hosted major events. The auditorium was already closed and in disrepair during filming and it burned down in 1989. (If you go to Pan Pacific Park, you can see some smaller-scale replicas of its distinctive Art Deco spires.) Other key scenes were performed at the chic Fiorucci showroom in Beverly Hills and the Venice Beach Boardwalk.
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‘Demolition Man’ (1993)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Like “Blade Runner,” “Demolition Man” is set in a futuristic Los Angeles. But in contrast to the bleakness of Ridley Scott’s classic, Marco Brambilla’s action movie offers a fresh and whimsical take, one I remain enchanted by. Los Angeles has been transformed into crime-free “San Angeles,” where graffiti is instantly erased by sprinkler-like machines, citizens are issued fines for cursing and kiosk computers offer pedestrians pep talks. Unleashed on this utopia after being cryogenically thawed, vicious criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes) starts a one-man crime wave. In a recent GQ interview, star Sylvester Stallone called the thriller one of his favorites. Come for the showdown, stay for the jokes
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‘Smog’ (1962)
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(Titanus)
A quiet revelation after its recent restoration and exhibition, Franco Rossi’s Italian-made comedy — shot entirely in Los Angeles — may have been overshadowed by some bigger directorial names then dominating the scene. But don’t let that be an excuse to skip it. You won’t retain much of the workmanlike plot (an extended layover, an inability to catch a cab, etc.) but these crisp shots of a brand-new LAX are character enough. The moment that will stay in mind the longest: an intimate night swim in a Hollywood Hills private pool at the modernist Stahl House, never before captured this vividly. It took an outsider to notice.
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‘Less Than Zero’ (1987)
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(20th Century Fox)
The tagline for the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel was: “It only looks like the good life,” which all but doubles as a mantra for a city that depends on glittering superficiality. A portrait of nihilism and alienation (featuring a breakthrough turn by Robert Downey Jr. as an increasingly desperate coke addict), it relishes in showing the underbelly of 1980s Beverly Hills through the eyes of a disaffected Gen X-er returning home for the holidays. Moreover, Ed Lachman’s cinematography — beautifully capturing neon-lit streets, silver Christmas trees and garishly lavish parties — made L.A. feel cool and cold in equal measure.
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‘The Outside Man’ (1972)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
From its opening aerial shots of downtown, few films capture the disorientation of newly arriving in Los Angeles quite like Jacques Deray’s thriller. Marrying a detached European sensibility with gritty genre storytelling, the film follows a French hit man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who comes to L.A. for a job and is double-crossed, trapped in a foreign place he is desperate to leave. With incredible locations — from sleazy clubs and an abandoned Venice pier to the upscale environs of Beverly Hills — there’s an existential blankness in its depiction of the city, a tone that a painter like De Chirico would have recognized.
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‘Volcano’ (1997)
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(20th Century Fox)
Long before I arrived here, I learned L.A.’s unique geography from one of its classic texts: “Volcano.” Starring Anne Heche as a no-nonsense seismologist and Tommy Lee Jones as the gruff emergency manager who heeds her warnings, the 1997 disaster flick practically draws a map from MacArthur Park to Ballona Creek as our heroes fight city hall — well, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — to save the Westside from disaster. By the time a high-rise condominium was knocked on its side to direct the lava into the sea, the exact location of Cedars-Sinai was seared forever in my brain. I’ll take Mt. Wilshire over Dante’s Peak any day.
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‘The Crimson Kimono’ (1959)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
A hard-boiled wake-me-up from intense, iconoclastic Sam Fuller, who believed film was a battleground and made movies that proved it. This particular battle was in L.A.’s rarely seen Japanese community as two rival LAPD detectives, one a Japanese American, investigate the murder of stripper Sugar Torch, gunned down on downtown’s Main Street. Fuller shot that scene guerilla-style, “live, no rehearsal, in real traffic,” the director reporting, “ironically, I really did not get much dramatic reaction … An almost naked, 6-foot-tall blond is running for her life down the street and nobody does a double take.” Only in L.A.
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‘Beverly Hills Cop’ (1984)
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(Paramount Pictures)
Here are some things Detroit police officer Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) cackles at when he arrives in Beverly Hills: blonds in convertibles, Michael Jackson clones and art galleries hawking overpriced mannequin heads. From Fendi to Cartier, mansions to ice sculptures, the luxe life is everywhere — and he’s not impressed. Sylvester Stallone quit the movie two weeks before filming, but his version wasn’t a comedy. Murphy made Martin Brest’s megahit zing, acing both the run-and-gun scenes and the local humor. Handcuffed in the back seat, he deadpans, “This is the cleanest and nicest police car I’ve ever been in in my life.”
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‘Bowfinger’ (1999)
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(Universal Pictures)
Though “Rebel Without a Cause” may be the most iconic use of Griffith Observatory, “Bowfinger” is certainly the funniest, as screenwriter-star Steve Martin and director Frank Oz stage the ludicrous conclusion to their showbiz spoof at the tourist attraction. This is a comedy about all the creativity and ambition that lives outside the gates of the Hollywood studios and the people who won’t allow executives to dampen their dreams. Teaming up with a celebrity look-alike (an underrated Eddie Murphy in a double role), Martin’s would-be auteur Bobby Bowfinger figures he can use the streets as his soundstage, and his long con sort of works.
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‘Against All Odds’ (1984)
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(Columbia Pictures)
Maybe your memory of this one has something to do with Phil Collins, a sultry Mexican tryst and a shirtless Jeff Bridges. But elsewhere, director Taylor Hackford mounts a scary and thrilling high-speed Porsche-Ferrari race along a winding stretch of Sunset Boulevard near Bel Air and UCLA, one that deserves comparison to the chase in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Other locations include the Palace nightclub in Hollywood and the Ginger Man, a celebrity hangout owned by Carroll O’Connor (“All in the Family”).
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‘The Bling Ring’ (2013)
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Emma Watson at Paris Hilton’s house in the movie The Bling Ring. - Merrick Morton
(A24)
“I wanna rob.” Hip cocked, midriff bared, cigarette pressed between her lips, Emma Watson’s indelible plea to “visit” Paris (as in Hilton) encapsulates the perfect inside-baseball deadpan of Sofia Coppola’s crime saga — not least because Hilton opened up her Mulholland Estates home for scenes of the Bling Ring burglarizing it. No film crystallizes the shallow, amoral bluff of Hollywood’s high-tabloid era with such icy precision, from the flat affect of the teenage protagonists to the late Harris Savides’ minimalist digital photography. Largely misunderstood upon its release, “The Bling Ring” now registers as an incisive comedy of manners for a society of influencers just then being born.
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‘Inherent Vice’ (2014)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The Los Angeles of Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies isn’t just a place but a specific state of mind, each film encompassing a different way of experiencing the city. In this adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, he takes viewers back to 1970, immersing us in the already curdling promise of the counterculture, embodied by Joaquin Phoenix’s burnout hippie-detective who’s going to seed alongside the film’s South Bay hangouts and Topanga Canyon mansions. “Inherent Vice” is Anderson’s most bittersweet, dreamlike portrait of L.A., eulogizing its utopian allure of endless summers, beautiful beaches and free love that never came to be.
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‘One of Them Days’ (2025)
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(Sony Pictures Releasing)
Any movie that begins with the sounds of REAL 92.3 and a loving shot of a Norms restaurant belongs on a list of the greatest L.A. movies, even if it’s relatively new. Keke Palmer and SZA’s riotously funny buddy comedy follows in the footsteps of hangs like “Friday,” but has a distinctly 2025 view of life in Baldwin Village and its surrounding environs. As the two women at the center of the story scramble around the city to make rent, it’s also incredibly evident how gentrification is encroaching. But the soul of these neighborhoods hangs on.
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‘Quinceañera’ (2006)
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(Sony Pictures Classics)
Early on in this story about tradition and defiance, longtime Echo Park resident Tio Tomas (Chalo González) pushes his cart up and down the hilly streets selling champurrado. But before he reaches his first customers, he runs into a white gay couple who are his new landlords. They’ve just bought the property where he lives in this predominantly Latino part of town. (The movie’s writer-directors, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, were themselves a gay couple new to Echo Park.) As much as the film grapples with characters overcoming personal circumstances, it’s also a portrait of a changing city where individuals from distinct social classes and cultural backgrounds clash and sometimes connect.
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‘Under the Silver Lake’ (2018)
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(A24)
David Robert Mitchell chased his sinuous, unrelenting “It Follows” with this deep-dish conspiracy comedy, as tangential as his prior film was linear. That could account for the mystified reaction it got. But there’s a similar lure here, a compulsion for puzzle-solving that makes like-minded viewers feel seen. Mitchell’s L.A. is the besotted one of a transplant: Bronson Caves in Griffith Park (better known from TV’s “Batman”); downtown’s The Last Bookstore; the inky blackness of the title reservoir. It’s the work of someone swinging for the fences, trying to make his own semi-stoned “The Big Lebowski.” That’s impossible not to love.
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‘Mur Murs’ (1981)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
Agnès Varda’s documentary is an unabashed appreciation for vibrant outdoor mural art, turning L.A.’s ever-present billboards into unwanted extras. In elegant, sometimes playfully illusory tracking shots that punctuate neighborhood life, we get a rolling gallery show of eccentricity and resistance, from the developer-threatened wilds of outsider Venice and the Afrofuturism of Watts, to the bold Chicano expressionism of Boyle Heights. The city isn’t merely providing tantalizing canvases but serving as a muse for grand visions, impossible-to-ignore humanity and, when the focus is on artists like Judy Baca, Willie Herrón III and the Asco collective, a galvanizing political consciousness.
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‘Point Blank’ (1967)
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(TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo)
This classic modern noir may begin on Alcatraz, but its heart and soul reside in our town. Using previously ignored locations like the Los Angeles River’s concrete flood channels and the massive support columns that hold up the city’s freeways, the film has a great eye for the beauty inherent in emptiness and sterility, presenting an L.A. that is removed and distant but undeniably striking. And Lee Marvin’s footsteps as he strides tirelessly down an empty LAX corridor are unforgettable.
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‘Falling Down’ (1993)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
How flammable was this city in the early ’90s? The night before Michael Douglas’ rampaging William “D-FENS” Foster was scheduled to fire a semiautomatic in a fast-food joint for being three minutes late to order from the breakfast menu, production had to pause when the Los Angeles riots lit up the streets. Reality and fiction had merged as, according to co-producer Dan Kolsrud, the owner of Angelo’s Burgers in Lynwood slept at the filming location, guarding his restaurant-turned-set with a shotgun. The scene wouldn’t be shot for two more weeks, but director Joel Schumacher must have taken a strange solace in knowing his movie was destined to hit a nerve.
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‘The Karate Kid’ (1984)
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(Columbia Pictures)
From Encino mansions to NoHo’s Cobra Kai dojo and Cal State Northridge (site of the All Valley Karate Championship), transplanted Jersey teen Daniel LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) encounters romance and bullies across the San Fernando Valley in John G. Avildsen’s class-conscious coming-of-age tale. The cultural richness of this Reseda-set ’80s classic, however, comes from Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), the Okinawan martial arts master who takes Daniel-san under his wing, still haunted by the deaths of his wife and child at Manzanar — a nod to the thousands of Japanese Americans, mostly from Los Angeles, who were incarcerated there during WWII.
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‘Totally F***ed Up’ (1993)
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(The Criterion Channel)
You won’t find touristy vistas in Gregg Araki’s ensemble piece about ’90s queer youth because the characters’ lives are enmeshed in the fabric of the city, which is presented not as a temporary playground but as the space where they search for love and meaning in their adrift days. Mentions of the New Beverly Cinema, the Hollywood Palladium and other places situate their personal plights within a geographical and cultural context. “L.A. is so f—ing weird,” says Ian (Alan Boyce), a Minneapolis transplant, to his date, Andy (James Duval), who later responds, “It’s the alienation capital of the world.” A home for outsiders.
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‘To Sleep With Anger’ (1990)
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(The Criterion Channel)
Written and directed by the protean Charles Burnett, this film does more than vividly illuminate South-Central’s rarely portrayed Black middle class. A deft domestic horror story, it’s a contemporary tale with a folkloric twist that has old friend Harry (Danny Glover) visiting a married couple and gradually revealing himself to be a trickster with trouble on his mind. A fine companion piece to Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” (also on this list), “Anger” won four Spirit awards and boasts a career-best performance by Glover, supported by a terrific ensemble headed by Mary Alice and Paul Butler as the couple in question.
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‘S.O.B.’ (1981)
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(Paramount Pictures)
Every era of Hollywood tends to satirize itself, so Blake Edwards’ lacerating “S.O.B.” captures the moment when the freewheeling New Hollywood of the 1970s was giving way to the more corporate-minded environment of the 1980s. The sexual and social politics of the movie are certainly a snapshot of its era, especially the good-time, hang-out vibes of the Malibu beach house party circuit with all sorts of hangers-on coming and going. Akin in many ways to Seth Rogen’s recent series “The Studio,” the film is proof that while much may change over time in Hollywood, fragile egos and buffoonish behavior are eternal.
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‘Repo Man’ (1984)
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(The Criterion Collection)
A punk-inflected sci-fi comedy, “Repo Man” takes place in the ratty Los Angeles most movies ignore. Director Alex Cox fills the frame with strip malls, liquor stores, industrial streets and parking lots that feel bleached of personality. Emilio Estevez plays a directionless kid who falls into repossession work and drifts through a city ruled by errands and bad ideas. Products have no brand names; conversations sound like manifestos. A Chevy Malibu carries something dangerous enough to kill anyone who gets too close, yet barely anyone seems impressed. The movie treats nuclear waste, aliens and government agents with the same shrug. L.A. doesn’t panic. It absorbs the weirdness and keeps going.
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‘Inland Empire’ (2006)
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(Studio Canal)
David Lynch carved out his own dream terrain, a scary place that has paradoxically become comforting to revisit to in his absence. Even though his final feature includes a weird family of rabbits and an overall layer of consumer-grade video cruddiness, it somehow punctures through to something true about L.A.’s desperation. Much of that is carried on the heroic shoulders of Laura Dern, fearless when working with Lynch, who plays a celebrity, Nikki Grace, finding herself down on Hollywood Boulevard interacting with prostitutes. A weaponized screwdriver plays a part. Is she Nikki or Sue Blue? The film dares us to connect it literally to the outside regions of the city, but Lynch had been living in his own inland empire for decades.
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‘El Norte’ (1983)
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(Cinecom International Films)
“You think gringos want to live around Mexicans?” asks Nacha (Lupe Ontiveros), an undocumented woman, to her de facto mentee Rosa (Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez), who’s just arrived in L.A. from Guatemala. Rosa is surprised not to see any white people in downtown — mostly those who look like her. Like countless others before her and since, Rosa and her brother Enrique (David Villalpando) become part of the city’s unseen and underappreciated immigrant workforce. The raids and hardship the siblings face on-screen mirror what many have endured over the last year, making this one extra timely.
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‘Her’ (2013)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
The year is 2025 and Los Angeles looks both like and unlike itself: sun-dappled, all but devoid of cars and awash in skyscrapers. In the world of Spike Jonze’s film, there’s a brightness to its forward-looking image of urbanity — vintage and bespoke, dotted with green spaces. That’s because “Her” stitched Santa Monica’s beaches to Shanghai’s skylines to create a hazy, ethereal vision of a futurist city that could play the perfect backdrop to a melancholy meditation on romance and loneliness, as Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for his AI assistant, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).
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‘Sherlock Jr.’ (1924)
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(The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Buster Keaton’s special-effects showcase opens on a small-town theater operator who needs cash, love and sleep. Wrongly accused of theft by his girlfriend’s father, a weary Keaton takes a nap in the projectionist booth and his dream self steps into the movie. As the fictional film-within-a-film changes scenery, the disoriented man tumbles from one Los Angeles location to another, cutting from Hollywood Boulevard to a hilltop to the desert to the beach, in the process giving audiences insight into how this city creates fantasies — not just his own stunts but all the talented craftspeople behind the screen.
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‘Model Shop’ (1969)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
From a vista point in the hills above Sunset, Gary Lockwood’s broke architect George admires the “baroque harmony” of L.A. in temporary French transplant Jacques Demy’s urban travelogue of disenchantment and dreams. George drives his vintage MG around town, from a Venice Beach shack to the gridded, sunlit reality of storefront Hollywood. As Vietnam and the repo man loom, hustling the 1960s to the exit, a balmy day in the basin makes for a poetically existential way station. Though a flop in 1969, Demy’s mesmerizing SoCal mood piece has since earned its time-capsule status (Tarantino’s a fan).
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‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1995)
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(TriStar Pictures)
When filmmaker Carl Franklin adapted Walter Mosley’s period novel, he strove to capture the look — and, more important, the feel — of Central Avenue circa 1948, interviewing older jazz musicians who told him stories from the time. The result is a moody, lived-in noir that chronicles the vibrancy of the city’s historic Black communities. Although Franklin shoots beloved sites such as the 6th Street Viaduct and Griffith Observatory majestically, he never takes his eye off the city’s moral rot. His movie’s hero, Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), might crack the case, but he can’t solve the institutional racism surrounding him.
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‘The Driver’ (1978)
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(20th Century Fox / Studio Canal)
Before Michael Mann brought crime cool to L.A., director Walter Hill seeded the field with this spare, efficient urban western, turning downtown’s latticework into a stoic getaway driver’s solitary turf. Ryan O’Neal has no name and few lines, but his speed and steering speak for him. Even wild-eyed Bruce Dern is just called the Cop and Los Angeles itself is anonymous. But there’s Torchy’s bar (a favorite location of the director), Union Station and, for vertical appreciation of the city at night, the Bonaventure’s glass elevators. Nothing beats the screech and fire of a suspicious O’Neal demolishing an orange Mercedes in a South Flower garage: subterranean parking as one wheelman’s rage room.
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‘Slums of Beverly Hills’ (1998)
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(Fox Searchlight Pictures)
It can be difficult to explain to people who aren’t from Los Angeles that not everyone who lives in the city and its surrounding environs is absurdly wealthy. Filmmaker Tamara Jenkins captures this in her semi-autobiographical period piece about a Jewish family in the 1970s. The Abromowitz clan wants to take advantage of Beverly Hills’ luxuries (specifically the good schools) but shack up in the kind of rundown, low-rise apartment building with small rooms and plenty of outdoor space that is instantly recognizable to anyone from the area.
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‘The Limey’ (1999)
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(Artisan Entertainment)
“What are we standing on?” asks Terence Stamp’s avenging Cockney dad, legitimately mystified. He’s at the infinity pool of Astral House in ritzy Nichols Canyon, offering him a floating view of the city that’s both immense and hazy. Steven Soderbergh’s thriller answers the question with Cubist editing: L.A. is past, present and future in a heady mix. Violence marks a stop in downtown’s warehouse district; Dinah’s on Sepulveda offers rumination to lonely souls. And at the historic coral-pink Hollywood Riviera apartments, “The Limey” becomes a pure palm-shrouded noir. The characters leave for a Big Sur climax, but Los Angeles is this movie’s hard-edged temptress of a star.
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‘Mi Vida Loca’ (1993)
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(Sony Pictures Classics)
Set in Echo Park in the early 1990s, Allison Anders’ indie captures the neighborhood before later waves of gentrification reshaped it. She shoots the film on streets, porches and in apartments that feel genuinely inhabited (because they were). The story centers on young Chicana women navigating friendship, rivalry and responsibility in a close-knit community with its own rules and pressures. From today’s perspective, “Mi Vida Loca” preserves a street-level view of gang violence, made with an unflinching eye and no patience for quick solutions.
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‘The Fast and the Furious’ (2001)
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(Universal Pictures)
L.A. is a car town and Dominic Toretto is an L.A. guy, as established in this seminal cop-versus-street-racer face-off. Even when the franchise went global (and into actual outer space), the familia always made it home to clink Coronas at the Angelino Heights Craftsman where it all began. A spin-out at Dodger Stadium, tuna sandwiches at Toretto’s Market (Bob’s), a bro-down at Neptune’s Net and off to San Bernardino for Race Wars: Sacred gearhead texts don’t get much holier than the original “The Fast and the Furious,” which proved the power of a well-timed NOS boost while showcasing the multicultural spread of the city.
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‘Point Break’ (1991)
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(20th Century Fox)
There’s no movie that will make you want to move to the beach more than Kathryn Bigelow’s surf-centric cops ’n’ robbers action bromance. She makes Malibu life intoxicating and sexy for a reason, showing us why upstart FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) gets swept away by a gang of bank-robbing bros, led by their seductive spiritual leader Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). In scenes that span from Neptune’s Net to Westside house parties, Utah goes undercover, infiltrating the Ex-Presidents. Bigelow renders his journey so visually stunning and chemistry-laden that “Point Break” feels more like a love story.
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‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1955)
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(MGM)
So many of this noir’s real-world locations have been swept away by time or ulterior development motives: Those Bunker Hill apartments no longer stand and its Malibu beachhouse was taken out by a storm. But the movie itself remains an ominous indictment of secret power-playing. This is where Los Angeles truly becomes apocalyptic, influencing everything from “Pulp Fiction” and “Southland Tales” to the French New Wave. (Don’t get too hung up on the fact that we never see the “great whatsit.”) And if you haven’t had that dream in which you’re running barefoot down a dark and empty road, you just haven’t lived in L.A. long enough.
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‘Barton Fink’ (1991)
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(20th Century Fox)
In 1941, Hollywood was enjoying its creative heyday, delivering classics like “Citizen Kane” and “The Maltese Falcon.” But that’s not the Hollywood of Joel and Ethan Coen’s wonderfully sour study of a pretentious New York playwright (John Turturro) who comes to town to try his hand at the picture business. Part psychological horror, part industry satire, “Barton Fink” transforms landmarks like the Wiltern into surreal Art Deco locales that echo a fracturing mental state. In the Coen brothers’ hands, the dream factory becomes a gripping nightmare machine, a place where artistic integrity goes to die.
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‘In a Lonely Place’ (1950)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
Nicholas Ray loved his first Hollywood digs so much — a Spanish-tiled, fountain-centered bungalow at Harper and Fountain — it inspired the lush, alienating complex where Humphrey Bogart’s cynical, violent screenwriter meets Gloria Grahame’s aspiring starlet in this superb rewiring of Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel. A doomed love story (tinged with disgust at Hollywood conformity), it boasts another iconic Spanish revival locale in Beverly Hills’ City Hall. But for physicalizing Bogie’s spinning paranoia, it’s hard to beat a winding canyon road from moonlit Will Rogers State Beach. With this classic noir, L.A. officially became psychologically dangerous.
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‘Blood In Blood Out’ (1993)
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(Hollywood Pictures)
Devotees of this Chicano brotherhood saga were in an uproar when, in late 2020, a rumor spread that El Pino, an imposing bunya pine on the corner of Folsom and North Indiana in East Los Angeles, would be cut down. Exemplifying the extraordinary synergy between the city and the movie, the adored tree had already become a landmark after it was named and given significance in director Taylor Hackford and writer Jimmy Santiago Baca’s crime drama, as a symbol of identity for mixed-raced homeboy Miklo (Damian Chapa). Thankfully for fans, the plans for its removal were only an online prank.
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‘Valley Girl’ (1983)
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(Maximum Film / Alamy Stock Photo)
A movie inspired by a Frank Zappa novelty hit song didn’t have to be this good. But director Martha Coolidge plucked Nicolas Cage’s headshot out of the slush pile and made the young Coppola a star. This L.A. “Romeo and Juliet” story about a Hollywood punk and a princess from “over the hill” isn’t just an archive of ’80s slang — it boasts authentic locations and electric chemistry between Cage and co-star Deborah Foreman, who started dating during the shoot. Their first kiss, during a Plimsouls show at the Central (now the Viper Room), is totally swoon-worthy.
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‘Swingers’ (1996)
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(Miramax Films)
The mid-’90s swing revival might have felt like a fever dream if Jon Favreau hadn’t captured it — as well as the agony and the ecstasy of a struggling comedian — in his debut screenplay. Directed by Doug Liman, the film launched co-star Vince Vaughn into the stratosphere, along with Favreau as a voice of his micro-generation, while depicting the evergreen Los Angeles 20-something rituals of romance from the Derby to Las Vegas and back again. Thankfully, the Dresden in Los Feliz remains unchanged, if you ever need to feel like “you’re so money and you don’t even know it.” Chin chin.
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‘Stand and Deliver’ (1988)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
UCLA grad Ramón Menéndez first heard of the inspiring story of Jaime Escalante — a mathematics teacher at Garfield High School who worked against all odds to get 18 Latino students to pass Advanced Placement calculus — in the pages of the Los Angeles Times. The underdog tale, ripe for a Hollywood studio film (but produced instead by an intrepid group of filmmakers who ended up securing grants and endowments rather than traditional funding opportunities), stars Edward James Olmos, Lou Diamond Phillips, and a robust Latino and Chicano ensemble cast, all of whom make this classic East L.A. tale feel of and for the community.
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‘Shampoo’ (1975)
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(Columbia Pictures)
Part sex farce, part political satire and part requiem for lost idealism, “Shampoo” is an examination of the hustler’s heart: What gets L.A.’s dreamers out of (or sometimes into) bed each day? Starring and produced by Warren Beatty, who co-wrote the script with Robert Towne, and directed by Hal Ashby, the film is set against the backdrop of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential ascendance — including a memorable election-night party at the long-gone Beverly Hills spot the Bistro — bringing added charge to Beatty’s frantic scrambling as a hairdresser whose irrepressible womanizing makes his life a series of complicated encounters. Similar to the city itself, the movie comes on as breezy and a bit shallow, but reveals profound, transformative depths.
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‘Real Women Have Curves’ (2002)
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(HBO Films / Newmarket Films)
Before America Ferrera would come to be associated with Barbieland, she made her feature film debut in Patricia Cardoso’s sweet coming-of-age tale. Based on the play by proud Boyle Heights resident Josefina López, the film succinctly captures the spirit of Ana (Ferrera) — particularly her commitment to her education and her sunnily defiant sense of self-esteem in a sequence where she takes two long bus rides from East L.A. to her high school in Beverly Hills while lyrics from Aterciopelados practically sum her up: “Soy una chica difícil, pero yo valgo la pena” (“I’m a difficult girl, but I’m worth it.”)
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‘Love & Basketball’ (2000)
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(New Line Cinema)
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s romance is told through L.A. sports institutions. Monica (Sanaa Lathan) and Quincy (Omar Epps) start out at Crenshaw High before matriculating to USC, where their romance flourishes on a campus dotted with red-and-gold iconography. (The movie is such a tribute to that school that it’s almost shocking that Prince-Bythewood went to rival UCLA.) While Quincy ends up on the Lakers, Monica ultimately plays for the Sparks, in the earliest days of the WNBA. It’s a story of people finding love in their backyard, which happens to be L.A.
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‘L.A. Story’ (1991)
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(TriStar Pictures)
“I’ve always loved Los Angeles,” Steve Martin once told me, saying he wanted “L.A. Story” to feel magical. “I’m just not sure if I achieved that.” He’s being modest. Because this 1991 film, which Martin wrote, captures the city’s eccentricities — the car ride to the house just up the street — with a fanciful sweetness that never feels forced or false. I can’t be the only one who scoured Venice Beach looking for a girl who spelled her name SanDeE*. And I know I’m not the only one still scanning the electronic freeway signs looking for a revelation.
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‘Rebel Without a Cause’ (1955)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
“You’re tearing me apart!” It’s been more than 70 years since Nicholas Ray’s youth-culture classic premiered, but if you visit Griffith Observatory, chances are you’ll hear someone utter the film’s most iconic line. James Dean’s troubled teen Jim Stark says those words to his parents when they pick him up at a police station, but that doesn’t matter — two of the film’s most important scenes, including its climax, take place at the Observatory, which put it on the international map. In 1988, a bronze bust of Dean, who famously died in a car crash near Paso Robles a month before the film’s release, was placed on the west lawn.
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‘Miracle Mile’ (1988)
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(Hemdale Film Corp.)
A low-budget concept told over one night, “Miracle Mile” didn’t make much of an impression when first released, but it has since attained cult status. The film depicts a city in turmoil as Angelenos flee the believable threat of a nuclear strike, which also throws a wrench in the burgeoning romance between a struggling trombone player (Anthony Edwards) and a coffee shop waitress (Mare Winningham). The chaos is mainly set on the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard bordered by La Brea and Fairfax avenues, with landmarks including the May Co. department store (now the Academy Museum), the shuttered Johnie’s Coffee Shop and, ominously, the La Brea Tar Pits.
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‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ (1985)
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(MGM / UA)
That title alone makes it essential for our list and Wang Chung’s theme song — approved by John Mulaney for his talk shows — has kept the movie current. But director William Friedkin’s crime film features several action scenes in and around Los Angeles, including memorable moments at LAX’s Tom Bradley International Terminal, Union Station, the L.A. River and several industrial warehouses. The centerpiece, though, is a chaotic wrong-way car chase along the Terminal Island Freeway near Long Beach. Friedkin knows a thing or two about car chases and he was actively trying to top himself here.
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‘Ed Wood’ (1994)
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(Touchstone Pictures)
Generally speaking, Tim Burton creates worlds that spring from a clown-music-scored section of his brain that only he has access to. Which is why “Ed Wood” was so radical for him: black-and-white, stubbornly plain, a Hollywood story of underfunded dreamers. It’s a place where an untalented visionary in an angora sweater could run into Orson Welles in a corner booth at Musso & Frank and share a moment of commiseration. Empathy courses through the movie. We also visit Bela Lugosi’s den, his dogs on his lap, a late-night horror movie in progress. In its midcentury ordinariness, “Ed Wood” makes a lovely case for those who dare to be different.
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‘Strange Days’ (1995)
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(Universal Pictures)
Set during the then-ominous final two days of 1999, Kathryn Bigelow’s futuristic fever dream of a film is a startlingly astute critique about the ills that plague this city. Screenwriters James Cameron and Jay Cocks took inspiration from the 1992 riots, a collective expression of anguish about racist state violence captured on video. This virulently antipolice thriller (also a neo-noir about virtual reality) stars Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett and anticipates the druggy voyeurism of social media. The climax is an end-of-millennium rave that takes place at the foot of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in DTLA.
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‘Spa Night’ (2016)
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(Strand Releasing)
The original draft of Andrew Ahn’s feature debut takes place entirely during one night at an all-male Koreatown spa. After all, that’s the place where young David (Joe Seo) finds himself moved to explore and understand his closeted sexuality, with furtive glances and flirty encounters coloring how he moves through his place of employment. Thankfully, Ahn’s finished film makes ample use of other locations all over K-town (including karaoke bars, restaurants and golf driving ranges) that help flesh out the world of this shy 18-year-old who’s tortured over what his self-actualization may cost him at home.
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‘Mosquita y Mari’ (2012)
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(Sundance Film Festival)
Rarely captured on screen, the streets of Huntington Park, a city in Southeast Los Angeles where Latinos are the dominant demographic, serve as a lively backdrop to the blossoming queer relationship between two Mexican American girls. Their hangout spot is Pacific Boulevard, a once-bustling commercial hub where storefronts still display colorful quinceañera dresses and cowboy hats and boots. Director Aurora Guerrero cast most of her first-time actors locally and involved area businesses in the production, making her debut feature a true community endeavor.
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‘Die Hard’ (1988)
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(20th Century Fox)
In the film industry, everybody exaggerates their attributes, even those of our most famous buildings. Twentieth Century Fox advertised this action extravaganza as “40 stories of sheer adventure,” but in truth, the movie’s central location, Century City’s Fox Plaza (here dubbed Nakatomi Plaza), is only 34 floors. No matter: The building became iconic as the setting for Bruce Willis’ explosive big-screen breakthrough. His New York cop character doesn’t much care for L.A. and indeed, this Christmas classic celebrates just how delightfully bizarre the holidays are in a climate of no snow but plenty of salacious news media.
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‘Body Double’ (1984)
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(Columbia Pictures)
Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) sure can’t act, but he’s great at peeking where he shouldn’t — into his bedroom when his wife is cheating on him, say, or through a stranger’s window when she’s getting murdered by a driller killer. That helpless voyeurism is what makes “Body Double” such a perfectly fun L.A. movie, bursting with recognizable landmarks: the old Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand, a pre-cool Barney’s Beanery, the Farmers Market and Tower Records. But the ultimate location is Hollywood Hills’ octagonal modernist Chemosphere, a location so strange that, if it didn’t already exist, it would need to be invented for a trashy De Palma thriller.
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‘They Live’ (1988)
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(Universal Pictures)
From the skyscraper-lined streets of DTLA to the Hollywood Hills, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s blue-collar drifter navigates an urban battleground of extreme privilege and poverty in John Carpenter’s sci-fi satire of Reagan-era consumerism as he’s awakened to the truth: Aliens are using subliminal messages to control humankind. Pedestrian tunnels, the swanky Biltmore Hotel and a 7th Street alley are among the L.A. locations that bring Carpenter’s prescient allegory to life, while the razing of a homeless encampment by “ghoul”-controlled police, a nod to the Justiceville community bulldozed by the city in 1985, remains a chillingly contemporary dystopian scene.
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‘The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years’ (1988)
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(New Line Cinema)
Every one of Penelope Spheeris’ “Decline” films deserves to be on here, but her documentary about the late-’80s hair metal scene captures L.A. at its hottest and tackiest. MTV turned the Sunset Strip into the center of music culture, so Spheeris turned her camera on its bejeweled and hair-ratted stars and hangers-on. “What do you think parents think about you?” she asks Kiss’ Paul Stanley as he reclines on a bed with multiple Playboy bunnies. Snorting, he replies, “Do I care?” The girls are half-naked. The idols’ egos are exposed. “I was just preserving it for history,” Spheeris later said. Rock on.
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‘Friday’ (1995)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It’s Friday and two bud-smoking slacker buddies have until 10 p.m. to come up with $200 in Ice Cube’s stoner classic, the one-crazy-day comedy that put a lighthearted spin on the predominantly violent stories then being made about life in South-Central. The movie was filmed on the West Athens block that director F. Gary Gray grew up on and inspired by Cube and co-writer DJ Pooh’s own Angeleno upbringings. Its nuanced observations and stacked supporting cast bring the neighborhood so alive with humor, humanity and highly quotable lines that Craig’s 126th Street porch perch remains a popular tourist destination to this day.
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‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
No writer has gotten under the skin of Los Angeles better than Raymond Chandler, whose Santa Ana winds made “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks.” “The Big Sleep” is his most celebrated book partly because of this Howard Hawks version, which made a hash of the plot but created fireworks between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Detective Philip Marlowe knew his way around “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in” and this investigation of how low crime and high society mixed helped create the L.A. noir template.
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‘A Star Is Born’ (1937)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
Though Judy Garland’s 1954 version is more celebrated, there’s much to be said for the 1937 original, which took pains to look like the physical Hollywood of the day. The near-riot conditions at the funeral of the film’s Norman Maine, for instance, were inspired by similar chaotic scenes at Irving Thalberg’s funeral just the year before. The film was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, director and lead actress for the luminous Janet Gaynor and won one, for original story. Even if you swear by any of the three more recent versions, this one will win you over.
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‘Licorice Pizza’ (2021)
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(MGM)
As evidenced by this list, Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the preeminent Los Angeles filmmakers, but none of his movies are a more loving tribute to the bygone Valley of his youth than this one. Anderson re-created locations that have long since disappeared, like the Ventura haunt Tail o’ the Cock, and found the odd gems that were still standing. (One of those is the bizarre Tudor-style house at the dead end of Balboa that this writer grew up in.) “Licorice Pizza” understands the mundane magic of suburbia, close to Hollywood but just out of reach.
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‘The Graduate’ (1967)
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(Embassy Pictures)
The first words you hear in Mike Nichols’ classic are “Ladies and gentleman, we are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles,” the camera offering a close-up of Dustin Hoffman’s dead-eyed face. In that moment, it’s clear how key L.A. will be to Nichols’ portrait of young-adult malaise. (Another choice metaphor: Nichols’ use of LAX’s slowly moving walkway that Tarantino later lifted and put in “Jackie Brown.”) The cheeriness of the well-manicured ranch houses with their blue pools stinking of chlorine is oppressive to Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock. It becomes his reason to act out.
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‘The Exiles’ (1961)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
As observed through the lens of Native Americans who left their reservations for urban opportunities, life in downtown Los Angeles during the early 1960s seems at once thrilling and precarious in this seminal docufiction. A time capsule rife with the bright lights of cinema marquees, bars, liquor stores and recognizable locations (Angels Flight, Grand Central Market), it shows a city that has always lured lost souls to stumble upon redemption or perdition. A sequence near the end overlooks the metropolis from a hill in Chavez Ravine, a community that had already been displaced and where Dodger Stadium was eventually built.
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‘La La Land’ (2016)
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(Lionsgate)
It begins with a traffic jam and ends with a shattered dream. If there’s a better summary of Los Angeles, I’m all ears. Granted, Damien Chazelle’s 2016 almost-best-picture-winner offers an idealized vision of a city swaddled in magic-hour lighting and romantic excursions to Griffith Park and the Hermosa Beach Pier. Come to think of it, that SigAlert was much too joyful, even with the horn-honking. That’s OK. “La La Land” is the movie to watch when you need a reminder about how wonderful L.A. can be, even if those dreamlike moments sometimes feel just out of reach.
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‘A Star Is Born’ (1954)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
George Cukor’s classic musical about a star-crossed celebrity couple takes place in — where else? — Los Angeles, where an inside view of the dream factory provides the perfect backdrop for heartbreak. Aspiring singer Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) first meets movie star Norman Maine (James Mason) when he crashes her performance at the Shrine Auditorium. Later he ruins her Oscars moment at the Cocoanut Grove. In between, their showbiz romance unfolds across the Warner Bros. lot and the stomping grounds of Hollywood’s creative class (after-hours clubs, downtown hotels, the Santa Anita racetrack) until it meets its tragic end where the 10 does too: in the Pacific.
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‘Drive’ (2011)
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(FilmDistrict)
Pro tip: If you roll your car windows down with Kavinsky’s haunting “Nightcall” blasting through the speakers as you pass the Los Angeles skyline, you’ll suddenly notice you are wearing a jacket emblazoned with a scorpion. Merging the city’s ingrained driving obsession with its inextricable bond with the film industry, Nicolas Winding Refn conceives the perfect L.A. vigilante: a movie stunt driver whose side gig is criming in a getaway car. A stony Ryan Gosling embodies coolness as his character transforms the roads into a battlefield where his skills behind the wheel are a superpower. You won’t see him caught in traffic.
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‘Training Day’ (2001)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
A tightly wound thriller built on intimidation and control, director Antoine Fuqua’s cop drama unfolds over a single day in Los Angeles, following a narcotics detective who knows exactly how the city works and how to exploit it. Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris uses his badge to shake down dealers, settle scores and test how far he can push a rookie partner (Ethan Hawke). The movie moves through South L.A. and Watts largely from inside cars and living rooms, places where authority is asserted quietly. Rather than offering a broad portrait of the city, Fuqua shows how power operates at the street level, dependent on familiarity and reputation. It’s a vision of L.A. where the rules change block by block.
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‘Speed’ (1994)
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(20th Century Fox)
A product of its time, “Speed” has a quintessentially ’90s-feeling premise, as absurd as it is absorbing. How else to describe an action-thriller that depends on an L.A. public city transit bus (the fictional “33 Downtown” bus route, yet looking like a Big Blue Bus from Santa Monica) that can’t slow below 50 miles per hour, lest it blow up along with everyone inside it? Cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont was wise enough to cast Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock, the two capably bringing grit and charm to make this film double as both a paean to Los Angeles’ many interstate highways and a movie-long flirtation.
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‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991)
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(TriStar Pictures)
James Cameron’s heartwarming sequel about a boy from the Valley, his loving mother and an unlikely father figure from the future ups the bombast of its predecessor from the moment the T-1000 materializes beneath DTLA’s 6th Street Bridge to its final showdown in an abandoned Fontana steel mill. From an Elysian Park playground to the Santa Monica Place mall and a Malibu mansion, the action masterpiece utilizes Los Angeles’ urban sprawl to dismantle the supposed safety of family-friendly spaces, its unforgettable chase sequence doubling as cinema’s most iconic love letter to the L.A. River.
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‘A Woman Under the Influence’ (1974)
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(Faces International Films)
John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands’ greatest film is set in Hollywood — not the mythical land of movie stars, mind you, but the actual neighborhood filled with working-class families surviving their everyday dramas. This searing indie’s raw study of a mentally unraveling housewife is a rebuke to both the polish of the studio system and the phony notion of Southern California as a world of endless glamour. Few movies feel so attuned to L.A.’s weird, glorious eccentricities. It’s not just Rowlands’ performance that’s electric — it’s the film’s sense of a city vibrating with unpredictability.
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‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High’ (1982)
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(Universal Pictures)
Arriving amid a wave of ’80s teen sex comedies, “Fast Times” stood out for its candor, frankness and the amount of respect it paid to its young characters and their everyday misadventures. Directed by Amy Heckerling from a screenplay by 24-year-old Cameron Crowe, the film took an almost anthropological approach to depicting life events both big and small and how as a teenager it can be hard to tell the difference. It also made the San Fernando Valley — more specifically the Sherman Oaks Galleria — feel like the center of the universe, elevating mall culture and turning checkered slip-on Vans into an enduring totem.
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‘Mildred Pierce’ (1945)
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(Miramax Films)
Opening with the sound of a gunshot from an isolated Santa Monica beach house, this 1945 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel is a revolutionary consideration of classism in a city that often considers itself above such things. When her faithless husband leaves her, Mildred (Joan Crawford and a very hard-working lighting team) works her way from the “shame” of waitressing in Glendale to owning a chain of restaurants, all so she can give her spoiled rotten daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) the kind of Pasadena mansion life Mildred never had. A lesson in parenting, to be sure, but also a reminder that L.A. can be just as snobby as New York and that, while Glendale has always been hopping, there was a time when beach houses in Santa Monica were few and far between.
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‘Tangerine’ (2015)
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(Faces International Films)
Sean Baker’s raucously entertaining movie (famously shot on an iPhone 5s) is, above all else, a hyperlocal portrait of Hollywood — the neighborhood, that is. Featuring a doughnut shop on Santa Monica and Highland (since turned into an unmissable pink Trejo’s Coffee & Donuts stand) as its gravitational center, this look at the lives of two sex workers values something few other Los Angeles movies do: walking. Besties Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are literal street walkers, strutting around corners as their Christmas Eve plans unravel in increasingly outlandish ways in Baker’s crackling modern twist on a screwball comedy.
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‘Jackie Brown’ (1997)
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(Miramax Films)
Quentin Tarantino made his most grounded film with “Jackie Brown,” setting it in the South Bay sprawl he knew growing up in Torrance. The story unfolds in places like the Cockatoo Inn, Del Amo Fashion Center and a bail bonds office in Carson. Pam Grier stars as a flight attendant moving cash for a gun runner, quietly working both sides and waiting for the moment when the leverage finally shifts. This isn’t the L.A. of premieres or power lunches, but airport lounges, strip malls and freeways, where time stretches and survival depends on nerve and timing. Tarantino dials down the flash and lets the pleasure come from rhythm, confidence and Grier’s cool control of every scene.
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‘Safe’ (1995)
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(Sony Pictures Classics)
Todd Haynes’ unsettling psychological horror film, like its San Fernando Valley setting in the late 1980s, is deceptively placid on the surface but utterly sinister underneath. “Safe” couldn’t have chosen a better location or time period to critique an American culture so obsessed with perfection — and terrified of AIDS — that the unnamed malady plaguing Julianne Moore’s pretty, vacant housewife becomes a metaphor for a society that’s sick to its core. Haynes weaponizes Southern California’s abundant sunshine and conspicuous consumption, turning them into allergens infecting a nauseatingly superficial city.
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‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988)
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(Touchstone Pictures)
You know you’re an Angeleno when you start describing Robert Zemeckis’ cartoon noir as the story of how our city got cheated out of cheap public transportation. Likewise, you get riveted by the character-use contract negotiations between Warner Bros. and Disney that mandated Daffy Duck and Donald Duck share exactly the same amount of screen time — hence their piano duel — and that it must be Bugs Bunny, not Mickey Mouse, who pranks Bob Hoskins’ detective Eddie Valiant by handing him an inopportune spare tire. Technically, the entrance to Toontown is in Griffith Park. But we’re all living in it.
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‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)
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(Gramercy Pictures)
The Coen brothers’ classic dives into Los Angeles by way of Raymond Chandler but also the early ’90s, introducing us to potheads and pornographers, nihilists, pacifists and feminist conceptual artists with strongly held beliefs about sex being a natural, zesty enterprise. We take in Venice bungalows, Beverly Hills mansions, Googie diners and nice, quiet little beach communities. We take note of the proximity of an In-N-Out when running an errand to shake down a miscreant teenager. And we nod our head in silent agreement in its assessment of the Eagles. Only No. 22? Seriously? That’s just like your opinion, man.
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‘Collateral’ (2004)
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(DreamWorks Pictures)
Director Michael Mann turned Stuart Beattie’s taxicab-killer thriller script into a love letter to his adopted city, shooting the film almost entirely at night on early digital video (which has aged beautifully). Tom Cruise, an obsessive perfectionist like Mann, breaks bad here as silver-haired assassin Vincent; Jamie Foxx is his unlucky cabbie Max, also playing against type. As they drive from a jazz joint in Leimert Park to a Mexican cowboy bar in Pico Rivera and a K-town nightclub, Mann nails not just the layout and traffic patterns of this sprawling city, but its diverse communities — including the coyotes.
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‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)
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(Miramax Films)
Though Jack Rabbit Slim’s doesn’t exist, the 1950s themed diner where Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman) do their now-iconic dance feels like a place that could find a home here. A Marilyn Monroe impersonator in her emblematic white dress holds a trophy while patrons sit in booths fashioned to resemble classic cars. It’s California-loving kitsch with a heavy dose of Hollywood fantasy. Outside of this place, in neighborhoods ranging from Atwater Village to Canoga Park, Quentin Tarantino unfurls gritty violence, tough talk and shootouts galore, but within the enticing artificiality of this fake establishment, movie magic exists, for us and for the characters. And isn’t that tug of war between fake and real what L.A. is all about?
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‘Nightcrawler’ (2014)
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(Open Road Films)
“L.A. is vibrating at night in a way you’d never really know,” observes Jake Gyllenhaal’s amoral opportunist who finds his calling when he happens upon a cameraman shooting an accident scene. Hey, it beats stealing copper wire. Gyllenhaal’s saucer-eyed sociopath spends the rest of the movie driving around Koreatown, Hollywood and the Valley, looking for trouble, becoming a professional voyeur and working his way up the local media food chain, desperate for blood. Dan Gilroy’s 2014 neo-noir captures L.A. after dark in a way that feels thrillingly alive. After watching it though, you might decide to stay in tonight.
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‘Short Cuts’ (1993)
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(Fine Line Features)
Robert Altman’s surreal yet all-too-real omnibus ensemble piece isn’t exactly brief, but it’s an easy-breezy three-hour tour in a California-cool kinda way. Inspired by the stories of Raymond Carver, Altman weaves together overlapping narratives in his signature style, capturing the kooky highs and tragic lows of L.A., where something weird, dark or absurd seems to always be happening. In one strange but sweet scene, Lily Tomlin’s waitress laughs while she shelters from an earthquake with her good-for-nothing husband (Tom Waits). Fun fact: Her restaurant is the former Johnie’s Broiler in Downey, also famously seen in “Heat.”
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‘Magnolia’ (1999)
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(New Line Cinema)
The movie that made me want to write about movies, Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilarating epic about life, death and fate along Ventura Boulevard fashions workaday L.A seaminess into a tale of operatic, even biblical intensity. Against a familiar tapestry of dive bars and luxury cars, strip malls and backlots, an ensemble of beat cops, stage parents, desperate housewives and other local archetypes sings, screams, rants, raves, kisses and keels over — as if to suggest that life is simply more dramatic inside county lines. No wonder the film sparked a shy New England teen’s fatal attraction for the place. If L.A. has a “La Bohème” (or “Rent”), “Magnolia” is undeniably it.
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‘The Player’ (1992)
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(Fine Line Features)
Before “The Studio” put a bumbling face to movie execdom, Robert Altman’s scathing satire about an amoral studio suit (adapted by Michael Tolkin from his own novel) used the terrain of schmoozers and sharks to give Hollywood the biopic it deserved. Wheeling and dealing out of Hollywood Center Studios (now Sunset Las Palmas), Tim Robbins’ Griffin Mill also haunts celeb-studded Geoffrey’s Malibu, the Sunset Tower Hotel and Hollywood Forever Cemetery. But it’s in darkness and obscurity — and the ’burbs — where he commits his fateful crime: killing a screenwriter and his dreams in the parking lot behind South Pasadena’s Rialto Theatre (now a church).
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‘L.A. Confidential’ (1997)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It’s not that novel to note that Los Angeles has a sunshine surface and rot beneath. Instead, director Curtis Hanson illustrates how the two intertwine in an ecosystem of movie stars, drugs, gangsters and tabloid reporters like Danny DeVito’s Sid Hudgens who get their thrills spilling the dirt. “You’d think this place was the Garden of Eden,” Sid wisecracks in his opening monologue over footage of Mickey Cohen dancing at the Mocambo in West Hollywood. Almost every character in the movie looks posh but sells their souls for cheap, from Kim Basinger’s celebrity clone sex worker to Kevin Spacey’s fame-addicted cop.
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‘Heat’ (1995)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
It is no exaggeration to say that every location used for Michael Mann’s masterful crime story and study of male psychology is striking and memorable. From its opening robbery on Venice Boulevard to an epic downtown shootout to the climactic foot chase on the runways at LAX, as well as memorializing since-closed places like the restaurant Kate Mantilini where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have their definitive coffee break together, the film is a sweeping portrait of the city’s diverse topography. The moment when Pacino jumps in a helicopter to careen across the nighttime skyline might best encapsulate all that is thrilling, magnificent and daring about the movie, one that makes L.A. come alive.
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‘Boyz n the Hood’ (1991)
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(Columbia Pictures)
The complicated dynamics of teens grappling with violence while coming of age in South-Central Los Angeles inform USC alum John Singleton’s groundbreaking feature debut, based on his experience of being sent to live with his father at age 11. The young characters hang out in front of their well-kept houses and show off their cars on a stretch of Crenshaw Boulevard near Baldwin Hills that has since been largely redeveloped. Singleton scored an Oscar nomination for directing — the first Black filmmaker to ever earn that honor and still to this day the youngest at 24 — as well as one for his screenplay, while the movie helped launch the careers of several cast members, including Ice Cube, Nia Long and Regina King.
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‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ (2019)
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(Sony Pictures Releasing)
Quentin Tarantino’s history-altering buddy comedy is a tender tribute to movies and the people who make them, as well as the joys of driving around Los Angeles with the top down. The film won the production design Oscar for its loving, detailed re-creation of 1969 L.A., most vividly seen in the sequence when Brad Pitt books from the Hollywood Hills down Sunset Boulevard on his way back home to a trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In (re-created for this shoot). California dreamin’ has never felt more enticing. Plus, it’s the Manson family — not the ’60s — that goes up in flames. Let’s go to Musso’s to celebrate.
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‘The Long Goodbye’ (1973)
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(United Artists)
Robert Altman invented the modern L.A. film: discursive, cynical, unfooled by take-the-top-down glamour. (We also have him to thank for his gifted disciple, Paul Thomas Anderson.) Among Altman’s many locally shot triumphs — including a couple of career comebacks — can this be the one? Easily. It’s the city subsumed in paranoid exhaustion, a place where nude hippies, exploitative doctors and one picky house cat can stymie a decent if shaggy gumshoe (Elliott Gould, hatching a whole new way to play Philip Marlowe). “You’re a real ding-a-ling,” says Sterling Hayden’s blocked novelist; his Malibu Colony beachhouse was Altman’s own. But sometimes it takes a wobbling bumblebee to find the honey.
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‘Killer of Sheep’ (1978)
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(Kino Lorber and Milestone Films)
When Charles Burnett studied film at UCLA, he noticed that his classmates’ movies seemed from a different universe. “These were personal films about young kids exploring their sexuality or freedom or whatever,” he recalled in 2025. “I came from Watts. That wasn’t my issue. Mine was just trying to survive on the streets of South-Central without getting harassed by the police.” A core member of the Black independent film movement known as the L.A. Rebellion, Burnett shocked audiences with his neorealist debut, ripping open a doorway to Los Angeles’ most neglected neighborhoods. His naturalistic drama exudes a precise, weary tone, showing disillusioned adults and directionless children navigating a hostile environment of poverty, crime and racism. In subsequent years, “Killer of Sheep” has lost none of its sting or defiance, detailing the broken promise of Black Americans’ Great Migration westward, finding only dashed dreams and unfulfilled potential.
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‘Double Indemnity’ (1944)
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(UCLA Film & Television Archive)
From the Los Feliz Spanish-style mansion where Barbara Stanwyck’s scheming Phyllis Dietrichson flashes a “honey of an anklet” and the bowling alley at Third and Western where smooth-talking insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tries to shake off her spell to the night-shrouded hills overlooking the Hollywood Bowl where he realizes his mistake, Los Angeles is more star than setting. Directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Raymond Chandler, this 1944 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel sets the standard for L.A. noir with film’s most famous insurance scheme made sexy by Stanwyck’s ice-blooded siren and MacMurray’s antihero, a man so cool he lights matches with the flick of a thumbnail. It’s a story of multifaceted betrayal, but even some of the best lines — “There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour” and “How could I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”— make it clear that these particular twists and turns could only happen in L.A.
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‘Singin’ in the Rain’ (1952)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
When Gene Kelly is crooning the title song, he is very evidently not on the streets of Los Angeles. But Kelly and Stanley Donen’s film proves that soundstages are one of the most natural environments you can inhabit in this city. “Singin’ in the Rain” is a Hollywood fairy tale shot in Technicolor, enamored with the beautiful facades that are constructed on studio lots. At the same time, it’s also about our economy and how it fundamentally changes every couple of years. Released in 1952, it harks back to an earlier era of massive upheaval in the industry, when talkies were emerging, silent film actors were losing their livelihoods and a new class was emerging. It’s a hopeful portrait, one in which a girl who jumps out of a cake can become a star, but also a picture of a place in constant flux.
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‘Boogie Nights’ (1997)
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(New Line Cinema)
Promoting his epic story of ambition, sex and hot-tub poetry, Paul Thomas Anderson said he viewed the San Fernando Valley “the way David Lean saw the desert in ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’” Vast? Strangely beautiful? Profoundly isolating? You bet. In “Boogie Nights,” the Valley checks off all those boxes. Spanning an era from disco to just-say-no, the movie follows the broken circus of L.A.’s other film industry: “adult films, exotic pictures” as Burt Reynolds’ director Jack Horner would call them.“Boogie Nights,” though, is less about porn than broken people trying to fill the holes in their hearts. We see drugs, decadence, delusion and an endearing commitment to making a movie (on film, not videotape) with the kind of story that hooks the audience. Just like they would in Hollywood.
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‘Los Angeles Plays Itself’ (2003)
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(Cinema Guild)
Thom Andersen’s clips-rich disquisition on the role the city plays as a backdrop in movies is as epic as the elusive, memory-challenged metropolis itself. He’s a purist for films that showcase Los Angeles as it really was (and sometimes still is): “Double Indemnity,” “Kiss Me Deadly,” many of the titles on this list. But Andersen also has sardonic admiration for high and low trash (“Swordfish,” anyone?). Among his subtopics are common objects (palm trees, cars, etc.), malleable landmarks (e.g., the Bradbury Building) and one neighborhood that’s been entirely erased (Bunker Hill). Movies define a city for good and ill, so where “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential” set up a cultural neighborhood called Corruption, poetic indies like “The Exiles” and “Killer of Sheep” keep things grounded in the lives of actual people. Andersen’s cine-essay inspires more than just rewatching; he makes you want to get out and experience the real thing.
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‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
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(Warner Bros. Pictures)
Documentary filmmaker Thom Andersen describes Ridley Scott’s dystopian masterpiece as the “official nightmare of Los Angeles” in his comprehensive “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” We’re inclined to agree. Even though the movie’s temporal setting of 2019 is long in the rearview, “Blade Runner” remains a kind of shorthand for a late-capitalist endgame, endlessly influential on all neo-noirs that followed. Citizens are drenched with relentless acid rain, flying cars maneuver through the darkness and massive digital billboards dominate the landscape. Much of the action takes place in the iconic Bradbury Building in downtown L.A. “Blade Runner” fans regularly flock to the historic structure, which still operates as an office building, to admire the cage elevators, decorative marble stairs and distinctive atrium. The Million Dollar Theater across the street is also visible in the film.
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‘Clueless’ (1995)
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A Beverly Hills teenager is behind the wheel of a BMW convertible, her boyfriend riding shotgun and her best friend, Cher, babbling in the backseat. The nervous driver needs to put on her blinker and glance at her blind spot. Instead, she flips on her windshield wipers and swerves into the next lane, and she’s soon hyperventilating on the 405. “Getting off the freeway makes you realize how important love is,” Cher exhales after the car exits to safety. Yes, and transplanting a Regency romance to L.A. makes you realize the city’s own silly social codes. Alicia Silverstone’s Cher would never confuse an Alaïa minidress with one by Calvin Klein, but she can’t understand why her Salvadoran housekeeper is offended to hear her huff that she doesn’t “speak Mexican.” Director Amy Heckerling steers us to root for Cher anyway. If this blond cupcake can wise up, there’s hope for us all.
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‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950)
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(Paramount Pictures)
A screenwriter floats face down in the pool of a crumbling estate located on L.A.’s most famous street, narrating his own demise. Has any opening scene captured the glamorous brutality of Hollywood better than Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard”? It’s the story of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who once made it big (“it’s the pictures that got small”) and refuses to accept that Tinseltown has moved on from her, and flailing hack Joe Gillis (William Holden), who finds himself Norma’s live-in himbo while evading the repo men. A host of luminaries play versions of themselves in this ironic meta-noir that remains as cutting today as it would in any era of Hollywood history. Joe thinks he’s just missed the golden age; Norma can’t stop reliving hers. Either way, no one’s happy in the present. Somehow, heartbreak feels awful in a town like this.
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‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)
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(Universal Pictures)
Los Angeles is a city built on the fantasy of who you might become. “Mulholland Drive” asks what happens when that fantasy collapses. David Lynch had been thinking about the city for years after moving here in the early 1970s, drawn to L.A. while deeply suspicious of it. For a while, the movie plays like a warped Hollywood fable, built on killer auditions and the sense that everything might work out for Naomi Watts’ aspiring actor Betty, bright-eyed and believing. Elsewhere, though, it goes full Lynch and you know she’s fooling herself. A terrified man describes a vision of something waiting behind a diner and when that monster finally steps into view — filthy, silent, barely human — the film’s mood collapses. Using canyons, freeways, banal exteriors (the Sierra Bonita Apartments play a big part) and soundstages, Lynch captures a core truth about Los Angeles: It invites you to dream and doesn’t wait around when the dream falls apart.
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‘Chinatown’ (1974)
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(Paramount Pictures)
Layer exposes layer, mystery unveils mystery. Which is why “Chinatown” is the most emblematic Los Angeles movie of them all, in that it never stops revealing itself, eventually becoming resoundingly familiar and consistently fresh. (Even the fact that its director would become a convicted sex offender on the run from the law becomes another complication in the film’s knotty legacy.) The gold standard of conspiracy thrillers examines the city’s expansion through the 1930s via a foundational myth of how water came to flow to L.A. and who profited from bringing it here. Though there are locations from the movie that still exist — you can toodle around the lake at Echo Park or pop into the Prince bar — it’s the cynical spirit of the thing that hangs like a haze, an essential unknowability implied by its notorious final line: “Forget it Jake — it’s Chinatown.” As for the why behind it all, let’s leave that to John Huston’s rapacious Noah Cross. What exactly does he want? “The future, Mr. Gittes, the future.” That’s still something we hear every day.
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