Thrown out of the house by his wife, OCD neat-freak Felix Unger (Jack Lemmon) wanders aimlessly through Manhattan, tries (and fails at) suicide in a squalid Times Square hotel, and winds up at the slovenly Upper West Side apartment of his best friend, sportswriter Oscar Madison, who is also in the midst of divorce. Worried that Felix will actually succeed in committing suicide,Oscar asks him to move in. Within a few days, Felix and Oscar have driven each other to the edge. Not only are their neat vs. sloppy habits getting on each other's nerves, but Felix wrecks a potentially passionate evening with Oscar's neighbors, the Pigeon sisters, by Felix's reminiscing about his wife and children. In revenge, Oscar trashes his apartment, which sends Felix running. At the next poker game, Oscar is worried that Felix might have attempted to kill himself again, but when Felix arrives to pick up his things, he's surprisingly cheerful, and announces he's moving in with the Pigeon sisters. Of course, he winds up back with Oscar and the two endure many adventures together, including watching a Mets game at the old Shea Stadium during which Felix makes Oscar miss a triple play that actually happened in 1967.(Another bonus for CRE fans: watch for the Bohack Supermarket, the last of which closed in 1977!) The 1968 movie is a faithful adaptation of Neil Simon's hit Broadway play, which was allegedly based on a chapter in the life of Simon's brother Danny, and inspired a long-running hit series starring Tony Randall as Felix and Jack Klugman as Oscar, living together at 1049 Park Avenue.

After honeymooning at the Plaza Hotel, Paul (Robert Redford), a conservative young lawyer, and his new wife, the vivacious Corrie (Jane Fonda), head downtown to their first apartment. In that fifth-floor walkup, which costs a whopping $125 a month (in 1967 terms), and features a broken heating system and a hole in the ceiling that lets rain and snow fall through,Paul and Corrie's passionate relationship turns riotously dysfunctional. Although the front of their building says 49 W. 10th Street, the actual location was 111 Waverly Place, near Sixth Avenue.

With its spooky, quintessential Victorian/classic Renaissance style, The Dakota (1 W. 72nd Street), built in 1890-94, is the ideal setting for Roman Polanski's 1968 hit horror movie. Young newlyweds Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse (Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes) move into a new apartment on the Upper West Side, planning to start a family. Guy is a struggling actor, but they're a happy couple until suddenly being befriended by their neighbors, the creepy Minnie and Roman Castevets (Ruth Gordon and Ray Milland), who turn out to be Satanists. Suddenly, Guy's rival for a lead role has been blinded, Guy's career is taking off, Rosemary's friends are mysteriously dying and, well, the title says it all.

In this classic Hitchcock film, Jeff Jeffries (James Stewart) is a New York City newspaper photographer who's broken his leg shooting a racetrack accident and is stuck for several weeks in his Greenwich Village apartment during a long summer heatwave. Aside from regular visits from his cleaning lady, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his much younger socialite girlfriend, Lisa Freemont (Grace Kelly), Jeff is bored out of his mind until he begins watching his neighbors' windows across the courtyard and realizes he may have witnessed a murder. This 1954 suspense/thriller has an ominous, edgy tone, yet the scenes Jeff observes each morning are quite charming. There's a dancer he nicknames "Miss Torso," a pianist, a sculptor, a single woman Jeff nicknames "Miss Lonelyheart" and several married couples, including Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), a traveling jewelry salesman with a bedridden wife who becomes Jeff's murder suspect. Although the scenes out Jeff's window are very true to a Greenwich Village courtyard, you won't be able to find it. The film was shot at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, but that hasn't stopped anyone from envisioning apartment life in the Village (sans the murder) as Rear Window depicted it.

In this romantic comedy, an unusual departure for Australian director Peter Weir, Georges Faure (Gérard Depardieu) is a French composer who has been offered a job in the U.S., but needs a Green Card to take it. Brontë Parrish is a single New Yorker and a horticulturist who just found the perfect apartment, complete with its own greenhouse, but the apartment complex is only available to couples. A marriage of convenience seems like the ideal solution for both parties, but it's not that simple: to convince U.S. Immigration that they married for love, they must live together. And of course, as the two attempt to cope with life together, they fall in love. Meanwhile, the apartment literally blossoms with new life. For film location aficionados, it's at the Aylesmere, a grand 56-unit Pre-war building with an onyx lobby and marble floors throughout, located in the heart of the Upper West Side at 60 West 76th Street, near Columbus Avenue.

It's 1987 in Harlem and obese, illiterate 16-year-old Claireece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe) is in trouble. She lives with her unemployed, physically and psychologically abusive mother and has been raped and impregnated twice by her father, who has AIDS. But as impossible as it may seem, this is an uplifting film. Precious miraculously manages to find kind people to help her escape her plight and work toward finishing school and building a brighter future. When director Lee Daniels released Precious in 2009 and began screening it at major film festivals (Cannes, Toronto, Sundance) he told an interviewer he felt embarrassed because he was afraid the film would stereotype African Americans, and did not foresee the smashing success it would become. The film was a boost to New York City as a setting for movies as well, with scenes shot in Harlem, downtown Brooklyn, Inwood, Coney Island Hospital, Dyckman Street subway station and in the Bronx at BronxWorks Community Center (1130 Grand Concourse) and on Fort George Hill.

Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) is a cranky, bigoted, homophobic OCD writer, whose life falls apart when his despised neighboring gay artist Simon (Greg Kinnear) is hospitalized and his dog is entrusted to Melvin. Meanwhile, Carol (Helen Hunt), the only waitress at Melvin's local diner who will tolerate him, must leave work to care for her sick son, which makes it impossible for Melvin to eat breakfast. But everything works out okay in the end with a long car trip by Melvin, Simon and Carol, which ends with some surprising and touching results. This 1997 film's locations include 31-33 W. 12th Street, as Melvin and Simon's building, and 1 Windsor Place in Prospect Park, where Carol lives with her mother and son.

Julie Powell changed her life by cooking every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook, The Art of French Cooking, in one year and writing a blog about it...just as Julia Child had changed her life by moving to Paris and learning French cuisine. In 2009, the film of Powell's blog and book, Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep, respectively, became a smash hit. Among the film's New York City locations was 12-17 38th Avenue in Long Island City, the roof of which hosted Julie's summer dinner party.

In this creepy thriller from 1992, Allie Jones (Bridget Fonda) is an up-and-coming software designer in New York City whose personal life is a mess. After banishing her fiance from her Upper West Side apartment for sleeping with his ex-wife, she places an ad for a female roommate. Queue the usual onslaught of strange people. Then she meets Hedy Carlson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who seems comparatively normal but turns out to be anything but...in fact, her real name isn't even Hedy. Soon Hedy is aggressively usurping Allie's identity and belongings, and Allie and Sam, who have reconciled, are desperate to escape. This very scary film could not have had a better location. The Ansonia (2109 Broadway) on the Upper West Side, was built in 1899 has been the scene of many scandals and the location for the horror series 666 Park Avenue and has hosted several famous people. Originally built as a residential hotel, the Ansonia was a Utopian experiment that included a rooftop farm, long before "green roofs" became popular, that housed six goats, several ducks, a bear (!) and 500 chickens whose eggs were delivered daily to tenants and sold cheaply to the indigent public in the building's basement arcade. The city's Dept. of Public Health closed down the farm in 1907 but after that the building just got weirder. In 1919 the Chicago White Sox met there to plan intentionally losing the World Series and the Black Sox Scandal ensued. The Continental Baths thrived there in the 1970s, providing space for gay men to meet and giving Bette Midler and Barry Manilow their starts as performers. From 1977 to 1980, Plato's Retreat, an open club for swingers, raged. And a long list of colorful guests includes Arturo Toscanini, Igor Stravinsky, Enrico Caruso, Babe Ruth, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman and Florenz Ziegfeld.

In this cult classic from 1984, three goofy Columbia University scientists lose their funding, get fired and form a ghost extermination company. Armed with proton guns, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) and Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis, also the scriptwriter with Ackroyd) help their first client, cello player Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), and then become wildly popular, so much so that the Environmental Protection Agency lands them in jail for fraud. But the EPA needs to rethink things when New York City is put under siege by the ancient Sumerian God Gozer the Gozerian, who is channeled through Dana's apartment building at 55 Central Park West.

Three New York models, Shatze (Betty Grable), Pola (Marilyn Monroe) and Loco (Lauren Bacall) move into in what would now be called a luxury apartment (actually at 33 South Sutton Place in Manhattan) determined to find men who aren't cheap. They find themselves visiting Rockefeller Center and the George Washington Bridge in the process. And they rather hilariously find that while it's not always easy to tell the rich guys apart from the fakers and when they can, dating them isn't always worth the money. This 1953 film was the final box-office bonanza in Betty Grable's 26-year movie career and an early one for Marilyn Monroe. Enjoy seeing the torch passed!