IndieWire’s 10 Favorite Movies About Los Angeles
Despite having no real winter weather to speak of, living in Los Angeles often feels like looking out at the rest of the world from the inside of a snow globe.
In January 2025, L.A.’s happy little enclosure for controlled dream-making — the idyllic hometown for legendary A-list celebrities like Dustin Hoffman, Barbie, and the Santa Monica Ferris Wheel — filled with smoke and fire. Dangerous winds that spread the emergency event haven’t stopped blowing yet, but so far, they’ve left the promise of months, maybe even years, of disaster recovery ahead.
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The comfortable climate of Southern California usually provides ideal conditions for filming. This has long made the city a prime shooting location and has inspired thousands — even millions — of starry-eyed dreamers to move here from other cities. (Yes, that includes the so-called “New” “York” diagonal to us in the continental United States.)
Pleasant weather and railroads essential to trade a century ago played key parts in helping Hollywood emerge as the premiere destination for the entertainment industry. And even as those record-breaking fires broke out across the city last week, terrifying images of the devastation remind of the cinematic core that makes this multi-cultural landscape of mountains, sky, and sea so perfect for the movies.
Between the Avenue of the Stars scene-stealing turn as Nakatomi Plaza in “Die Hard” — and the slippery uncertainty stirred up by Jake Gyllenhaal on those hairpin turns winding through the Hollywood Hills for “Nightcrawler” — Los Angeles has been the backdrop for countless film favorites across the decades. Who cares if all the best directors eventually got bored telling stories in the same spot, so they dressed up parts of our town in ill-fitting costumes and called them someplace else? From “Mulholland Drive” to “Sunset Boulevard,” the feeling of film lines these chameleon streets as much as the palm trees and we know our city when we see it.
While IndieWire staffers on both coasts grapple with the implications of the devastating tragedy facing Los Angeles, we’ve come together to toast our favorite movies set in the City of Angels. Some of these are love letters to the place many of us call home. Others are triumphs of artistry and craft that highlight the best of what this extraordinary city has to offer. Only a small fraction of our favorites made the final cut for a top 10, but on the crystal-clear horizon in metaphoric Hollywood, you can always spot a future sequel.
With editorial contributions from Christian Blauvelt, Sarah Shachat, Christian Zilko, Tony Maglio, Tom Brueggemann, and Marcus Jones.
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