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One of the most cinematic cities in the world has been showcased in literally hundreds of movies. We gave Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver the unenviable task of choosing just 10 great films set in the city

As featured in our New York city guide

Manhattan, Woody Allen, 1979

"He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion." Woody Allen could never be accused of ignoring his native city, returning time and again to eulogise the virtues of its buildings and its inhabitants. With this black-and-white story of faithless lovers and nervous courtships wending their way through major art galleries, celebrated restaurants and picturesque landmarks, he came closest to the perfect love letter to the place. Filmed in jazz-age black-and-white, and opening with a stunning montage set to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Manhattan is suffused with an affectionate, excited nostalgia.
? Queensboro Bridge; Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Modern Art; Central Park; Russian Tea Room

The Naked City, Jules Dassin, 1948

On one level, a simple docudrama about how the New York police go about their daily work; on another, an amazing, pioneering poem to the rhythms of big-city life, in both its brutality and mundanity. "There are eight million stories in the naked city," said the famous narration, and with extensive use of hidden cameras director Jules Dassin set out to record "one of them" in an unprecedentedly unvarnished way. This is the New York of the Weegee era: hardboiled cops and pill-popping floozies, big hats and Saturday Night specials, a city tender and iron-hard at the same time.
? Williamsburg Bridge; Times Square; West 83rd Street

Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, 1984

In some ways the apogee of the first Saturday Night Live generation ? a quintessential New York TV institution ? this blockbusting comedy took a special brand of mayhem on to the city's streets, making New York an integral part of all the spooky goings-on. From the bookstacking ghoul in the New York public library, to the firehouse HQ, to the intra-dimensional portal on the roof of one of those gothic midtown apartment blocks, Ghostbusters put the city front and centre. And then took great delight in ripping it apart: tearing up the streets, deluging them in goo and demolishing prime real estate.
? New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue; 55 Central Park West; 8 Hook and Ladder firehouse, Tribeca

Shaft, Gordon Parks, 1971

Shaft may not have been the first film in the blaxploitation genre, but it was certainly the first properly successful one, taking the Harlem-dude look of feather-hat, platform boots and silver-top cane to a massive audience. As a film, it's rough and ready but full of modish attitude and made a star of Richard Roundtree as the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks. The score was bit of a hit, too. For the first time, a hit film spent much time prowling in and around Harlem's main drag, 125th Street; but Shaft was a downtown cat, too: his apartment was in Greenwich Village and his office in Times Square.
? 125th Street; Times Square; Greenwich Village

Saturday Night Fever, John Badham, 1977

It may have been based on a made-up piece of jourmalism, but this much-venerated disco classic remains a raw, tough-nosed look at a then-hidden youth subculture. John Travolta, force-fed into a white polyester suit, became an instant star, and the Bee Gees's soundtrack a huge-selling, hit-spawning record. To their credit, the film-makers opted to film in authentic locations in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a world away from Manhattan's bright lights. The hardware store where Tony works, the place where he buys pizza, the studio where he rehearses: they're all local, and all still there. One major miss: the disco where he struts his stuff ? known at the time as 2001 Odyssey, has been demolished.
? Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; Verrazano Narrows Bridge

Wall Street, Oliver Stone, 1987

Wall Street was supposed to be a denunciation of stock traders' venality, but as is the way of these things, became their defining document, a kind of holy grail. Oliver Stone's depiction of the "greed is good" generation dug its way fully into the financial district, even managing to snag 45 minutes' filming time on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The rest of the film is a whirlwind tour of the exclusive venues patronised by the brokerage set, from the ballroom of the Roosevelt hotel where lizardlike Michael Douglas delivers his epoch-making speech, the Broadway offices of Merrill Lynch, to the 21 Club, where Charlie Sheen eats steak tartare with Douglas.
? Battery Park; 21 Club, West 52nd Street; Roosevelt Hotel, 45 East 45th Street

Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee, 1989

Almost two decades after the blaxploitation explosion of the early 70s, Spike Lee singlehandedly reignited African American cinema with this tremendously powerful drama. It zeroed in on the inter-ethnic tensions then stalking New York, and Lee scrupulously articulated all the contending points-of-view in his account of a riot at a pizzeria. He also made sure it looked authentic, shooting the whole thing on a single-block location on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn, in the heart of the Bed-Stuy district that remains a central African-American neighbourhood in the borough.
? Stuyvesant Avenue, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976

Martin Scorsese rivals Woody Allen as New York's premier film-maker: he's returned to the city again and again in different guises, from the brash musical New York New York to the intense, confessional thriller Mean Streets. But Taxi Driver is arguably his towering achievement, and an eye-opening document of New York at its scuzziest, before the big clean-up began. De Niro drove a cab to get into the role, and Scorsese filmed at real cab offices and a cabdrivers' cafe. Even though Scorsese largely avoided obviously recognisable locations, Columbus Circle jumps out ? that's where De Niro's mohawk-wearing Travis Bickle plans to shoot a politician. And East 13th Street ? now considerably cleaner ? was used for Taxi Driver's nastiest scenes, including the one where Bickle guns down pimp Harvey Keitel in a doorway.
? Columbus Circle, East 13th Street, 8th Avenue

Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick, 1957

Despite having a director who had grown up in Scotland and cut his teeth on Ealing comedies, this remains arguably the greatest depiction of New York of the Mad Men era: all smoke-filled rooms and swirling whiskies, newspapermen and cigarette girls. Tony Curtis hit a career high as press agent Sidney Falco, trying to sell tips to gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Some key scenes were filmed at the legendary restaurant Toots Shor, but it's no longer around. Unlike the Brill Building, on Broadway, where Hunsecker has his apartment; it's better known, of course, for playing host to numerous songwriters in the 50s and 60s. And, like Bud Fox in Wall Street, Falco makes his way to the 21 Club to pay court to his more powerful employer.
? Brill Building; Broadway; 21 Club

Requiem For A Dream, Darren Aronofsky, 2000

It might not yet have acquired the status of a New York classic, but the Black Swan director's adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr's sprawling novel certainly offered an unusual slant on the city. Requiem is about the junkie son of a doting Jewish mother, who herself becomes an addict through the injudicious use of diet pills. Brighton Beach and Coney Island, for decades a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish immgrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, is the focus: the mother, Sara Goldfarb, has an apartment in one of the blocks on Brighton 8th Street (outside which she sits and gossips, like a yenta of old), while her son Harry drags his mum's TV along Coney Island's famous boardwalk, where you can see in the background the remains of the now-demolished Thunderbolt rollercoaster and the bizarre Parachute Jump tower. And Requiem's signature scene ? a limpid dream sequence in which Harry fantasises about meeting Marion, his girlfriend, plays out on Steeplechase Pier.
? Brighton Beach; Coney Island

? Andrew Pulver is the film editor of The Guardian

Andrew Pulver

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/jun/01/top-10-films-on-new-york

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HM Revenue and Customs reckons a million employees still owe it money for 2010/11, though many more can expect a refund

Up to 4.7 million people have paid the wrong amount of tax during the 2010-11 tax year, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) has revealed.

It estimates that about 1.2 million people have paid too little through the pay as you earn (PAYE) system, and owe an average of between �500 and �600, a total debt of around �660m.

A larger number will receive good news in the next few months: they have paid too much tax and will receive a refund. HMRC says that between 1.7 million and 3.5 million people paid too much, and will be sent cheques for, typically, just under �340.

The taxman will be hoping this disclosure will not trigger a repeat of the storm that blew up last September when it emerged that almost 6 million people had been caught up in what was dubbed a PAYE "tax blunder". The Revenue said: "We are in a happier place than we were last September."

Every year, HMRC checks that the amount of tax and national insurance deducted by employers matches the information on its records. Last year, the department was bedding in a new IT system which trawled through all the tax records and discovered millions of discrepancies. It is about to begin the process for the 2010-11 tax year.

The Revenue has long said the vast majority of the 40 million people who pay through PAYE are correctly taxed but, because people's circumstances change during the year, there will always be a minority who have paid too much or too little. Those most likely to be affected are people who have changed jobs, taken on an extra source of income, received a new benefit through work or retired.

HMRC said the range of 1.7 million to 3.5 million for those who have paid too much tax were "very much an estimate".

"We won't know [the precise figure] until we have crunched the numbers, which will start from mid-July." Those due a refund should receive it by the end of September. Last year the average overpayment was �340, but this year it is expected to be "a bit less".

The department will then concentrate on those who have underpaid tax. Last year the typical underpayment was �1,027.

The vast majority of those affected will not get a bill ? instead, their tax code will be changed. In effect, they will pay back what they owe via deductions from their salary during the 2012-13 tax year. By December, they should have received their "tax calculation" letter (form P800) giving more information. Note that HMRC is not referring to these as tax demands. "Most people have paid the right amount of tax so won't get a letter from us with a revised tax calculation. So don't worry if you don't receive a letter," it says.

Last autumn it emerged that many people who owed tax would have their underpayments written off, after HMRC said it would not pursue cases where the amount owed was less than �300, but this concession will not be in place this year, and the threshold has gone back to the standard �50.

The Revenue says it is sympathetic to cases of genuine hardship, and those who cannot afford to pay the tax should get in touch to see if it can come to some arrangement with them.

Rupert Jones

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/jun/28/pay-as-you-earn-errors

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Banks have stopped the cheque card, but it is not time yet to sign and date the warrant killing off the cheque

Today, in one of those small moments of change that delete once routine parts of national life, the cheque guarantee card dies. 1969 - 2011: 40 years of insignificant assistance, more a fiddle and a cause of delay in shop queues than anything better. But where the card has gone, the cheque itself will soon be heading ? and this loss should concern us. Banks have declared cheques to be in terminal decline and want to shred them completely by October 2018. They are expensive to process, prone to fraud, used disproportionately by the old and the poor and do not ? unlike credit cards ? allow banks to take a cut of the transaction. A snappier world of instant digital transactions and pin numbers awaits. But with this arrival, as the Treasury select committee chair Andrew Tyrie has pointed out, will go an easy way for charities and small businesses to take payments. Not every village shop can afford a card machine, and not every bank account holder can remember their pin code. A bit like digital radio, this is a modernisation for which there is questionable demand. The Treasury committee (with characteristic vigour) is now pursuing banks: demanding a cost benefit analysis and collating protests from charities and the public. No one doubts cheques are in decline: but they are still useful and much used (1.4bn were written in 2010). Queuing at a cashpoint is not an alternative. Banks have stopped the cheque card, but it is not time yet to sign and date the warrant killing off the cheque.

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Source: http://feeds.guardian.co.uk/~r/theguardian/commentisfree/rss/~3/DFufD1PbpEY/in-praise-of-cheques-editorial

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UKAR chief presiding over �80bn of bailed-out mortgages says 'tough love' would be fairer on those struggling with payments

Britain is facing a 'tsunami' of house repossessions as soon as interest rates start to rise, one of the country's leading bankers has warned.

Richard Banks, the chief executive of UK Asset Resolution (UKAR), the body that runs the �80bn of mortgages bailed out by the taxpayer during the banking crisis, also said in an interview with the Guardian that the Labour government's pleas at the start of the crisis for lenders to keep families in their homes was forcing some homeowners further into debt.

In a warning that the industry may have been too lenient with some of its customers, he said he believed a policy of "tough love" would be fairer to people facing long-term difficulty in keeping up payments on loans taken out when house prices were at their peak and personal incomes on the rise.

His warning came the day after the international bank regulator said the Bank of England, which has kept rates at 0.5% for more than two years, would have to raise rates shortly to curb inflation.

The Bank of International Settlements said the policy of the Bank of England, whose rate-setting committee is split over whether or not to increase borrowing costs, was "unsustainable".

With 750,000 customers, UK Asset Resolution, set up to run the nationalised mortgages of Bradford & Bingley and parts of Northern Rock, is the country's fifth largest mortgage lender. But 23,000 of those mortgage holders are more than six months behind with payments and Banks admitted the projections for the number of people falling behind on payments could get "scary" if lenders did nothing to prepare for higher rates.

"You can see if you don't do something about it, you can see a tsunami," he said. "If you don't get into the hills you could get drowned by this. If you don't manage this properly it could get very messy."

He regards it is an industry-wide problem, albeit one that might be concentrated at UKAR as its customers include buy-to-let landlords and so-called self-certified borrowers ? those without salaried income. UKAR, through three calls centres in Crossflatts, West Yorkshire, Gosforth, Newcastle, and Doxford, Sunderland, has begun cold-calling customers it believes are at risk of falling behind on payments in an attempt to keep their mortgage payments on schedule.

The bank is also trying to tackle customers behind with payments for six months or more and at risk of repossession.

His concern about a surge in repossessions is partly the result of moves by the industry early in the 2008 crisis to grant so-called forbearance to help customers stay in homes by, for example, reducing monthly interest payments. "We as an industry, as a kneejerk reaction in the emergence of the crisis, and because the government asked us to be forbearing to customers in the hope it would all go away, we have been too lenient with some customers.

"It's a tough love approach," he said. "It's treating customers fairly, not nicely, because if you can't afford your mortgage you are only increasing your indebtedness. If we allow you to increase your indebtedness, that's not really fair to you."

This month the Council of Mortgage Lenders forecast a rise in repossessions from 40,000 this year to 45,000 next. This figure would still remain well below the 75,500 peak of 1991. The remarks by Banks follow a warning last week from the new regulator set up to spot financial risks in the system ? the Financial Policy Committee (FPC) inside the Bank of England ? that warned banks may be providing a "misleading picture of their financial health" if they were not making big enough provisions for borrowers in difficulty.

Forbearance has been brought into play in up to 12% of mortgages, the FPC said.

It also noted that the most "vulnerable" households were concentrated in a few banks. It did not scrutinise UKAR but noted that the two other bailed-out banks, Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland, had the largest exposure to customers whose mortgages were bigger than their value of their homes.

Last month, the Financial Services Authority issued a guide to handling forbearance in which it warned: "Arrears and forbearance support provided with due care by firms has a beneficial impact for both the firm and the customer ? However, where such support is provided without due care or any knowledge or understanding of the impacts, it has potentially adverse implications for the customer, for the firm's understanding of the risks inherent within its lending book, and in turn for the regulators and the market."

Jill Treanor

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jun/27/house-repossessions-wave-interest-rates-rise

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Margaret Drabble's collected stories are more than the sum of their parts

Margaret Drabble's avid readers must be very grateful to the Spanish academic Jos� Francisco Fern�ndez, who has gathered for publication the 14 stories she has published since 1966. Consistently skillful and engaging, the stories dwell upon themes familiar from Drabble's novels ? the perils of artistic vocation and, especially, the penalties of distinction and fame, for accomplished women; the trials of living with a querulous and demanding companion (always the husband in these stories, although Drabble has said that "The Merry Widow" was actually written after the death of her mother); the combination of stern feminist values with great sensuality and delight in beauty, including one's own; and the anxieties and discoveries of aging.

In the early stories the heroines are generic and abstract, usually called "she" rather than named. But with each decade, the stories deepen in tone, are more probing about their older heroines, and become exponentially more moving and aesthetically more adventurous. The last three stories, "The Dower House at Kellynch", "Stepping Westward" and "The Caves of God", are both personal and resonantly profound, so that the emotional impact of the whole book is much greater than the sum of its parts.

In his introduction, Fern�ndez rightly declares that Drabble's stories "constitute an essential element in understanding her work" and argues that "research on the interwoven lines, preoccupations, and topics shared between her stories and novels remains a task yet to be completed". But despite his editorial contributions, Fern�ndez is not much help in this research. He teasingly mentions, for example, that "it is now known" that Saul Bellow wrote Drabble a nasty note about her portrayal of him as the failed seducer Howard Jago in "A Success Story", but he provides no footnote or source. I tried to track down the information and it is not known by Bellow's current biographer Zachary Leader nor the editor of his letters. To read the letter, I finally discovered online, you have to read a 2010 article by Fern�ndez in an obscure and virtually unobtainable German literary quarterly, ZAA.

Fern�ndez does not supply important information either about the provenance of a key story, "The Dower House at Kellynch: A Somerset Romance". I happened to be in the audience in October 1993 when Drabble read this story aloud to the Janeites at the annual conference of the Jane Austen Society of North America, in an inn on Lake Louise, in the Canadian Rockies. The set book for the conference that year was Persuasion, and Drabble's story is first of all a clever, playful and unpretentious modernisation of Jane Austen, in which a successful but lonely actress named Emma Watson falls in love with Kellynch Hall and its decaying Dower House, arranges to rent it from its absentee owner William Elliot, and has a romantic entanglement with Burgo Elliot, the heir to the estate.

Drabble had done the introductions to an edition of Austen, and the story is full of in-jokes about Persuasion, including the heroine's accident on a fossil-hunting trip to Lyme Regis; and about the Canadian Rockies (where Bill Elliot escapes to study minerals and falls in love "with the mountains and the everlasting snows"). But it is also about the heroine's fear that she herself is a fossil, who has left her "cad of a husband" but is afraid of a "second attachment". By the end of the story, Emma, flying to Calgary, is reinvigorated through immersion in the past, by the possibilities of love and discovery in the present, and feels "a sense of my own power . . . I can move mountains".

The use of romantic literature and the romantic landscape as a frame was so liberating for Drabble that the next year she used a similar device for "Stepping Westward", a story commissioned by the Wordsworth Society and read at its annual meeting in Grasmere. "Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale" uses the British narrative paradigm of a walking (and driving) tour of literary landmarks to take the heroine, Mary Mogg, on a psychological journey (a device also recently used in a Lake District setting in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's TV series The Trip).

Mary is a "solitary teacher of English literature", facing retirement, and terrified of "old age, ill health, solitude" and death, as the Wordsworthian title metaphorically suggests. But on her tour she meets a wise and vigorous woman of 60, named Anne Elliot ? a lichenologist, in love with eternal things but also with the present. Like John Stuart Mill, Mary is saved from her depression by Wordsworthian meditation. Although she had feared the despair of "age and enforced idleness", she sees in Elliot's radiant life that "the untravelled world still gleams".

The last story, "The Caves of God", is also a famous woman's exorcism of fear, this time of the exposure of her own wild youth by some biographer; and here too she comes to forgive herself, and to accept her own history. "All these things had been good. They were not to be buried, or despised, or forgotten. They held no shame." Although Drabble wrote relatively few short stories, she used them to explore important themes, to express her abiding love for nature, and to consider not only her place among women writers but also her heritage from the English poets; and to claim her rightful place in a writer's Britain.

Elaine Showalter's A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx is published by Virago.

Elaine Showalter

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/30/margaret-drabble-smiling-woman-review

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Fresh from playing Glastonbury, Nashville-born country star Caitlin Rose visits the Guardian's studios to perform an exclusive live version of her new song Own Side

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2011/jun/30/caitlin-rose-live-session-own-side

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As Blue Peter waves goodbye to the BBC's west London studios and departs for Salford, we look back at more than half a century of presenters, animals and sticky-backed plastic

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/gallery/2011/jun/28/blue-peter-picture-gallery

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IPS: Gender barriers prevent women across the developing world access funds for communities dealing with the effects of climate change

Of the millions of dollars spent on climate change projects in developing countries, little has been allocated in a way that will benefit women. Yet, in Africa, it is women who will be most affected by climate change.

According to United Nations data, about 80 percent of the continent's smallholder farmers are women. While they are responsible for the food security of millions of people, agriculture is one of the sectors hardest hit by climate change.

"There is a lot of international talk about climate change funding for local communities and especially for women, but not much is actually happening," says Ange Bukasa, who runs investment facilitation organisation Chezange Connect in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Bukasa was one of the delegates at the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) 2011 Partnership Forum, which was held from Jun. 24-25 in Cape Town, South Africa.

The Climate Investment Funds (CIF), established by the World Bank in cooperation with regional multilateral development banks, provide funding for developing countries' climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Since their launch in 2008, the CIF have allocated 6,5 billion dollars to climate change projects in 45 developing countries. More than a third of the money went to 15 African states.

But most of the money ? more than 70 percent ? is financing large-scale clean technology energy and transportation projects. These are traditionally male-dominated sectors of the formal economy.

Only 30 percent is being spent on small-scale projects that directly benefit poor, rural communities and thereby potentially improve women's livelihoods.

Experts at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) warn that the funds could run the risk of perpetuating existing gender imbalances.

To take into account the gendered nature of energy consumption and domestic labour patterns in a resource-poor context, women need to be consulted when designing and implementing climate change mitigation and adaptation initiatives, they say.

But that doesn't happen often enough. "The links between large regional institutions that administer the funds and the people on the ground who need to access them are missing," says Bukasa, who works with farmers in Katanga in the southern DRC and elsewhere in the country.

She complains about a lack of consultation of women, who make up the majority of smallholder farmers in the area. Bukasa also points out that most rural communities have not been sufficiently educated about what climate change is and how to mitigate it or adapt to it.

"People may have heard the words 'climate change', but they have no clue what to do about it and where to access information," Bukasa warns.

That means that they remain unable to identify problems and solutions related to climate change and hence cannot develop their own projects and apply for funds. Their only option is to "continue farming like before", she sighs.

Such feedback from climate change experts working at community-level seems to have had some effect, however. The banks managing the CIF have now pledged they will integrate gender indicators into all operations and include them in the main criteria for the approval of grants.

Gender analysis, sex-differentiated data, gender monitoring and gender auditing will also be part of all projects financed by the CIF to ensure they benefit men and women equally, they promise.

"We are planning to take gender into greater account and are introducing more and more indicators to assess the gender dimension of projects," says Mafalda Duarte, climate finance coordinator at the African Development Bank (AfDB), one of the regional institutions administering the funds.

Duarte says there is a particular focus on financing off-the-grid energy technologies that will improve the lives of women and girls, because they are still lumped with the burden of fetching wood and water in rural communities.

The funds will go towards solar energy projects, improved cooking stoves, sustainable forestry projects, solar-powered irrigation as well as water storage and heating systems. "When we review proposals we ensure that women will be able to access the funded technologies," Duarte adds.

The only drawback is that the focus is again on small-scale investments that only make up a small percentage of the overall funds. Duarte admits that more needs to be done: "We do need to increase the scale of gender-sensitive projects because we have too many poor hotspots on the continent."

Florah Mmereki, project manager at Wena Industry and Environment, an environmental education trust based in Gaborone, Botswana, agrees that efforts need to be accelerated: "The few climate change project projects that exist in Botswana today are not targeted at women. It's a huge oversight."

Mmereki says women remain excluded because participation in many climate change adaptation projects usually requires an upfront investment, such as a contribution to the cost of energy-efficient wood stoves.

"But rural women don't have access to funds. They are the ones working in the fields, but it's their husbands who manage the money," she notes. "There are many gender barriers that still need to be removed."

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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-environmental-sustainability

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One of the most cinematic cities in the world has been showcased in literally hundreds of movies. We gave Guardian film editor Andrew Pulver the unenviable task of choosing just 10 great films set in the city

As featured in our New York city guide

Manhattan, Woody Allen, 1979

"He adored New York City. He idolised it all out of proportion." Woody Allen could never be accused of ignoring his native city, returning time and again to eulogise the virtues of its buildings and its inhabitants. With this black-and-white story of faithless lovers and nervous courtships wending their way through major art galleries, celebrated restaurants and picturesque landmarks, he came closest to the perfect love letter to the place. Filmed in jazz-age black-and-white, and opening with a stunning montage set to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Manhattan is suffused with an affectionate, excited nostalgia.
? Queensboro Bridge; Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Modern Art; Central Park; Russian Tea Room

The Naked City, Jules Dassin, 1948

On one level, a simple docudrama about how the New York police go about their daily work; on another, an amazing, pioneering poem to the rhythms of big-city life, in both its brutality and mundanity. "There are eight million stories in the naked city," said the famous narration, and with extensive use of hidden cameras director Jules Dassin set out to record "one of them" in an unprecedentedly unvarnished way. This is the New York of the Weegee era: hardboiled cops and pill-popping floozies, big hats and Saturday Night specials, a city tender and iron-hard at the same time.
? Williamsburg Bridge; Times Square; West 83rd Street

Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman, 1984

In some ways the apogee of the first Saturday Night Live generation ? a quintessential New York TV institution ? this blockbusting comedy took a special brand of mayhem on to the city's streets, making New York an integral part of all the spooky goings-on. From the bookstacking ghoul in the New York public library, to the firehouse HQ, to the intra-dimensional portal on the roof of one of those gothic midtown apartment blocks, Ghostbusters put the city front and centre. And then took great delight in ripping it apart: tearing up the streets, deluging them in goo and demolishing prime real estate.
? New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue; 55 Central Park West; 8 Hook and Ladder firehouse, Tribeca

Shaft, Gordon Parks, 1971

Shaft may not have been the first film in the blaxploitation genre, but it was certainly the first properly successful one, taking the Harlem-dude look of feather-hat, platform boots and silver-top cane to a massive audience. As a film, it's rough and ready but full of modish attitude and made a star of Richard Roundtree as the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks. The score was bit of a hit, too. For the first time, a hit film spent much time prowling in and around Harlem's main drag, 125th Street; but Shaft was a downtown cat, too: his apartment was in Greenwich Village and his office in Times Square.
? 125th Street; Times Square; Greenwich Village

Saturday Night Fever, John Badham, 1977

It may have been based on a made-up piece of jourmalism, but this much-venerated disco classic remains a raw, tough-nosed look at a then-hidden youth subculture. John Travolta, force-fed into a white polyester suit, became an instant star, and the Bee Gees's soundtrack a huge-selling, hit-spawning record. To their credit, the film-makers opted to film in authentic locations in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a world away from Manhattan's bright lights. The hardware store where Tony works, the place where he buys pizza, the studio where he rehearses: they're all local, and all still there. One major miss: the disco where he struts his stuff ? known at the time as 2001 Odyssey, has been demolished.
? Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; Verrazano Narrows Bridge

Wall Street, Oliver Stone, 1987

Wall Street was supposed to be a denunciation of stock traders' venality, but as is the way of these things, became their defining document, a kind of holy grail. Oliver Stone's depiction of the "greed is good" generation dug its way fully into the financial district, even managing to snag 45 minutes' filming time on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The rest of the film is a whirlwind tour of the exclusive venues patronised by the brokerage set, from the ballroom of the Roosevelt hotel where lizardlike Michael Douglas delivers his epoch-making speech, the Broadway offices of Merrill Lynch, to the 21 Club, where Charlie Sheen eats steak tartare with Douglas.
? Battery Park; 21 Club, West 52nd Street; Roosevelt Hotel, 45 East 45th Street

Do The Right Thing, Spike Lee, 1989

Almost two decades after the blaxploitation explosion of the early 70s, Spike Lee singlehandedly reignited African American cinema with this tremendously powerful drama. It zeroed in on the inter-ethnic tensions then stalking New York, and Lee scrupulously articulated all the contending points-of-view in his account of a riot at a pizzeria. He also made sure it looked authentic, shooting the whole thing on a single-block location on Stuyvesant Avenue in Brooklyn, in the heart of the Bed-Stuy district that remains a central African-American neighbourhood in the borough.
? Stuyvesant Avenue, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese, 1976

Martin Scorsese rivals Woody Allen as New York's premier film-maker: he's returned to the city again and again in different guises, from the brash musical New York New York to the intense, confessional thriller Mean Streets. But Taxi Driver is arguably his towering achievement, and an eye-opening document of New York at its scuzziest, before the big clean-up began. De Niro drove a cab to get into the role, and Scorsese filmed at real cab offices and a cabdrivers' cafe. Even though Scorsese largely avoided obviously recognisable locations, Columbus Circle jumps out ? that's where De Niro's mohawk-wearing Travis Bickle plans to shoot a politician. And East 13th Street ? now considerably cleaner ? was used for Taxi Driver's nastiest scenes, including the one where Bickle guns down pimp Harvey Keitel in a doorway.
? Columbus Circle, East 13th Street, 8th Avenue

Sweet Smell of Success, Alexander Mackendrick, 1957

Despite having a director who had grown up in Scotland and cut his teeth on Ealing comedies, this remains arguably the greatest depiction of New York of the Mad Men era: all smoke-filled rooms and swirling whiskies, newspapermen and cigarette girls. Tony Curtis hit a career high as press agent Sidney Falco, trying to sell tips to gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). Some key scenes were filmed at the legendary restaurant Toots Shor, but it's no longer around. Unlike the Brill Building, on Broadway, where Hunsecker has his apartment; it's better known, of course, for playing host to numerous songwriters in the 50s and 60s. And, like Bud Fox in Wall Street, Falco makes his way to the 21 Club to pay court to his more powerful employer.
? Brill Building; Broadway; 21 Club

Requiem For A Dream, Darren Aronofsky, 2000

It might not yet have acquired the status of a New York classic, but the Black Swan director's adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr's sprawling novel certainly offered an unusual slant on the city. Requiem is about the junkie son of a doting Jewish mother, who herself becomes an addict through the injudicious use of diet pills. Brighton Beach and Coney Island, for decades a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish immgrants from Eastern Europe and Russia, is the focus: the mother, Sara Goldfarb, has an apartment in one of the blocks on Brighton 8th Street (outside which she sits and gossips, like a yenta of old), while her son Harry drags his mum's TV along Coney Island's famous boardwalk, where you can see in the background the remains of the now-demolished Thunderbolt rollercoaster and the bizarre Parachute Jump tower. And Requiem's signature scene ? a limpid dream sequence in which Harry fantasises about meeting Marion, his girlfriend, plays out on Steeplechase Pier.
? Brighton Beach; Coney Island

? Andrew Pulver is the film editor of The Guardian

Andrew Pulver

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The Retzlaffs fled Zimbabwe with 104 rescued horses and now run horseback safaris in Mozambique. Could this be the world's best beach riding?

Two years ago, I received an email from a woman called Amanda Retzlaff. Her story sounded extraordinary: she and her husband had fled Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe with 104 horses which they had rescued during the land invasions and taken across the border to Mozambique. They were trying to piece together a new life and start a riding holiday business from scratch. Would I like to come and visit? I told her there was little chance of my getting there ? but held on to her email.

I had reasons of my own, aside from the riding ? which sounded fantastic ? for being interested. I had taught in Zimbabwe in the 1980s and been curious about neighbouring Mozambique which, at that time, was more or less unvisitable. Independent from Portugal since 1975, it was in the grip of civil war (between the Renamo resistance movement and the Marxist Frelimo, the Liberation Front of Mozambique).

I tried to forget about Amanda's invitation. But from time to time I would check her website, mozambiquehorsesafari.com. And, at the beginning of this year, I realised I could hold out no longer: I had to swap my armchair for a saddle.

The Retzlaffs met me in the last week of March in the tiny, shambolic (though being expanded and refurbished) airport of Vilanculos ? a seaside resort 750km north of Maputo. They are what my grandmother used to call "real people". Mandy is warm, talkative, good company. Pat is quieter and a fine horseman: he makes his own saddles, shoes his horses and escorts all the rides.

They had been farmers in Zimbabwe. In time, I would find out more. But at first, I wanted to hand over the gifts I'd brought ? honeyed horse treats, a spare riding hat and, at Mandy's request, a DVD of the award-winning documentary Mugabe and the White African. This film, which they had not seen, is the harrowing account of white farmers ? friends of theirs ? who were beaten up on their farm by war veterans in Mugabe's "Land Reform", went to court about it, and won, but later lost everything when their farms were burned to the ground.

Mozambique, unlike Zimbabwe, is uncontroversially peaceful now. I spent the first night in Archipelago Lodge, a resort of self-catering chalets on the ocean south of Vilanculos, where you feel you could easily run into Babar and Celeste, the elephants from Laurent de Brunhoff's stories. Each chalet is spacious, with a thatched roof and a view of the Indian ocean.

It is a serene, reasonably priced base for a Vilanculos riding holiday. Mandy and Pat are open to riders of all abilities and can customise rides. (It is too hot to ride all day ? two to three hours at a stretch feels right.) They proposed riding out on the afternoon I arrived. And that ride was a revelation.

The beaches of Vilanculos are wide ? they go on forever when the tide is out ? and bordered by mangrove swamps and the Indian ocean. I ride regularly and have had several holidays on horseback, but Mozambique has to be the most outstanding beach riding destination. I have never been allowed such freedom on a horse holiday. Here we were not herded or bossed, though Pat was mindful of safety. He might say, "Canter up to the yellow boat," or,"Stop at the big rock" ? which was a small speck on the horizon. The atmosphere was personal, ad hoc and magical. The heat was intense but there was a constant breeze coming off the sea. The silk on my hat kept threatening to blow away.

The sea, in many variants of turquoise, was calm, though it rushed into the mangroves at speed. I had forgotten how the African sunlight transforms everything. And nothing could be more wonderful than speeding along the sand past egrets, herons, a solitary ibis. You might dodge a bed of shells, a rock or the rope securing a fishing boat but otherwise there were no obstacles. We rode along the north beach and up a red dune to a place nicknamed Fingerprint of God. God, I observed, seems to have had his hands all over this place.

In Mozambique, everything happens in its own time. There is a saying that in the west we have money; in Mozambique, they have time. The truth is that Mozambique needs our money: its tourist industry has huge potential but the country is still (blessedly for visitors) under-visited. And it is perhaps also true that we need its time. My timetable involved nothing more challenging than leaving Vilanculos for a 20-minute boat trip to the bewitching Bazaruto archipelago.

First stop was Benguerra island, 14km from the mainland, where half a dozen of Pat and Mandy's horses live and where rides are overseen by Lucy Campbell Jones, an engaging Englishwoman who first came to Mozambique as a volunteer.

The plan was to sample the varied pleasures of Benguerra and neighbouring Bazaruto islands. My life has not featured many luxury hotels but I adjusted with indecent speed to Benguerra Lodge and to being waited upon by the Byronic Sergio in his floor-length white gown and scarlet cummerbund. There was no resisting his ability to produce iced tea at the double, summon a dhow or string up a shady hammock.

When I lay in the hammock, I reasoned that everyone deserves to visit this country once. I walked down from Benguerra Lodge to a barbecue on the beach one night, where a fire was burning and its smoke, driven by breeze, poured out horizontally ? it reminded me of our beach riding as it vanished rapidly alongside the sea.

The riding on Benguerra is out of this world: the horses are safe, well-schooled and fit. One late afternoon, Lucy and I cantered along the beach and trotted inland past beautiful freshwater lakes where there were cashew nut trees (the toxic husks are used to brew liquor), wild orange trees and gatherings of flamingos.

On Benguerra, I was introduced to non-riding pursuits too: fishing and snorkelling. I think of fishing as a wait at the edge of a dreary English pond and had not realised it could be so active. At one thrilling moment, guided by expert fisherman Graham Pollard, I caught a ladyfish which, with unladylike athleticism, promptly flung herself back in the sea. At another, I hauled in satisfactorily ? with help ? a majestic green spot trevally. From the boat, we saw several dolphins and a turtle (I was thrilled to catch its beady eye on camera). Sometimes it is also possible to see humpback whales and dugongs in these waters.

The next day, I went snorkelling above a coral reef and was entranced by the shoals of parrotfish, the finest of which was maroon with traces of gold ? like swanky hotel upholstery (an escapee from Benguerra Lodge?). I also saw powderblue surgeonfish and goatfish ? white with inky dark spots. I could not believe how unfazed the fish were ? as if we were of their company, just larger and more cumbersome, with our rigid flippers.

I stayed one night in the immaculate, modern Marlin Lodge (also on Benguerra) where I was treated to a memorably over-the-top "bush bath" scattered with hibiscus petals in an outdoor playpen made of palm leaves. At Marlin Lodge, they toss their flowers about freely ? like confetti for the many ecstatic honeymooners who fetch up there.

I spent another night on Bazaruto island, a mile or two north, at Indigo Bay ? a magisterial hotel for those who prefer not to give modern life the slip altogether (air-con, computer room and, a rarity in Mozambique, sparkling mineral water). But what I most enjoyed was an outing with Indigo Bay's Mozambican horseman Domingo, who took me up a 100m sand dune called the Pelican. Going up was easy enough but then I had to descend an almost vertical sandy slope. It seemed impossible, but I just had to trust that the horses knew what they were doing (and they did).

Back on the mainland in Vilanculos, I decided the time had come to find out more about Mandy and Pat. I already knew their story had not been one of five-star luxury. They were victims of the 2001 trashing and looting of farms in Zimbabwe's Chinhoyi district. As the land invasions spread, thousands of horses were abandoned on the farms, or destroyed.

Many veterinary surgeons, depressed by the relentless slaughter, left the country altogether. Pat and Mandy took in horses from miles around. Some were in a sorry state. One had a war vet's spear piercing her withers ? a wound that took two years to mend. ("I could stick my fist through her back," Pat says).

The Retzlaffs moved from one leased farm to another as the land invasions intensified. Often, they would have to pack up and move on in less than four hours. Along with most of Zimbabwe, they hoped Morgan Tsvangirai would win the presidential election: "It would have been light at the end of the tunnel."

After their sixth eviction, they moved to Mozambique, by which time, they had to acknowledge, the horses were becoming "a huge burden".

Mandy was starting to panic: "What on earth are we going to do with all these horses?"

Pat replied: "We are going to start a horse safari."

He took his horses off the truck at 4pm one day and was taking guests on rides the next morning: "I went up the beach, and found a few paths. The customers loved it."

And the horses themselves were "delighted by beach life ? as though they were on holiday". It was then that Pat realised he had "never ridden anywhere as beautiful".

But on 22 February 2007, two months after they'd settled into this new life, disaster struck: a cyclone flattened Vilanculos: "We didn't get a single customer for six months."

Did they think then of giving up?

"No, because the horses had become part of our lives. There was no question of deserting them."

They got by, with help from volunteers from overseas. (It is hard to imagine a more brilliant destination for horse-mad volunteers than Mozambique Horse Safari.)

But on 14 November 2010, disaster struck again. They had moved 26 horses to an area where there was fresh drinking water and grasslands.

"We thought we were being clever but we weren't. The horses ate a rare, poisonous plant called crotalaria and started to die. We lost a horse every three days. We were pulling dead horses around in a Land Rover and digging pits to bury them."

They had to hide this tragedy from clients and "paste smiles on our faces" while weeping behind their backs. "We had been through so much together," Mandy told me, with tears in her eyes. On her website, she has written: "May their hoofbeats always be heard on the beaches of Chibuene."

On my last morning, the plan was for a swim on horseback after a final gallop along the beach, if the tides allowed it. By this stage, any attempt at equestrian propriety had gone and I was, like my hosts, riding in Crocs (practical, as it turned out). As I rode into the sea, I registered, suddenly, an uncanny weightlessness as the water lifted half a tonne of horse and me. The horse was swimming horse paddle, moving like a stocky dolphin. It was wonderful. I laughed at the absurd joy of it ? this was the ride/swim of a lifetime.

And then it was time to say goodbye. The previous night had been spent at Casa Rex ? a charming, Mediterranean-style hotel in Vilanculos, an upmarket alternative to Archipelago Lodge. There I did my last-minute packing with reluctance, trying to work out how to wedge a tremendous Mozambican wire-and-beadwork chameleon ? a metre long ? into my suitcase. I'd named him Bazaruto.

I noticed that I was behaving as if there were all the time in the world. And that, I now realise, is because Mozambique makes you believe that there is.

Kate Kellaway

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