Co-starring with leading ladies down through the years, the ever-versatile New York City has played itself onscreen as everything from a nurturing parent to a fickle mate to a bohemian relative. Gotham has long been both a filmmaking hot spot and an imagination-capturing setting; the bustling masses, fizzy nightlife, mean streets, and self-mythologizing chutzpah were exported by Hollywood to enter global consciousness. The female protagonist’s experience of the Big Apple, with its seemingly endless possibilities, has been brought to the screen as screwball comedy, musical, coming-of-age drama, horror movie, thriller, and much more besides. With our biggest retrospective yet, we’re spanning nearly a century of cinema history and all five boroughs to gather together these diverse female-driven stories of ambition, romance, rebellion, and risk: portraits of shopgirls, party girls, working girls, funny girls, unmarried women, society dames, mad housewives, and ladies about town trying to make it big or simply get by in a city of glass towers and glass ceilings.