On Saturday, America celebrates its 250th birthday. To mark that occasion, I thought I might put together a list of movies that I think best sum up the real spirit and story of the nation, in all its occasional joys and frequent woes. But The New York Times kinda already beat me to that punch this week, and anyway I don’t really feel like thinking about the US too much. 

Instead I have done what any good writer does when they are out of ideas: I decided to write about myself. You see, July 4th also marks the 20th anniversary of my moving to New York City, which I think was the real beginning of my adult life. And thus the following list, in which I have picked one particular movie from each year that I have spent maneuvering the highs and lows of my adopted home. (The count comes to 21, because I guess that is how math works?)

They’re not all New York movies, mind you, and some of them I didn’t even see in the city. But they are nonetheless films that tether me to the experience of living here for two decades. If you’ve seen these movies, maybe consider a rewatch! And if you haven’t, most of these are heartily recommended. 

2006 - Half Nelson 

I’d only been living in the city for a couple months when some friends—whom I was desperate to see—took the Chinatown bus down from Boston for a visit. I of course wanted to show off my cool new cultured, sophisticated Manhattan life (reader, I lived in the East Village for $1100/month—way too much then, but a steal now) so I took us all to see this sad but energizing movie in which Ryan Gosling brilliantly—career-makingly, some might say—plays a popular teacher struggling with a crack addiction. Everyone liked it, we all had instant crushes on Gosling (if we didn’t have them already), and I felt very proud of myself for steering us in the right direction. Which I would certainly not do the next year, when one of those friends came for another visit and I took her to see the absolutely mind-ruining bestiality documentary Zoo at the IFC and she was really mad at me. “What did you just make me see?!” she cried at the Gray’s Papaya on 6th Avenue afterward. “The Village Voice liked it,” was my meek reply. 

2007 - Children of Men

Technically this came out at the very end of 2006, but I saw it in January of the following year, having read Lisa Schwarzbaum’s glowing review in Entertainment Weekly. I went with a college friend who lived near me in the city, and we staggered out of the Village East on 2nd Avenue in a sort of shocked silence. We walked a few blocks to a great (and still operating!) bar called The Scratcher, which was on the same block as my apartment. We drank cheap red wine from little glasses and declared that Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning dystopian odyssey had solved the meaning of life. I don’t know that I still fully agree with the idea that procreation is the key to everything, but I am still bowled over by this movie—its technicals, its performances, its doleful vision of humanity going to seed—every time I revisit it. Still, nothing beats that first time.

2008 - Synecdoche, New York 

Perhaps my most memorable trip to the long defunct Sunshine theater on Houston was seeing Charlie Kaufman’s big, bizarre, solipsistic, profound exploration of art and self. I staggered out of this one too, though my viewing companion was scratching her head. And thus I got to have the smug satisfaction of saying that, well, I got what it was trying to say. (At least, I thought I did.) Not the beginning of that particular pretension, exactly, but definitely an intensification of it. 

2009 - Grey Gardens

Having just found a new group of friends in the city, I somewhat warily traveled all the way to Astoria, Queens to an apartment I’d only been to once before. There we mostly drank and talked—specifically about the fact that two friends were both sleeping with well-regarded comedians (one of them recently ended a long-running podcast, the other of whom liked to jerk off in front of unwilling people), which felt illicit and exciting and very New York. And then we watched this lovely, criminally underrated HBO movie—adapted from the documentary—and all cried. I still contend that if this movie had been released theatrically, Drew Barrymore would at the very least have an Oscar nomination. And I said that to those now old friends for the millionth time just last week.

2010 - Please Give 

I may or may not have had an assignation, or at least the fumbling beginnings of one, with a guy I was briefly dating during a Union Square showing of this tart, sharp Nicole Holofcener movie. That’s mostly what I remember of that, so I should probably revisit the film.

2011 - Martha Marcy May Marlene

The first movie I ever reviewed! I was nearing the tail end of my time at Gawker and was sick of recapping Housewives and aggregating blind items and wanted to do something serious. My editor reluctantly agreed, I somehow tracked down a press screening, and then it was, well, off to the races I guess. I had some issues with Sean Durkin’s stylish but murky post-cult thriller-drama, but I was transfixed by the process of writing about it. Before I left Gawker a month or so later, I also reviewed the Footloose remake and George Clooney’s The Ides of March. Remember those famous movies??

2012 - The Hunger Games

A month or so after a close friend died—the one who I took to see Zoo, though that is not what killed her—I went to Los Angeles. I had booked the trip partly to see her, but I instead spent a morose week with my sister in West Hollywood. My editor, at The Atlantic Wire, wanted me to see this buzzy YA adaptation, so I went into a screening at the Arclight (RIP) and wrote my review sitting out by the Melrose Place-style pool in the courtyard of my sister’s building. I didn’t love the movie, and I hated everything happening in my life, but I do at least cherish the memory of returning to New York and seeing, with a sort of cathartic wonder, that buds had sprouted on all the trees in my absence. 

2013 - Frances Ha

I saw Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s true masterpiece alone at the IFC in the late morning of my 30th birthday. I cried when Frances put her name on her new mailbox, and then walked up 6th Ave talking to my mom on the phone. It was an impossibly sunny day and I made my way north suddenly trusting that getting older in New York City wasn’t such a bad thing.