http://www.movie-locations.com Film locations around the world Cinema/Travel http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/l/Legend-2015.php   Locations: London; Buckinghamshire.

In 1990, brothers Gary and Martin Kemp portrayed notorious London gangsters Ron and Reggie Kray in Peter Medak’s quirky, Philip Ridley-scripted The Krays. Advances in technology mean that Tom Hardy can now pull off the feat of playing both twins while interacting convincingly.
Director Brian Helgeland (the screenwriter of LA Confidential) presents a very different take on the story but, by chance or as an homage to that film, Legend uses at least three of the same locations.
The Krays lived, famously, at 178 Vallance Road in... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Mission-Impossible-Rogue-Nation.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Oxfordshire; Morocco; Vienna.

Time was, sequels got increasingly cheaper and tattier with time (Jaws IV, Superman IV…) but, along with the Fast And Furious franchise, the Mission: Impossible series shows no sign of running out of steam just yet.
And though there’s nothing startlingly new about Rogue Nation, it breezes enjoyably along from one belting set piece to another.
The much-touted pre-credits sequence sees Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) clinging to an Airbus A400M Atlas stuffed with biowarfare material as it takes off from an airfield in ‘Minsk’. No matter how much CGI improves, nothing matches the breathtaking immediacy of... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Mr-Holmes.php   Locations: London; Sussex; Essex; Kent; Japan.

A Slight Trick Of The Mind, Mitch Cullen’s 2005 novel about Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective, in retirement and fearing encroaching dementia, is adapted as an elegiac drama by Bill Condon, director of Gods And Monsters and Kinsey.
Even though Sherlock Holmes was fighting Nazis on screen back in the Forties (in the person of Basil Rathbone), it still comes as a jolt to see the aged sleuth (Ian McKellen) post-WWII, nuclear age.
It’s 1947 and he’s retired to a cottage near the sea, tending bees and increasingly dependent on the attentions of housekeeper Mrs Munro (Laura Linney) and her bright and inquisitive young son Roger (Milo Parker).
The country retreat looks a bucolic dream and, the good news is that the delightful farmhouse cottage is not only real, but that you can stay there.
Supposedly in ‘Cuckmere Haven’,... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Escape-From-New-York.php   Locations: St Louis; Los Angeles; New York.

John Carpenter works wonders making a modest $5 million production look like a widescreen epic, using old school matte paintings, traditional animation and plenty of imagination.
It’s the distant future of ‘1997’ and the island of Manhattan is sealed off to become ‘New York Maximum Security Penitentiary’. When Air Force One is downed on the island, hardened criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is offered a deal by Police Commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef) if he’ll enter the lawless island and rescue the President (Donald Pleasence), who’s being held hostage.
Despite the setting, and the title, there’s very little of New York here. The filmed was made almost entirely in St Louis, Missouri, and around Los Angeles.
Most of the ‘Manhattan’ skylines are matte paintings, as in the opening scene of the raft of ... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Magic-Mike.php   Locations: Florida; California.

The amazingly unpredictable Steven Soderbergh directs this backstage story, inspired by Channing Tatum’s real-life experiences as an exotic dancer which, beneath its glistening pecs and glutes, has echoes of A Star Is Born and All About Eve.
It’s set around Tampa on the east coast of Florida, bathed in a relentlessly dazzling golden glow.
‘Club Xquisite’, where the ‘Kings of Tampa’ bump and grind under the strict eye of the cocky, confident Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), is a conflation of two separate locations hundreds of miles apart.
The exterior is Wilson’s Bar, 3030 4th Street North, St Petersburg, on a peninsula a few miles southwest of Tampa. But since so much of the film takes place inside the club, the interior was filmed much closer to the Hollywood studios... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Terminator-Salvation.php   Locations: New Mexico.

McG takes over the direction for this unremittingly bleak entry into the franchise which is set almost entirely in a, hopefully, alternative 2018 following the Judgment Day cataclysm.
Don’t be fooled by the presence of a decaying Hollywood sign, the ruined cities and blasted deserts are not California but New Mexico. The production was based at Albuquerque Studios, 5650 University Boulevard SE, Albuquerque, where it occupied all but one soundstage as well as sprawling out onto the surrounding Mesa Del Sol development.
Parallel storylines see John Connor (Christian Bale) discovering that Skynet is developing the powerful new terminator, the T-800, while the mysterious Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) – seemingly... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/j/Jurassic-Park-3.php   Locations: Hawaii; California.

Jurassic Park was the original and The Lost World allowed T-Rex to run amok on the mainland, but Jurassic Park III lacks the Spielberg touch and doesn’t really add much that’s new – except perhaps the Spinosaurus, larger and more vicious than the T-Rex, which was suggested by the series’ technical consultant, palaeontologist Dr Jack Horner.
The excuse for a return to Isla Sorna (Site B) is the disappearance of young Eric Kirby (Trevor Morgan) while parasailing along the coast of the raptor-infested isle (not recommended).
The production returns to Hawaii, but where the previous films used Oahu and Kauai (with Maui and the Big Island, the four largest islands of the group), JPIII includes Molokai, a smaller island that seems to... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/j/Jurassic-World.php   Locations: Hawaii; Louisiana.

Can it really be 22 years since John Hammond was so determined to open his groundbreaking theme park? Yes, it can. And with nary a mention of Site B, the park is not only up but has been running for several years.
1993’s technology looks as quaint as steampunk and kids hold a stegosaur in no more awe than a captive elephant, so it’s time to create a new attraction for the park. InGen is not making the same mistakes again.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum in The Lost World, it’s making all new ones.
Jurassic World is essentially a rerun of Jurassic Park with about 20,000 extra visitors and one extra dimension, but director Colin Trevorrow delivers the most enjoyable fun ride in the series since the original.
Once again, Hawaii stands in for the fictitious ‘Isla Nublar’ but... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spy-2015.php   Locations: Hungary; France; Italy.

A James Bond spoof is probably not the most original of ideas, and the lazily functional title doesn’t bode well, but the Paul Feig-Melissa McCarthy-Rose Byrne team delivers the requisite amount of fun. And there’s a sterling supporting cast.
The film’s big idea is to kill off the tuxedoed agent early on and, with the identities of remaining operatives compromised, backroom spook Susan Cooper (McCarthy) gets the opportunity to put her expertise into action in the field.
The action ranges from ‘DC’ to ‘Paris’ and ‘Rome’ but, apart from a couple of scene-setting shots, was filmed in Budapest, Hungary, which finally gets to appear as itself in... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Eagle.php   Locations: Hungary; Scotland.

The Eagle of the title is the standard of the Roman Ninth Legion, lost on a mission in what is now Scotland along with 5,000 men.
Kevin MacDonald’s convincingly grimy and muddy adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1954 novel, sees Marcus Flavius Aquila (Channing Tatum), son of the legion’s commander, embark on a quest to retrieve the standard and restore his family’s reputation.
The film, benefits – like John Carter Of Mars did – from the great marketing ploy of having its original title, The Eagle Of The Ninth, reduced to the point of meaninglessness.
Set almost entirely in 2nd Century Roman Britain... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Ex-Machina.php   Locations: Norway; London.

The first film directed by novelist Alex Garland, who wrote The Beach, and the scripts for 28 Days Later… and Sunshine, is the quietly sinister examination of artificial intelligence that Steven Spielberg’s disappointing AI significantly wasn’t.
Computer programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins the chance to spend a week with his company’s reclusive CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a genius who at the age of 13 had coded the world’s largest search engine – no, not that one – but one called BlueBook.
Caleb works at BlueBook’s sleek offices, which are those of the Bloomberg financial company at 50 Finsbury Square, London EC2, built in 2000 by Norman Foster & Partners.
After winning his prize, he’s taken by helicopter to Nathan’s retreat in ‘Alaska’ where, on signing a non-disclosure agreement, he’s invited to... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Mad-Max-Fury-Road.php   Locations: Namibia.

George Miller himself, the director of the original Mad Max trilogy, returns to the world of post-apocalyptic anarchy with a new Max in the form of Tom Hardy, and an unexpected feminist slant that sees Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) taking off with a truck full of enslaved women to find freedom in the dimly remembered ‘green place’ where she was born.
Fans of Australian cinema will recognise the sly nod to the spiky VW from Peter Weir’s 1974 The Cars That Ate Paris in the design of the fleet of attacking cars.
It was intended to follow the previous films to the region of Broken Hill in New South Wales but – wouldn’t you know – a couple of years of unusually heavy rainfall had turned the blasted wilderness green.
A new desert location was found in Namibia, on the west African coast north of South Africa. The production was centred... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/Death-Line.php   Locations: London.

Gary Sherman’s quirky and grotesque horror film has been overtaken in the gore department over the years but, on release back in the 1970s, was regarded as shockingly graphic. Indeed, it was retitled Raw Meat in the USA, which may give you a subtle hint where the plot is headed.
Donald Pleasence (Dr Loomis from the Halloween movies) is clearly having a ball as Inspector Calhoun, the eccentric police detective investigating a series of mysterious disappearances from the platforms of Russell Square tube station. You might recognise his sidekick as British stalwart Norman Rossington, one of the Beatles’ long-suffering roadies in A Hard Day’s Night. Even a luxuriantly moustachioed Christopher Lee appears in a cameo as a pompous MI5 spook.
That certainly is the exterior of the real Russell Square station... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Man-Up.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire.

This likable and unashamedly traditional romcom takes over from Richard Curtis, who really seems to have lost the magic touch. But what’s with the misleadingly laddish Judd Apatow-style title?
The film is largely set over one night in central London, though it does open with a South Seas-themed engagement party held at Down Hall House Hotel in Hertfordshire, setting up the premise of 34-year-old Nancy (Lake Bell) single, cynical and pretty much having given up on dating.
Down Hall, a hotel-wedding and events venue on the Hertfordshire-Essex border near to Bishops Stortford, will be familiar to addicts of ‘reality’ TV as the venue for the 2009 nuptials of... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Taken-2008.php   Locations: Los Angeles; Paris.

Liam Neeson’s solid earnestness makes this relentless revenge thriller, co-written by Luc Besson, almost credible.
It kicks off in sunny Los Angeles where divorced dad Bryan Mills (Neeson) is trying to come up with a suitable birthday gift for his dearly loved daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace).
The electronics store where he purchases the best available karaoke machine (you know, as used by pros like Beyonce and Mariah Carey) is Hightech Electronics, 6630 Hollywood Boulevard B at Cherokee Avenue in Central Hollywood. It’s a popular stretch of the road – you can clearly see the venerable Musso And Frank Grill on the other side of the street behind him. Opposite the store stands the now closed Geisha House (featured in Knocked Up) and... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/o/Oblivion.php   Locations: Louisiana; Iceland; New York; California; Hawaii.

The complicated sci-fi plot is done no favours by the incomprehensibly mumbled dialogue, which means you’ll probably need subtitles to follow what’s going on. The film does, though, look fantastic.
It’s 2077, and nasty aliens have destroyed our moon. With the earth rendered uninhabitable by the ensuing cataclysm, two remaining inhabitants, Jack and Vika (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough), are doing a bit of last minute clearing up before joining the rest of the human race’s alternative accommodation on Titan, the moon of Saturn.
The scope of the film called for huge studio sets, which were built at Louisiana’s largest studio facility, the Celtic Media Centre, 10000 Celtic Drive in Baton Rouge, a 30-acre site which houses some 150,000 feet of stage space.
Here, the interior of ‘New York Public Library’ (the building on ... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/r/Robin-Hood-2010.php   Locations: Surrey; Wales; Hertfordshire; Derbyshire.

A very odd-sounding project entitled Nottingham, based on the traditional Robin Hood myth, but which doubled Robin and his arch-enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham as the same person, went through several rewrites and directors, until finally becoming a much more conventional origins story in the hands of Ridley Scott. With the Sheriff (Matthew Macfadyen) hardly getting a look-in and the Magna Carta left lying around unsigned, it feels like a sequel was intended.
Although the production eschews Britain’s wealth of castles in favour of sets built at Shepperton Studios (including the ‘Tower of London’, the medieval city and most interiors) and digital imagery, it does firmly anchor the story in authentic English woodlands.
The film begins against the familiar background of King Richard the... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spooks-The-Greater-Good.php   Locations: London; Isle of Man; West Midlands; Berlin.

The long-running TV series Spooks (MI5 in the US) has an unusually high death rate among its characters, so few of its stars make it to the big screen, but Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) is vital.
Much of the plot is now overfamiliar, with Middle Eastern terrorists planning attacks in the UK capital, but there’s a fast pace, some suspenseful set pieces and a hard edge that save the film.
It’s mostly set in London, though the prominent credit acknowledging Isle of Man Film gives a hint as to where some of the locations may be found.
The opening sequence, of high-value prisoner Qasim (Elyes Gabel) being sprung from a convoy, supposedly on London’s M4, was filmed on the ring road of Coventry in the West Midlands, underneath the... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Punch-Drunk-Love.php   Locations: Los Angeles; Hawaii.

After the multi-focus sweep of Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson turned to this strangely quirky romance, which begins like a David Lynch movie, with a shocking car smash, and the arrival of a mysterious harmonium, on Canoga Avenue, outside the toilet-plunger business where Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) works.
In reality, it’s a bodyshop, Eckhart Autobody, 10101 Canoga Avenue at Mayall Street, Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley.
Lovestruck Barry follows Lena Leonard (Emily Watson) to Hawaii, where they stay at the venerable ‘Pink Palace of the Pacific’, the Royal Hawaiian.... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Far-From-The-Madding-Crowd-2015.php   Locations: Dorset; Buckinghamsire; Somerset.

48 years after the classic John Schlesinger adaptation, Thomas Vinterberg brings Thomas Hardy’s novel to the screen – this time more swooning romance than gloom-laden tragedy. The story is set, of course, in Hardy’s ‘Wessex’, a slightly fictionalised Dorset, the West Country of southwest England.
Carey Mulligan is Bathsheba Everdene, a strong-willed, level-headed woman (without the dangerous vanity of the Julie Christie incarnation), while Matthias Schoenaerts makes Gabriel Oak such a steely hunk that most straight women in the audience will be mystified as to why Bathsheba, independent or not, doesn’t jump at his first proposal of marriage.
As Oak’s fortunes wane with the loss of his flock of sheep, Bathsheba’s blossom... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/j/Jack-The-Giant-Slayer.php   Locations: Surrey; Norfolk; Gloucestershire; Somerset.

A bit of a change for Bryan Singer with this FX heavy revamp of the Jack and the Beanstalk story, which doesn’t seem to know if it’s aimed at kids or adults. It was made in the UK, and features some great historic locations.
Gone is the traditional cow, as Jack (Nicholas Hoult) takes a horse and cart to sell in the town of ‘Cloister’.
The bustling town square, where Jack gets distracted by Old Hamm (Warwick Davis) and his troupe of actors and defends the honour of Princess Isabelle (Eleanor Tomlinson), is Base Court, the first courtyard of Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey in Surrey.
Hampton Court Palace, on the River Thames southwest of London, was built in 1514 for Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, but after the Cardinal fell out of favour with King Henry VIII, the king seized the palace for himself – naturally enlarging it. Toward the end of the 17th century, King William III commissioned Sir Christopher Wren to... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/Avengers-Age-Of-Ultron.html   Locations: London; Surrey; Norfolk; Hampshire; Italy; South Korea; South Africa; Bangladesh.

After the collapse of SHIELD at the end of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the mismatched team comes under more strain than usual when the personal project of gung-ho entrepreneur Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) to launch an ambitious peace keeping programme goes disastrously haywire.
The mega Jarvis 2.0 upgrade, called Ultron (voiced by James Spader), comes with those drawbacks of massively superior artificial intelligence, single-minded megalomania coupled with a snarkily superior attitude.
The problems start after the Avengers team raids the Hydra Research Facility situated in the almost-believable but totally fictitious eastern European country of ‘Sokovia’.
The initial attack is launched via Hawley Woods... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Sherlock-Holmes-Game-Of-Shadows.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Buckinghamshire; Surrey; Kent; Oxfordshire; Wales; France; Switzerland.

The fast, snappy and ambitious sequel pits Holmes (Robert Downey Jr) against his nemesis Moriarty (Jared Harris), living out in the open as a mild-mannered professor, but secretly planning to profit from an impending European war.
The story ranges across Europe but was mostly filmed in the UK and although there’s plenty of CGI, there are lots of real locations. Many are familiar but not always recognisable.
There’s a brief location shot of Place de la Cathédrale in Strasbourg, France, as an anarchist bomb explodes in front of the Cathedral.
Baker Street and the famous digs at 221B are a set built at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, the former Leavesden Aerodrome factory, where Mosquitos and Halifax Bombers were once manufactured. The disused facility was used as... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Insurgent.php   Locations: Georgia; Chicago.

A mere five days after the events of Divergent and Jeanine (Kate Winslet) is blaming the destruction of the Abnegation village on Divergents. Not only that, she’s come into possession of a gizmo which will unlock some mighty secret. Unfortunately for her, this can only be unlocked by a Divergent.
The story continues in a ring-fenced, post-apocalyptic Chicago but competition to attract film makers (and the attendant economic benefits) is fierce and, apart from establishing shots, Atlanta, Georgia, snaffled the production, which was based at the Screen Gems Studios Atlanta, 175 Lakewood Way.
Atlanta seems to be on a roll, having become home to the Hunger Games franchise from The Hunger Games: Catching Fire onwards and, though you would have a hard time recognising it, standing in for Los Angeles in ... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/Divergent.php   Locations: Chicago.

OK, this is not The Hunger Games. But it is a post-apocalyptic urban dystopia with society divided into factions and a bunch of young adults adopting survivalist mode to challenge a controlling elite. Apart from that, it’s not The Hunger Games.
Where the film scores is in replacing Games’s extravagantly Baroque ruling class with stern technocrats and setting the action in a grubby, festering, post-war Chicago Loop, using plenty of real Windy City locations, scruffed down and weedy with CGI.
This society is divided into supposedly cooperative factions, each concentrating on a different set of virtues: Erudite, Abnegation, Candor, etc … and, although children are born into these classes, they’re given one single, irreversible opportunity to change. Beatrice/Tris (Shailene Woodley) is born into Abnegation, a culture of selfless... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/x/Men-Days-Of-Future-Past.php   Locations: Montreal.

Bryan Singer returns to the franchise and, after Toronto and Vancouver, the production moves on to Montréal, Québec, to be based at Mel’s Cité du Cinema, the huge modern production facility which has hosted filming for Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can.
Much of the film is set in Washington DC, but there were only a few days filming establishing shots in the city, at the RFK Stadium and the Potomac River.
In a Terminator-style plot, Logan (Hugh Jackman) is sent back from the time of a disastrous future war to forestall the event which triggered it off.
A small group of mutants is hiding out from Sentinels – relentless robots programmed to detect and eliminate the human mutations – in a ‘Chinese’ monastery, which was of course a set at Cité du Cinema.
It’s from here that Logan is chosen to return to 1973 to ... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/j/John-Wick.php   Locations: New York.

When a bunch of goons not only steals the car but kills the cute puppy of recently widowed ex-hit-man John Wick (Keanu Reeves), we know that he will find them, and he will kill them in this energetically violent revenge thriller from first-time directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch.
The pair were previously second-unit directors and stunt coordinators, who’d worked on the Matrix films (for which Stahelski was Reeves’ stunt double), so it comes as no surprise that breathtakingly elaborate fights and stunts take precedence over sparkling dialogue and in-depth characterisation.
In fact, the film has a deliberately unreal air, set in a strangely otherworldly New Jersey-New York, where criminals adhere to a strictly observed code and favours... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Fast-And-Furious-7.php   Locations: Los Angeles; Georgia; Colorado; United Arab Emirates.

Even at episode 7, the series shows no sign that it’s running out of steam as director James Wan throws everything at the screen, and it even survives the sad death of star Paul Walker halfway through production.
The story is based in Los Angeles with apparent forays to ‘Azerbaijan’ and Abu Dhabi. While the capital of the UAE is real enough, there’s no Caucasus, but you might be forgiven for not noticing there is quite a lot of Atlanta.
F&F7 follows directly on from the teaser ending to F&F6. When the team blew up megavillain Owen Shaw, they forgot to check if he had an older, and even badder, brother who looks like... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Fast-And-Furious-6.php   Locations: London; Scotland; Merseyside; Suffolk; Hertfordshire; Spain; California.

Logic and credibility are not the strong points of this entry into the F&F franchise, what with cinema’s least likely street race and that infamously endless runway, but that’s not the point. Justin Lin’s aim is to provide pure kinetic pleasure with fast cars, speed, adrenaline and even faster cars.
As the series continues its globetrotting, the main locations this time around are the UK and the Canary Islands, a group of Spanish-owned islands just off the northwest coast of Africa.
Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) is settled down on the Canary Island of Tenerife, where his partner Mia (Jordana Brewster) is about to give birth.
This being a Fast & Furious film, the happy event naturally triggers a race along a treacherously winding coast road as Brian races his Nissan GT-R against Dominic Toretto’s (Vin Diesel) modified Challenger to be at her bedside for the birth along the hair-raising road between Buenavista del Norte and... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/King-Ralph.php   Locations: London; Berkshire; Buckinghamshire; Hertfordshire; Kent; Leicestershire; Oxfordshire; Warwickshire; West Midlands; West Yorkshire; South Yorkshire.

The screenwriter of 70s classic The Sting directs this broad but amiable version of Emlyn Williams’ novel Headlong, which saw a young English stage actor in the 1930s unexpectedly inheriting the throne of the UK. The story is updated to the present and, in order to extract maximum fun from national stereotypes, the central character becomes Vegas lounge singer Ralph Jones (John Goodman).
What once would have been a cheapo studio-set comedy is given a real lift by the use of an astonishing number of real locations scattered across no fewer than 11 counties in the UK, which is why this is such a substantial entry.
Naturally, there are establishing shots of Buckingham Palace, at the end of The Mall, the reigning monarch’s... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Morgan-A-Suitable-Case.php   Locations: London.

Could there be a more archetypal Sixties movie, as gorilla-fixated, anarcho-Trotskyite Morgan Delt (David Warner) baits and hounds his upper-class ex-wife Leonie (Vanessa Redgrave, who got an Oscar nomination as did her sister Lynn for Georgy Girl in the same year) and her ghastly new boyfriend (Robert Stephens)?
Their boisterous relationship implodes at 13 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, west London.
Morgan’s unreconstructed Stalinist mother (Irene Handl) takes him to pay homage at the tomb of Karl Marx in the East Section of Highgate Cemetery, on the east side of Swain’s Lane, north of Oakeshott Lane, London N6. She speaks fondly of Morgan’s late father: “You know, he wanted to shoot the royal family, abolish marriage and put everybody who’d been to public school in a chain gang... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/h/Hamlet.html   Locations: Oxfordshire.

After the success of his film of Henry V in 1989, Kenneth Branagh was able to bring this big, and preposterously star-studded, version of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy to the screen. In fact, it was the first British movie in years to be filmed in 70mm, and was shot almost entirely on sets built at Shepperton Studios.
To match the film’s scope and stellar casting, there’s a suitably daunting exterior for the Danish castle of ‘Elsinore’ in the shape of Blenheim Palace, in the village of Woodstock, eight miles north of Oxford, Oxfordshire.
The vast Baroque mansion, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in the early 18th century, was home to the Dukes of Marlborough... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Cinderella.php   Locations: London; Buckinghamshire; Oxfordshire; Berkshire.

After Thor and Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh brings another legendary character to the screen with this refreshingly straightforward, romantic live-action update of Disney’s own 1950 cartoon.
Before you get too carried away about the prospect of swirling round that sumptuous ballroom, remember that Branagh seems to like working in the studio and most of the film was shot on stages at Pinewood Studios near Iver Heath in Buckinghamshire, home of those great British institutions, the Bond films and the Carry On... series.
In fact, the Grand Ball was filmed on Pinewood’s 007 Soundstage, the largest in Europe. The gigantic set (here come the stats: 50 yards long, 35 yards wide and 30 feet high) was designed by Dante Ferretti, the Production Designer who worked with... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/End-Of-The-Affair-1999.php   Locations: London; Brighton.

Neil Jordan manages to bring an austere poetry to the exhausted shabbiness of the Forties in this adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, saturated with the author’s trademark Catholicism, sex and guilt.
Director Jordan revisits a couple of locations from his previous films, including the glittering art deco bar of the Sheraton Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly W1, which stands in for the ‘Café Royal’. It was formerly seen in Mona Lisa, The Golden Compass, Guy Ritchie’s Revolver, and you can see the hotel’s luxurious toilets in Paul McGuigan’s Gangster No.1.
Almost as gleaming and impressive is the carved-wood and etched-glass bar where Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) receives evidence of supposed ‘intimacy’ by his ex-lover, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), from private detective Parkis (Ian Hart). It’s the Prince Alfred, 5a Formosa Street, Maida Vale, seen also in Michael Radford’s artsy B Monkey, Chen Kaige’s misfired erotic thriller Killing Me Softly, and in the broad 1991 comedy King Ralph, with John Goodman inheriting the British throne.
The bar retains its original ‘snob screens’ from an earlier age, when patrons... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Georgy-Girl.php   Locations: London.

The Sixties were in full Swing when Lynn Redgrave grabbed an Oscar nomination as the plainish Georgy, sharing a flat with the gorgeous and flighty Meredith (Charlotte Rampling). There were nominations too for James Mason as the predatory older man, for Kenneth Higgins’ b&w photography and for the theme song, sung by folksy group The Seekers and written by Tom Springfield (brother of legendary singer Dusty) and Carry On... film regular, Jim Dale.
The clanking metal staircase leading up to the top-floor flat shared by Georgy and Meredith could still be seen in the alley off Maida Avenue alongside the Grand Union Canal at the corner of Edgware Road (it’s actually the rear of 449 Edgware Road), until the restaurant next door added an extension.
Further down Maida Avenue, between numbers 15 and 22, is... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Connecting-Rooms.php   Locations: London.

Connecting Rooms started out as Marion Hart’s downbeat and sentimental play The Cellist, which throws together middle-aged musician Wanda Fleming and retired schoolmaster James Wallraven in shabby lodgings in London’s Bayswater.
Franklin Gollings’ 1970 screen version (the only feature he directed) is notable mainly for the pairing of Hollywood legend Bette Davis as Fleming and theatrical knight Sir Michael Redgrave (father of Vanessa) as Wallraven.
The boarding house where the two protect their respective guilty secrets is 37 Craven Hill Gardens, W2. How times change – 31-35 Craven Hill Gardens was converted into favourite of the stars, the classy, minimalist Hempel boutique hotel (with a Zen garden opposite, which was featured... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Breaking-And-Entering.php   Locations: London.

In the last cinematic release of Anthony Minghella (director of The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley), teenage Miro (Rafi Gavron), a refugee from Sarajevo, lives on a north London estate with his mother Amira (Juliette Binoche), using parkour skills to break into offices and steal computers.
Among his targets is the office of successful architect Will Francis (Jude Law), who’s working on the extensive renovation of the old St Pancras Station in King’s Cross to become St Pancras International on Euston Road, London N1.
Amira and Miro live on the Alexandra Road Estate, Rowley Way, South Hampstead NW8 – you might recognise this as the same brutalist concrete estate where Eggsy (Tamron Egerton) lives in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
Will, however, shares a very desirable canalside house with... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/Dream-Demon.php   Locations: London.

Eton Avenue, in northwest London’s smart Belsize Park, provides a row of striking, red brick mansions, any one of which could provide a suitably Gothic Hammer film backdrop.
And indeed it’s 53 Eton Avenue, NW3, at King’s College Road, that bride-to-be Diana (Jemma Redgrave) gets an attack of the Elm Street Blues, slipping in and out of nightmares, menaced by increasingly grotesque Timothy Spall and... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/Kingsman-The-Secret-Service.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Surrey; East Sussex.

When old school, super-secret, non-governmental agency Kingsman loses a man in action, gentleman agent Harry Hart, aka Galahad (Colin Firth), breaks with a tradition of snobbery and chooses to train working class lad Gary Unwin, aka Eggsy (Taron Egerton), as a potential replacement.
After Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn brings another quirky graphic novel to the screen with this enjoyably silly and surprisingly violent homage to classic Bond movies (complete with pastiche John Barry score), filmed mainly around London and the southeast.
The 70s brutalist council estate, where Eggsy lives with his long-suffering mum and his abusive stepdad is the Alexandra Road Estate (correctly, the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate) stretching along... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Fifty-Shades-Of-Grey.php   Locations: Vancouver; Seattle.

The one-time piece of online Twilight fan fiction replaced Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code as the necessary adjunct to a long train/bus/plane journey, and the film adaptation happily trots through its by-the-numbers format without expending needless energy on plot, characterisation or dialogue.
As with the series that inspired it, the story is set in the damp and fittingly grey-skied Pacific Northwest of the USA around Portland and Seattle but, apart from some Second Unit scene setting, was made in Vancouver, largely around the city’s historic downtown core, Gastown, and in the North Shore Studios (formerly Lionsgate Studios), 555 Brooksbank Avenue in North Vancouver.
So Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) is first seen jogging not around Seattle or Portland, but in Vancouver’s Coal Harbour seafront area and down the steps at Oceanic Plaza on Hastings Street... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Selma.php   Locations: Georgia; Atlanta.

Ava DuVernay’s account of Martin Luther King Jr’s campaign to secure voting rights for blacks in Alabama is built around a stunning performance by Brit David Oyelowo, which was oddly (or not so oddly by the often conservative Academy) snubbed by the Oscars. The performance is all the more impressive when you take into account that Oyelowo was obliged to reproduce the electrifying oratory without using King’s actual words, which were controversially licensed by the King estate to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks company.
There is some scene setting in Alabama, but most of the film was made in Georgia. In fact, it was intended for all the filming to take place in Georgia but the Atlanta Film Office tenaciously pushed for at least some of the famously real locations to be used... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Boyhood.php   Locations: Texas.

A real audience splitter, with little middle-ground between experiencing life-affirming joy or crushing tedium.
There’s no denying the ambition and commitment of the project, spanning a full 12 years as Mason Evans Jr (Ellar Coltrane) grows from a chubby faced six-year-old to an 18-year-old college kid pondering the point of life.
The film has been described as a quasi-autobiographical love letter to Richard Linklater’s home state of Texas, and the director even revisits a couple of locations from his earlier Slacker and Dazed And Confused.
The story ranges from Houston, San Marcos, Austin and Bastrop to the wild deserts of West Texas, but the usual budgetary constraints meant keeping as much of the filming as possible around the Austin area, beginning in... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/l/Loneliness-Of-The-Long-Distance-Runner.php   Locations: Surrey.

With the British New Wave on a roll, another unknown, Tom Courtenay, was launched to stardom as Colin Smith, the reformatory boy with stamina. This dour character study, written by Alan Sillitoe, was filmed on location around the southeast of England.
‘Ruxton Towers’, the young offenders’ institution, is Ruxley Towers, which for many years could be seen disused and crumbling away at the end of Ruxley Ridge, off Common Road, Claygate, just southeast of Esher in Surrey.
Built in the late 1800s by Lord Foley, the building had been used by the army as a NAAFI facility before falling into disuse. In 1996 it was bought by... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Serenity.php   Locations: California.

Based on TV series Firefly, cancelled by the Fox Broadcasting Company in December 2002 after 11 of its 14 produced episodes had aired, Serenity was turned into a feature film by creator Joss Whedon.
River’s school class, at the opening of the film, is set in the extensive grounds of the Huntington Library & Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, east of Pasadena.
The estate is a popular filming location, seen in American Wedding, Indecent Proposal, the 1996 Eddie Murphy version of The Nutty Professor, Memoirs of a Geisha, Mystery Men, Starsky and Hutch (2004), Anger Management and Coming to America.
When the Reavers chase Mal (Nathan Fillion) after the bank robbery... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/0/2001-A-Space-Odyssey.html   Locations: Namibia; Arizona; Scotland.

Stanley Kubrick’s acknowledged classic, representing a giant step forward in the way space movies looked, was made mostly at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, southeast England. The studio closed in 1970 and has been demolished to be replaced by housing.
The first scenes to be filmed, though, the visit of Dr Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) to the mysterious monolith on the moon, had to be shot at Shepperton Studios, southwest of London, where there was a soundstage large enough to accommodate the vast set.
The backgrounds for ‘The Dawn Of Man’ sequence were shot in Africa but, avoiding the cheesy look of back-projection, the perfectionist Kubrick came up with a sophisticated system of front projection using a screen 100 feet long and... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Interstellar.php   Locations: Alberta; Iceland; Los Angeles

Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic owes quite a debt to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and is mightily impressive for most of its running length.
The method of space travel was based on the work of physicist Dr Kip Thorne (which was also the basis for Carl Sagan’s novel, Contact), and Dr Thorne laid down two guidelines to be strictly adhered to: nothing would violate established physical laws, and all the wild speculations would spring from science and not from the creative mind of a screenwriter.
Then one character observes that “Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space”, which feels like the ultimate screenwriter cop-out.
The early, earthbound scenes are filmed in the area around Calgary, in... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Ghost-Rider-Spirit-Of-Vengeance.php   Locations: Romania; Turkey

Ghost Rider is back and, in the hands of the Crank team, grungier, crispier and crunchier.
Having left behind the plains of ‘Texas’, and seemingly his childhood sweetheart Roxanne, to lose himself in Eastern Europe, one-time stunt rider Johnny Blaze (Nicolas Cage) is given the chance to reclaim his soul in a deal that involves saving a young boy, Danny (Fergus Riordan), from becoming the next incarnation of the devil, now known as Roarke (Ciarán Hinds).
Filmed at Bucharest’s Castel Film Studios, most of the film’s locations can be found in Romania. The monastery-cum-fortress to which boozy French priest Moreau (Idris Elba) arrives to warn the monks that the young Danny is in danger, is Hunyad Castle, also called Corvin Castle, at... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Ghost-Rider.php   Locations: Victoria, Australia

Mark Steven Johnson’s big screen outing for the popular comic book character is too daft to be a serious origins story, but too reverential to be the all-out fun it should be. To say Nicolas Cage was born to play the flaming-skull-headed biker might be overstating, but when was the last time an actor needed to have a tattoo of the character he’s playing covered up?
The story is set mainly in ‘Texas’ but was filmed entirely around the city of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia, where nearly all of the city locations were found within a 20-block radius.
Or in the studio – the prologue explaining the legend of Ghost Rider was to have been filmed in the Australian desert, but in the end it’s all CGI.
About 30 miles west of Melbourne... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/American-Sniper.php   Locations: Morocco; California

A bulked-up Bradley Cooper is almost unrecognisable as Chris Kyle, heroic saver of countless lives or ruthless fantasist? Clint Eastwood’s box office success jettisons any of the potentially interesting contradictions in this ambiguous character in favour of an oddly old-fashioned black-and-white pitting of noble patriots against devious ‘savages’.
The ‘Iraq’ war sequences were filmed in Morocco. The country’s capital, Rabat on the Atlantic coast, and its neighbour city of Sale across the Bou Regreg River, doubled for war-torn ‘Fallujah’ – as they previously stood in for ‘Somalia’ in Ridley Scott’s 2001 Black Hawk Down.
The rest of the film, though, was made in California. Much of the ‘Ramadi’ tour of duty was filmed at the 100-acre Blue Cloud Movie Ranch, 20000 Blue Cloud Road, Santa Clarita, off I-5 north of Los Angeles, where a section of urban ‘Iraq’... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Theory-Of-Everything.php   Locations: Cambridge; Buckinghamshire; Sussex; Surrey; London

Eddie Redmayne turns in an astonishing physical performance as revolutionary physicist Prof Stephen Hawking, surviving the onset of Motor Neurone Disease with the support of his partner Jane (Felicity Jones) in a story which would be laughably preposterous if it didn’t happen to be true.
Most of the film is set around Cambridge, where the young Hawking studied. The city, named for the River Cam which runs through its centre, is about 50 miles north of London in East Anglia and its University rivals Oxford as the UK’s most prestigious seat of learning.
Although Hawking famously studied at Trinity Hall, the film substitutes the photogenically elaborate St John’s College, affectionately dubbed ‘the wedding cake’... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Imitation-Game.php   Locations: Oxfordshire; Buckinghamshire; Dorset; London

The story of WWII codebreaker Alan Turing has been told before, in Breaking The Code, with Derek Jacobi, but although Morten Tyldum’s film has the requisite Hollywood flourishes (although Turing’s homosexuality is crucial to the film, he’s never seen with a male partner but is constantly partnered by Joan Clarke), it’s still an important and affecting story.
Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a mathematics professor of prodigious abilities but limited social skills (it’s been mooted that he may have been on the Asperger’s or Autism spectrum) who volunteers to help the British government crack the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code used by the Nazi forces during WWII.
The secluded environment in which a team of the country’s brightest beavered away under conditions of strictest secrecy... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Foxcatcher.php   Locations: Pennsylvania; Virginia

Another (slightly disputed) based-on-real-life story brought to the screen by Bennett Miller, director of Moneyball and Capote, with rich-as-hell but socially inept John DuPont (Steve Carell), ornithologist, philatelist and philanthropist (the film omits conchologist) vainly attempting to use his family fortune to guide the US wrestling team to gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
Much of the film is set on the vast du Pont family estate, which stood in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, until it was torn down in 2013. The land where the estate stood is now part of the Liseter housing development.
The film was made almost entirely in Western Pennsylvania apart from the palatial du Pont mansion exterior, which is... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Predator.php   Locations: Mexico

Major ‘Dutch’ Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his elite squad meet up with a semi-invisible, near-invincible monster in the ‘South American’ jungle. After the exciting build-up and demonstrations of truly scary prowess, the creature inexplicably resorts to fisticuffs. No Contest.
The movie was filmed in Mexico near the popular beach resort of Puerto Vallarta, on the coast 400 miles west of Mexico City. John Huston’s 1964 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana, with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner, had previously put Puerto Vallarta on the map as a resort when it was filmed at Mismaloya, just to the south. This was at the height of the Burton-Taylor media frenzy, and when the couple went on to buy houses here.
The old set, outside... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Women-On-The-Verge.php   Locations: Spain

This frantic pop-art farce became the first big international hit for Pedro Almodóvar, as several women with preposterously complicated lives criss-cross each other’s paths in a gloriously primary-coloured Madrid.
Although the penthouse apartment of Pepa (Carmen Maura), with her menagerie terrace, is clearly – and deliberately – a studio set, the ground floor is Calle de Montalban 7, 28014 Madrid, at Calle Alfonso XI alongside the western fringe of Parque del Retiro.
She takes the wonderful Mambo Taxi (I want one of these in London) about a mile north to the home of Ivan (Fernando Guillén), which is Calle Almagro 38, 28010 Madrid.
A couple of blocks east, ... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Birdman.php   Locations: New York

Alejandro González Ińárritu takes a simple premise – one-time screen superhero actor Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton) makes a bid to revive his career and gain artistic credibility by adapting, mounting and starring in a serious New York Broadway stage production – and spins it into a piece of dazzling magical realism.
Apart from the excellent performances, Ińárritu’s film is a cinematic tour-de-force, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, seemingly filmed in one continuous take and backed by a relentlessly jittery drum track that perfectly captures the the nervy energy of Manhattan.
The theatre in which Riggan stages his adaptation of Raymond Carver’s stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, is the St James Theatre, 246 West 44th Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues, in the Theatre District.
The St James, which opened in 1927 as... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/National-Treasure.php   Locations: Washington DC; Philadelphia; New York; Los Angeles; Utah

While high-minded symbologist Robert Langdon went in search of the Holy Grail, down-to-earth historian Ben Franklin Gates (Nicolas Cage) solves a series of cryptic clues to find the earthly treasure of the Knights Templar, keeping one step ahead of his one-time backer turned ruthless competitor Ian Howe (Sean Bean).
For the backstory, told by to Ben by his grandfather (Christopher Plummer), the ‘White House’, of 1832 is the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) Constitution Hall, 1776 D Street NW. Coincidentally, the Hall provided the interior of the present-day ‘White House’ in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. A mysterious clue leads the grown up Ben Gates to the ‘Arctic’, where ‘Charlotte’ turns out to be a ship buried in ice. The snowy wastes were filmed at Chicken Creek West on the northern shore of... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Point-Break.php   Locations: Los Angeles; Oregon; Hawaii; Utah

Somehow director Kathryn Bigelow manages to bring an almost mythic dimension to the barkingly daft premise of straight-laced FBI agent Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) going deep undercover to infiltrate a gang of mystical surfer-dudes who fund their quest for inner enlightenment by robbing banks while disguised as the nation’s former leaders.
Utah is paired with cynically grizzled wacko Angelo Pappas (scene-stealing Gary Busey), who quickly deduces the gang’s lifestyle from traces of Sex Wax and the fact that they only pull jobs during the summer months... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Age-Of-Extinction.php   Locations: Chicago; Texas; Detroit; Utah; China

Bigger! Sillier! Explodier! Totally bypassing eleven, Michael Bay turns the volume straight up to twelve to kick of the post-LaBoeuf franchise.
Bay sets up multiple story threads around the globe, including a brief prologue, filmed by a second unit in Iceland, which sees dinosaurs exterminated by ancient Transformers.
In present day Texas, penurious (aren’t they always?) inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives in a small farmhouse with buxom (aren’t they always?) daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), until their lives are changed when he comes across a decrepit old truck, which turns out to be – well, guess what? The Yeagers’ farmhouse is 19818 Melber Lane, Manor... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Age-Of-Extinction.php   Locations: Chicago; Texas; Detroit; Utah; China

Bigger! Sillier! Explodier! Totally bypassing eleven, Michael Bay turns the volume straight up to twelve to kick of the post-LaBoeuf franchise.
Bay sets up multiple story threads around the globe, including a brief prologue, filmed by a second unit in Iceland, which sees dinosaurs exterminated by ancient Transformers.
In present day Texas, penurious (aren’t they always?) inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives in a small farmhouse with buxom (aren’t they always?) daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), until their lives are changed when he comes across a decrepit old truck, which turns out to be – well, guess what? The Yeagers’ farmhouse is 19818 Melber Lane, Manor... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Age-Of-Extinction.php   Locations: Chicago; Texas; Detroit; Utah; China

Bigger! Sillier! Explodier! Totally bypassing eleven, Michael Bay turns the volume straight up to twelve to kick of the post-LaBoeuf franchise.
Bay sets up multiple story threads around the globe, including a brief prologue, filmed by a second unit in Iceland, which sees dinosaurs exterminated by ancient Transformers.
In present day Texas, penurious (aren’t they always?) inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives in a small farmhouse with buxom (aren’t they always?) daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), until their lives are changed when he comes across a decrepit old truck, which turns out to be – well, guess what? The Yeagers’ farmhouse is 19818 Melber Lane, Manor... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Age-Of-Extinction.php   Locations: Chicago; Texas; Detroit; Utah; China

Bigger! Sillier! Explodier! Totally bypassing eleven, Michael Bay turns the volume straight up to twelve to kick of the post-LaBoeuf franchise.
Bay sets up multiple story threads around the globe, including a brief prologue, filmed by a second unit in Iceland, which sees dinosaurs exterminated by ancient Transformers.
In present day Texas, penurious (aren’t they always?) inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives in a small farmhouse with buxom (aren’t they always?) daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), until their lives are changed when he comes across a decrepit old truck, which turns out to be – well, guess what? The Yeagers’ farmhouse is 19818 Melber Lane, Manor... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Piano.php   Locations: New Zealand

Oscar-winning period drama, with the withdrawn Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), along with her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), bundled off to New Zealand as a mail-order bride for plantation-owner Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill).
Director Jane Campion stitches together several different locales on New Zealand’s North Island to provide the muddy, wooded setting for what becomes a dangerous emotional triangle with neighbour Baines (Harvey Keitel).
Scenes in the bush were shot on two farms: one along Matakana Valley Road, Matakana, a small town in the Rodney District about five miles northeast of Warkworth, itself around 40 miles north of Auckland. The other was about 120 miles south of Auckland on the west coast – a 2,500 acre farm on Awakau Road, Awakino... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Age-Of-Extinction.php   Locations: Chicago; Texas; Detroit; Utah; China

Bigger! Sillier! Explodier! Totally bypassing eleven, Michael Bay turns the volume straight up to twelve to kick of the post-LaBoeuf franchise.
Bay sets up multiple story threads around the globe, including a brief prologue, filmed by a second unit in Iceland, which sees dinosaurs exterminated by ancient Transformers.
In present day Texas, penurious (aren’t they always?) inventor Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) lives in a small farmhouse with buxom (aren’t they always?) daughter Tessa (Nicola Peltz), until their lives are changed when he comes across a decrepit old truck, which turns out to be – well, guess what? The Yeagers’ farmhouse is 19818 Melber Lane, Manor... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/u/Unstoppable.php   Locations: Pennsylvania; Ohio; New York State; West Virginia

On the day a slobby-looking train driver gets careless with safety standards, an inexperienced newbie rail conductor, Will Colson (Chris Pine), is paired with experienced old hand Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) and a class of schoolkids boards a train for a ‘railway safety campaign’, what could possibly go wrong?
Tony Scott, with his customary kinetic style, assembles a poundingly effective runaway train thriller, inspired by the 2001 ‘Crazy Eights Incident’, an out-of-control engine which careered 66 miles from Toledo, Ohio, before being stopped at Kenton. The name came from the engine’s number – 8888 – which is changed to 777 for the film... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Father-Of-The-Bride-1991.php   Locations: Los Angeles

This unashamedly old-fashioned remake of the 1950 Vincente Minnelli movie, with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor, happily trots out every cosy cliché about fathers, daughters and weddings.
The film is bathed in a pinky-golden glow, inspired by the feel of Norman Rockwell paintings, and the setting is ‘San Marino’, one of those prosperous southern California towns that looks just like an eastern suburb of Los Angeles.
It’s no great surprise, then, that ‘24 Maple Drive’, the home of the Banks family (Steve Martin and Diane Keaton) can be found in Pasadena. It’s 843 South El Molino Avenue, south of California Boulevard... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/u/Unstoppable.php   Locations: Pennsylvania; Ohio; New York State; West Virginia

On the day a slobby-looking train driver gets careless with safety standards, an inexperienced newbie rail conductor, Will Colson (Chris Pine), is paired with experienced old hand Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) and a class of schoolkids boards a train for a ‘railway safety campaign’, what could possibly go wrong?
Tony Scott, with his customary kinetic style, assembles a poundingly effective runaway train thriller, inspired by the 2001 ‘Crazy Eights Incident’, an out-of-control engine which careered 66 miles from Toledo, Ohio, before being stopped at Kenton. The name came from the engine’s number – 8888 – which is changed to 777 for the film... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Paddington.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Essex

Against all expectations, the live action adventures of Michael Bond’s much-loved bear is surprisingly witty and imaginative.
The opening scenes of the bear’s discovery in darkest ‘Peru’ were filmed in Costa Rica.
Leaving South America to find a better life in the fabled city of London, the little bear stows away on a ship to arrive at the docks at Tilbury in Essex.
A convenient truck unwittingly ferries him into the capital, inevitably crossing Tower Bridge en route, before dropping him off at one of the capital’s major rail termini... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/z/Zombieland.php   Locations: Georgia; Los Angeles

After a raging infection turns the US into the United States of Zombieland, socially inept loner (Jesse Eisenberg) sets out to make his way from ‘Texas’ to his parents in ‘Ohio’, while avoiding hordes of ravenous flesh-eaters.
Columbus, as he comes to be known after his destination, catches a ride with Twinkie-fixated Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) in his handy black Escalade.
Despite appearing to range across the country, the film was made almost entirely in Georgia.
The scenes of urban chaos as Columbus enumerates his rules for survival are staged on on Edgewood Avenue NE at Park Place NE, in downtown Atlanta... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Warrior-2011.php   Locations: Pennsylvania; New Jersey

What’s better than an underdog movie? A film with two underdogs, that’s what.
Tommy Riordan (Tom Hardy), an ex-Marine haunted by his past, returns to his hometown of Pittsburgh to enlist his father, retired steelworker and recovering alcoholic Paddy (Nick Nolte), to train him for a brutal Mixed Martial Arts tournament which offers a phenomenal cash prize.
The twist is that Paddy’s estranged other son, schoolteacher Brendan (Joel Edgerton), enters the same contest to escape his own financial hardship.
The original script was set in Long Beach, California, but the story made a perfect fit for Pittsburgh, taking advantage of Pennsylvania’s film-making tax incentives. The climactic scenes, which were to be set at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, were changed to Atlantic City... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Fargo.php   Locations: Minnesota; North Dakota

The Coens’ wickedly inventive thriller was shot mainly around Brainerd (which was the original title), Minnesota but as luck would have it, a particularly mild winter meant that film-making had to move north for snow scenes, as far as Grand Forks in North Dakota.
The ‘based on a true story’ myth supposedly had people descending on Brainerd with shovels, ready to search for the buried cash.
Sadly, most of the locations have now gone, including the King of Clubs, the pool bar where financially desperate car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) meets with the two shady characters (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to arrange the kidnapping of his wife, which stood at 957 Central Avenue NE at 3rd Avenue NE, northeast Minneapolis. It’s been demolished, to be replaced by housing... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Wedding-Singer.php   Locations: Los Angeles

Bouncy, Eighties-set feelgood romcom, set in ‘Ridgefield’, one of those movie anytowns which looks an awful lot like the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles.
‘Ridgefield Banquet Hall’, where Robbie Hart (Adam Sandler) serenades the various receptions, was the ballroom of the old Ambassador Hotel, which stood at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, midtown LA. Unused as a hotel for years, it was a screen regular – among the hundreds of films shot here are The Graduate, Se7en, Rocky, S.W.A.T., Apollo 13 and Old School. Despite an outcry, it was finally demolished in 2006.
Robbie lives in the basement of his sister’s house at 1075 East Topeka Street in North Pasadena, toward Altadena. As you can see in the film... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/Nightcrawler.php   Locations: Los Angeles

The apartment of loner Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), where he does little but watch TV, surf the net and water a single houseplant, is 1045 Figueroa Terrace, near White Knoll Drive, just southwest of Dodger Stadium. The neighbourhood is a fairly unprepossessing area of Echo Park, but its hills offer a tantalising view of the downtown highrises, and a relentless diet of self-improvement courses has fired up Lou’s ambition.
He could almost be a West Coast nephew of Travis Bickle, until a chance encounter offers a way out of his meagre existence, peddling filched chain-link fencing and manhole covers as scrap metal.
Lou comes across Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) and a freelance video crew filming the aftermath of a bloody accident on the ‘110’... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Edge-Of-Tomorrow.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Hampshire; Devon

Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) is sent in to battle against aliens only to relive his first deadly encounter over and over again, Groundhog Day-style, gradually honing his military skills in Doug Liman’s imaginative sci-fi actioner.
The suits who determine these things scuppered the film’s initial release by replacing the engagingly quirky title of All You Need Is Kill with the most blandly generic and forgettable title imaginable. The DVD release was repackaged under the film’s much snappier tagline Live Die Repeat.
The movie was made in the UK, being the first production to be made at the Leavesden Film Studios in Hertfordshire following its major refurbishment by Warner Bros. Originally Leavesden Aerodrome, an airfield and Rolls Royce airplane engine factory... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Gone-Girl.php   Locations: Missouri; Illinois; Los Angeles

David Fincher turns Gillian Flynn’s novel into a treat of a feelbad movie, with the horribly perfect married life of Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) disrupted when Amy is apparently abducted during a break in.
Set in the (fictitious) Missouri town of ‘North Carthage’, the movie was made (apart from a few scenes staged in Los Angeles) almost entirely in and around Cape Girardeau, eastern Missouri on the Illinois border, the town Flynn had in mind when she wrote the best-selling novel.
Behind the credits, we see the town clock of downtown Cape Girardeau, standing at the intersection of North Main Street and Themis Street... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Brokeback-Mountain.php   Locations: Alberta; New Mexico

Adapted by Larry McMurtry, who wrote the magnificent The Last Picture Show, from Annie Proulx’s story, and with a couple of powerfully understated lead performances, Brokeback looked like a shoo-in for Best Picture, but 2006 turned out not to be the Academy’s finest year.
Although it’s set in ‘Riverton’, a real town in the Big Horn Mountains of central Wyoming (and much larger and prosperous than the film version), and in Texas, it was filmed largely in the Canadian Rockies of Alberta.
Getting the big disappointment out of the way first, there really is no ‘Brokeback Mountain’ – it’s an invention of author Proulx... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/Amazing-Spider-Man-2.php   Locations: New York

Andrew Garfield really makes the role of Peter Parker his own, as the Gwen Stacy storyline is worked out.
Like all the Spider-Man films, including the Raimi trilogy, Amazing Spider-Man 2 is set in New York, but surprisingly this is the first one to be wholly filmed there (the others all feature scenes shot in Los Angeles and other cities).
A couple of familiar places return from the first movie, including the Parker home, which is 36 Fuller Place, just to the north of Prospect Avenue, in the Windsor Terrace neighbourhood of Brooklyn.
The exterior of the towering ‘Oscorp Building’, where business seems to be booming, is again the Hearst Tower, 300 West 57th Street at 8th Avenue, just to the south of Columbus Circle in midtown New York... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Children-Of-Men.php   Locations: London; Hampshire; Hertfordshire; Kent; Oxfordshire; Surrey

Alfonso Cuarón’s masterly film of PD James’s novel sees the world collapsing into anarchy after the human race is mysteriously stricken with infertility.
It begins in London with a breathtaking, real-time single take, set on a grungily polluted Fleet Street, EC4, linking the eastern end of The Strand to Ludgate Circus and St Paul’s Cathedral, where cycle-taxis ply their trade past buildings covered in animated ads.
142 Fleet Street (which used to be the King and Keys pub until it closed in 2007, to become Mexican restaurant Chilango) was the ‘Caf Fine’ coffee bar in which Theo Faron (Clive Owen) hears about the death of Baby Diego – the youngest person in the world – and which subsequently gets blown up by underground agitators. It’s said that author PD James can be glimpsed in a cameo appearance watching the TV news, but I can’t spot her... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Into-The-Wild.php   Locations: Alaska; Arizona; California; Georgia; Nevada; Oregon; South Dakota; Washington State; Mexico

The crazy / visionary / reckless journey of Christopher McCandless – aka Alexander Supertramp – from a comfortable existence in the suburbs of Annandale, Virginia, to a lonely death in the wilds of Alaska, is filmed by Sean Penn on many of the real locations visited by the restless traveller.
The marathon two-year shoot encompassed 35 different locations throughout the United States, beautifully captured by cinematographer Eric Gautier, who had impressed Penn with his work on another epic cinematic journey, Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries.
Told in flashback from the last days in Alaska, the film’s story begins with Chris’s graduation from Emory University, 201 Dowman Drive, Druid Hills, in Atlanta, Georgia... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Election.php   Locations: Nebraska; New York; Washington DC

Enthusiastically committed high school teacher Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick) gets his morals (or is it ethics?) tangled up when he goes too far in his attempts to thwart the campaign of ferociously ambitious Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) to run for school president. Alexander Payne’s smart satire is a re-working of On The Waterfront screenwriter Budd Schulberg’s novel What Makes Sammy Run?, in turn inspired by the career of his own father, the early Hollywood movie producer BP Schulberg.
It’s set and, naturally for Payne, mostly filmed in Omaha, Nebraska, where ‘George Washington Carver High’ is Papillion-La Vista High School, 402 East Centennial Road, between La Vista and Papillion, just to the south of the city.
Not far away is the La Vista branch of Godfather’s Pizza, 7920 South 84th Street, in which Tracy begins a clandestine affair with her teacher Dave Novotny (Mark Harelik) at an after-school dinner... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/About-Schmidt.php   Locations: Nebraska; Colorado; Iowa

Alexander Payne stays fiercely loyal to his home state, filming almost the entire movie in Nebraska – including the concluding section set in ‘Denver, Colorado’.
Jack Nicholson is uncharacteristically subdued as office drone Warren Schmidt, pushed into reappraising his life at the age of 66.
Change is triggered by retirement from his insurance job at Woodmen of the World Life Insurance Co, 1700 Farnam Street, in Omaha, where most of the movie is filmed. Woodmen is a real tower and a real company – the office used as Schmidt’s office is that of the company’s vice president and chief actuary.
With blank-eyed resignation, Warren endures a deadly retirement dinner, held at Johnny’s Cafe, 4702 South 27th Street, South Omaha alongside the Kennedy Freeway. A steak house since 1922, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a better time – and there’s always the bar for that much-needed vodka gimlet... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/Nebraska-2013.php   Locations: Nebraska; Montana; South Dakota; Wyoming

After years of sterling supporting work, Bruce Dern was finally rewarded with a Best Actor Oscar nomination, only to come up against Matthew McConaughey’s star turn in The Dallas Buyers Club.
Nevertheless, Dern got plenty of deserved recognition for his performance as ageing, cantankerous Woody Grant, convinced that a worthless ‘come-on’ flyer guarantees him a million dollars and doggedly determined to make it from his home in Billings, Montana, to collect his fortune from the marketing company in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Woody is first seen ambling down Montana Avenue in Billings, alongside the railroad tracks, past the eyecatching statue gracing the front of the Tire Factory, 3741 Montana Avenue... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Incredible-Hulk.php   Locations: Ontario; British Columbia; Brazil

The evolution of Hulk continues its convoluted journey as Ang Lee’s stylized ‘comic book’ visuals are jettisoned and Ed Norton takes over from Eric Bana, now lying low in Brazil, in a Rio de Janeiro favela, one of the city’s famous and teeming slums.
The spectacular aerial shot is of the real Rocinha Favela, the largest in Rio, and home to 300,00 people in the South Zone. Banner’s neighbourhood, a winding maze of narrow back alleys and steep steps, though, is the Tavares Bastos – which is the best-policed and – importantly – safest of the city’s favelas.
Banner is working as a general handyman in a juice bottling plant. This turns out to be not such a good idea, when an accidental cut results in a stray drop of his super-duper blood plopping into a bottle of Pingo Doce... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/r/Road-2009.php   Locations: Pennsylvania; Oregon; Louisiana; Washington State

An unnamed man and his young son (Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) make their way through a USA destroyed by some unspecified cataclysm, while trying to hang onto their humanity and remain “the good guys”, in John Hillcoat’s bleak adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
More than 50 locations in four states were scouted to provide the colourless, blasted landscapes, found largely in Pennsylvania, with detours to the slopes of Mount St Helens, down to the Katrina-hit areas of Louisiana and west to parts of Oregon.
The result is a combination of the coal-blackened, mining scarred Pennsylvanian countryside and the aftermath of natural disasters... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Guardians-Of-The-Galaxy.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Surrey

James Gunn scores a real hit with audiences and critics alike with this unlikely offshoot from the Marvel universe, which was based in the UK and filmed largely on spectacular sets built at Shepperton Studios near Shepperton, southwest of London in Surrey.
The largest of the sets was ‘the Kyln’ – the space prison where Quill, Rocket, Gamora, Groot and Drax are first lumped together, before joining forces to become the Guardians. The 360-degree set was built on three levels, incorporating 100 tons of steel, and later repurposed several times, including becoming the Collector’s (Benicio Del Toro) museum of extraordinary things... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Mask-1994.php   Locations: Los Angeles

Jim Carrey is perfectly cast, at his most hyperactively manic, in what amounts to a live action cartoon. The setting of ‘Edge City’ is, of course, Los Angeles.
The ‘Edge City Bank’ in which nerdy Stanley Ipkiss (Carrey) works, is the familiar old Bank of America Building at 650 Spring Street, downtown Los Angeles. The long-empty property has been used for countless productions including Marathon Man, Se7en, Ghost, The Prestige and Spider-Man 2.
The ‘Coco Bongo Club’ is a combination of two Los Angeles hotels, one of which is no longer with us.
The exterior is the canopied entrance to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub of the old Ambassador Hotel... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/h/Hulk.php   Locations: California; Utah

Ang Lee continued to confound genre expectations, from Sense And Sensibility to The Ice Storm to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. With Danny Elfman’s thunderous score, Lee brings an expressive comic book dynamic to the legendary Marvel story, and prefigures the current spate of serious origins stories. There are the, by now, regulation cameos: from creator Stan Lee and TV Hulk Lou Ferrigno as a couple of security guards on the university campus.
The ‘Berkeley Nuclear Biotechnology Institute’, at which nerdy Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) experiments with nanomeds, is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Philomena.php   Locations: London; Northern Ireland; Washington DC; Maryland

World-weary journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan) and devout Catholic Philomena Lee (Judi Dench) make an odd pairing who inevitably develop mutual respect as together they make efforts to track down Philomena’s son, Anthony, taken for adoption when she was still a teenager.
Most of the was shot on a tight eight-week schedule around London and Northern Ireland (standing in for the Republic of Ireland), with a brief trip to Washington DC and Maryland.
Wildly different backgrounds are revealed early on when Lee and Sixsmith first meet over a meal at The George, a Harvester restaurant on Bury Street at Sharps Lane, in Ruislip, northwest of London, and the writer reveals he prefers his little local place in Knightsbridge... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Birth.php   Locations: New York

Ten years after being widowed, Anna (Nicole Kidman) is approached by an unnervingly serious ten-year-old boy, Sean (Cameron Bright), claiming to be the reincarnation of her late husband.
The script, from director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under The Skin) and veteran Jean-Claude Carričre, regular collaborator of Luis Buńuel, avoids the crassly supernatural, allowing the performances, particularly Kidman and Bright, a disturbing plausibility.
Anna’s very comfortable and spacious Upper East Side apartment is 1136 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 95th Street, overlooking Central Park... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/0/101-Dalmatians.php   Locations: London; Buckinghamshire

This live-action version of the Disney classic uses plenty of real London locations, but the Dearly house is not one of them. ‘Gabriel Mews’ is a fictitious address, and both interior and exterior were built at Shepperton Studios.
Roger Dearly (Jeff Daniels) meets Anita (Joely Richardson) when he’s dragged by Pongo the dog from Trafalgar Square in central London to St James’s Park, on The Mall alongside Buckingham Palace.
The chase mysteriously takes them through the intimidatingly formal Burlington Arcade, which actually runs from 51 Piccadilly to Burlington Gardens. You might remember the Arcade housing the HQ of the IRA group in Phillip Noyce’s bonkers Patriot Games... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Prick-Up-Your-Ears.php   Locations: London

In the Sixties, Joe Orton had virtually elevated the status of playwright to that of rockstar, gleefully baiting the establishment with such dark, anarchic comedies as Entertaining Mr Sloane and Loot, when he was murdered by his partner Kenneth Halliwell.
The hedonistic Orton kept scandalously detailed diaries, providing rich material for John Lahr’s 1978 biography, which took its risqué title, Prick Up Your Ears, from an idea suggested by Halliwell for one of Joe’s plays.
Alan Bennett’s adaptation is so brilliant, and the performances so spot-on, it’s shocking that the film isn’t better known... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/Kaleidoscope.php   Locations: London

Very flashy, very Swinging Sixties, romcom caper, which shares a suspicious amount of its plot with James Bond novel Casino Royale, as playboy cardsharp Barney Lincoln (Warren Beatty) is recruited to bring down drugs kingpin Harry Dominion (Eric Porter) at a poker game.
Set in London and the French Riviera, the film is largely studio bound, but finds a couple of practical locations in the posh area of Hampstead, northwest London... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/I-Am-Legend.php   Locations: New York; New Jersey

Dr Robert Neville (Will Smith) is the sole remaining human inhabitant of New York City after a man-made virus, born out of a revolutionary cure for cancer, morphs into an infectious micro-organism and infects the whole world. It’s based on the Richard Matheson novel, which has been filmed several times before, as The Omega Man and The Last Man On Earth.
Like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later… did in London, the production team was allowed to clear entire city blocks for short periods of time and during weekends. Even the briefest exterior shot required dressing each location with abandoned cars, crumbling building facades, artificial plants and weeds laid into cracked pavements, and a finishing layer of dirt.
Neville is first seen driving his Mustang Shelby south down 5th Avenue from 38th Street, past Herald Square and Macy’s department store, before turning left into 34th Street... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/I-Robot.php   Locations: Vancouver

Apart from the title and the Three Laws of Robotics, there’s not a lot of Isaac Asimov in this enjoyable sci-fi actioner, with robophobic cop Del Spooner (Will Smith) investigating the suspicious death of wealthy robotics developer Dr Lanning (James Cromwell) in the ‘Chicago’ of 2035.
The movie recreates the futuristic city, including the Marina City Towers and the Wrigley Building, in Vancouver.
Studio sets, enhanced with plenty of CGI, were built at Pier 94 in North Vancouver, now regularly used for film production – the ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ set for Fantastic Four was built here... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Dark-Of-The-Moon.php   Locations: Chicago; Washington DC; Michigan; Wisconsin; New York; Florida; Cambodia; Tanzania

It’s overblown and overlong but, as the USA’s most photogenic city gets destroyed in spectacular fashion by Very Big Things hitting each other, Dark Of The Moon is a great improvement on Revenge of The Fallen.
The 1969 Apollo programme was, as we now all surely know, ordered by President Kennedy following the detection of an alien craft on the moon. The movie’s ‘White House’ really is in Washington DC, but it’s not on Pennsylvania Avenue. The government bigwigs are seen arriving at the similarly classical American Red Cross Headquarters, 430 17th Street at D Street... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/t/Transformers-Revenge-Of-The-Fallen.php   Locations: California; Pennsylvania; New Mexico; Virginia; Jordan; Egypt

Bumblebee crying? The Jar Jar Binks ice-cream truck twins? Despite the undoubted spectacle, Michael Bay scuppers the sequel by confusing kid-friendly with infantile.
The portentous prologue set in 17,000BC, revealing the backstory of the human race’s first meeting with ancient Transformers as they scour the universe for sources of energon, is filmed in the familiar Alabama Hills, Central California, against the imposing backdrop of the Sierra Nevada Peaks.
The rock formations, above the town of Lone Pine have been a staple exotic location since the Thirties, regularly providing a stand-in for the likes of the Himalayas in films such as Gunga Din and King Of The Khyber Rifles. Lone Pine not only has a Film History Museum but in October hosts its own annual Film Festival... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Watchmen.php   Locations: Vancouver

As ever, writer Alan Moore distances himself from the film of his graphic novel, though director Zack Snyder adheres closely to the images and sickly colour palette of Dave Gibbons’ illustrated panels. The only major change is the ending, though it seems only diehard fans missed the appearance of a giant tentacled alien.
The film is set in ‘New York’, but all those glimpses of the Twin Towers, the Chrysler and the Empire State Buildings are added digitally – this alternative 1985 Big Apple under Richard Nixon’s Third Term was filmed around Vancouver, British Columbia.
In order to recreate accurately the visuals of the comic book, most of the settings are purpose-built – though the claim of two hundred sets being built sounds suspiciously like press pack hyperbole... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Butterfly-Effect.php   Locations: Vancouver; Washington State

Anybody expecting a fluffy Ashton Kutcher comedy is in for a bit of a surprise with this dark story of alternative realities, seemingly inspired by Ray Bradbury’s classic short story A Sound Of Thunder, in which the casual crushing of a single butterfly by a time traveller totally alters the course of history. Be sure you watch the Directors’ Cut with the original uncompromised ending.
Kutcher is Evan Treborn (an improvement of the script’s original clunkily symbolic Chris Treborn – geddit?), who’s grown up plagued by memory blackouts. When he begins to recover memories, he also develops the ability to revisit those key moments and choose a different path. Inevitably, it turns out that each successive attempt to second-guess fate is thwarted by further complications. As a time-travel movie, it’s chock full of plot holes, but it succeeds as a dark fable about the futility of attempting to change the past... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Black-Christmas.php   Locations: Toronto

Bob Clark’s proto-slasher predated John Carpenter’s Halloween by four years and laid down many of the rules of the genre: there are the POV shots of the unseen stalker, a bunch of kids plagued by menacing phone calls, and blasé cops unconvinced that anything untoward is happening. There’s also John Saxon, who went on to play an almost identical role in A Nightmare On Elm Street.
In a sly nod to It’s A Wonderful Life’s ‘Bedford Falls’, the story is set in the college town of ‘Bedford’, but the pronunciation of “oat and a boat” indicates we’re north of the border in Canada, specifically Toronto, Ontario.
The college at which the kids are studying is the University of Toronto, where the highly-strung and suspect Peter (Keir Dullea) plays – and angrily smashes up – the piano, is Seeley Hall in Trinity College... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/b/Bonnie-And-Clyde.php   Locations: Texas; California

It’s difficult now to appreciate the shock caused in 1967 by the mix of comedy and violence which divided critics but thrilled audiences.
The skewed morality of the Depression, when banks were perceived as the rankest of villains and the police as no more than their enforcers, chimed perfectly with the anti-authoritarianism of the late Sixties.
One of the great ‘what ifs’ of cinema – the original choice of director was François Truffaut, leading light of the French New Wave, but who had already committed to filming Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The project passed to Warren Beatty who (after a Hollywood Who’s Who? of refusals) convinced Arthur Penn to direct... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Godzilla-2014.php   Locations: Vancouver; Hawaii; Las Vegas

An amazingly classy cast (Juliette Binoche in a Godzilla movie?), but all the standard clichés are present and correct. Godzilla retains his traditional disregard for urban architecture, though, as well as his canny ability to home in on major cities, and the dark, murky visuals are impressive.
There seems to be something about the Pacific Rim which is attracting very large creatures from beneath the sea these days, but don’t go planning that Godzilla tour of San Francisco just yet. There’s not too much of the said Rim on display, apart from Oahu, one of the Hawaiian islands. Most of the rest is British Columbia standing in for California... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/Neighbors.php   Locations: Los Angeles.

Retitled in the UK, in case anybody thought the daytime Aussie soap had finally made it to the big screen, Nicholas Stoller’s addition to the ‘escalating feud’ genre isn’t going to win any awards for originality, but it’s an enjoyable enough laddish, slightly gross, School-of-Apatow outing.
Neighbouring suburban homes usually screams ‘Pasadena’ but, for once, the city of ‘Ardendale’ is Los Angeles proper. The comfy home of young parents Mac and Kelly Radner (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) on ‘West Olmstead’ is 2179 West 20th Street between South Gramercy Place and South Western Avenue in the classy South Kinney district of West Adams, midtown.
It all looks so sweet, until the U-Haul truck arrives bearing giant Greek letters and the couple realise they’ll be living next door to a frat house. The numbering system on this street defies logic and the Delta Psi Beta house where, in time honoured tradition, Teddy and Pete (Zac Efron and Dave Franco) are... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Funny-Face.php   Locations: Paris.

Back in more innocent days, no-one batted an eyelid at the 58-year-old Fred Astaire chasing 28-year-old Audrey Hepburn, and it was only common sense for a woman not to bother her pretty little head with intellectual pursuits when given the opportunity to become a fashion model.
That said, Funny Face remains one of the most endearingly enjoyable of old-school musicals, with the George and Ira Gershwin score and Astaire’s twinkly charm staving off any potential creepiness.
It’s set in New York and Paris, though much of the film was shot on the Paramount lot in Hollywood.
There’s a brief second-unit glimpse of Greenwich Village... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Grand-Budapest-Hotel.php   Locations: Germany.

Wes Anderson’s shaggy dog story, inspired by (and borrowing from) the writings of Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, is a lo-tech delight – coming as a real relief after so much junk food CGI. It’s set, over several decades (neatly indicated by varying screen ratios), in the fictitious Eastern European country of ‘Zubrowka’, and was filmed in Germany, with sets built at the venerable Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam, on the outskirts of Berlin.
There’s much deliberate artifice, but also plenty of real locations, largely around the historic town of Görlitz in eastern Germany, about 60 miles east of Dresden, at the border with Poland and the Czech Republic... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Captain-America-Winter-Soldier.php   Locations: Ohio; Washington DC; Los Angeles.

Unlike Captain America: The First Avenger, which was made almost entirely in the UK, the sequel is filmed in – surprise! – America.
Although set in Washington DC, the ever-adaptable city of Cleveland, Ohio provides most of the actual locations, as it did for much of Avengers Assemble.
The film opens in the real Washington DC, though, with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) impressing Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) with his jogging prowess alongside the Potomac River and around the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, before he’s picked up by Black Widow / Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) to help sort out a hostage situation in the ‘Indian Ocean’.
Following the ‘Battle of New York’ (see Avengers Assemble), ‘Triskelion’, the impressive SHIELD HQ has been constructed on Theodore Roosevelt Island, at the foot of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge in DC. After Rogers confronts Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) about his lack of transparency, he’s taken down for a peek at the vast ‘Project Insight’ weapons facility deep beneath the Potomac... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Wilde-1997.php   Locations: London; Hertfordshire; Hampshire; Oxfordshire; Dorset; Spain.

Stephen Fry stars as Oscar Wilde, a role he was born to play, with an explicitness missing from earlier versions and the use of striking period locations. For those not familiar with the circumstances of the writer’s fall from grace, the US DVD jacket helpfully tints the central character’s suit bright pink. You get the hint?
If you expect a traditional English Heritage film, you’ll be totally wrongfooted by the startling opening, supposedly at ‘Leadville, Colorado’. The Western-style sequence is the desert at Alicante on the southeast coast of Spain, though the interior of the tin mine, where Wilde charms the miners, was constructed at Grip House (now Greenford Studios), west London.
The exterior of Wilde’s West End apartment is the central courtyard of Somerset House in the Strand, a familiar location seen as ‘St Petersburg’ in Goldeneye and as ‘New York’ in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow, among many other appearances... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Sexy-Beast.php   Locations: Spain; London.

After directing music videos and high-profile commercials for companies such as Levi’s and Guinness (he was responsible for the white horses galloping through surf), Jonathan Glazer burst onto the big screen with a boldly surreal caper movie, based on a brilliant expletive laden script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, and boasting an electrifying, Oscar-nominated performance from Ben Kingsley as psychotic, bullet-headed gangster Don Logan.
Not a box-office blockbuster on release, the film nevertheless went on in 2004 to be named the 15th greatest British film of all time by UK magazine Total Film.
The much-feared Logan visits one-time safecracker Gary ‘Gal’ Dove (Ray Winstone), relaxing in sunny retirement in southern Spain, intent on enticing him back to the UK to join a team for one more job... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/h/Hunger-Games-Catching-Fire.php   Locations: Georgia; Hawaii; New Jersey.

A huge improvement on the first film, the series really does begin to catch fire with this far more gripping and fleshed-out installment, as the devious President Snow (Donald Sutherland) conspires with game-maker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to compromise the credibility of the people’s favourite victors.
There’s a complete change of location, from North Carolina to Atlanta, Georgia, though it seems the Peach State couldn’t provide the wintery backdrop for the opening scenes of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) suffering post-traumatic flashbacks as she hunts in the woods with Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Instead, this was filmed up in snowy New Jersey, in Ramapo Mountain State Forest on Skyline Drive, near the New York State border... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/g/Grapes-Of-Wrath.php   Locations: California; Arizona; New Mexico; Oklahoma.

John Ford’s moving, though politically softened, filming of John Steinbeck’s story of 1930s sharecroppers forced to leave their Oklahoma farmland to find work in the west, was shot mainly on the 20th Century Fox backlot on Pico Boulevard in Century City, Los Angeles.
Despite the technical limitations of the time, Ford was determined to give the journey of the Joad family a gritty authenticity. A Second Unit was dispatched to travel the old Route 66, filming scenes in long-shot using stand-ins for the actors. Occasionally, real migrants heading west were paid to accompany the Joad wagon.
The story begins with Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) freed from Oklahoma State Penitentiary only to find his family has been forced to leave the land they’ve farmed for decades... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/u/Under-The-Skin.php   Locations: Scotland.

Jonathan Glazer’s chillingly minimal adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel explains little as it follows Scarlett Johansson’s nameless alien predator trawling the streets of Glasgow in a transit van for unattached men who won’t be missed when their organs are, in some strange way, harvested.
The film was shot almost entirely chronologically, much of it guerrilla-style with hidden cameras, bringing the kind of realism usually reserved for social dramas to its sci-fi plot.
Some have unfairly referred to the film as Species directed by Ken Loach but, in fact, it’s closer to Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 The Man Who Fell To Earth. Everyday sights become joltingly unfamiliar, as when Johansson finds herself in a disorientingly bustling shopping mall. After the quiet stillness of the opening scenes, the Buchanan Galleries, 220 Buchanan Street in Glasgow suddenly appear like the interior of an anthill in a nature documentary... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/z/Zero-Theorem.php   Locations: Bucharest.

Terry Gilliam exudes such easygoing joviality, it’s hard not to feel that there’s tremendous therapeutic value in making his films. All his anxiety seems to be siphoned off into the panicky visuals and cluttered, worrying sets.
He’s turned ‘dystopian’ into a genre of its own, and his view of the future (or alternative present) as a flustered piling of make-do technology on top of the creakingly decrepit is far more persuasive than the smooth gloss of traditional sci-fi.
Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a jittery, insecure cousin of Brazil’s Sam Lowry, number-crunches at a rickety computer while desperately waiting for the return of an interrupted phone call he believes will reveal the purpose of his existence... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Carry-On-Constable.html   Locations: London.

After sergeants, nurses and teachers, the fourth in the series takes on the police force, as a flu epidemic leaves the local police station short-staffed, and three raw recruits are drafted in as temps. Sid James, as the beleaguered Sgt Wilkins, makes his first appearance in a Carry On... film.
The police beats ensure there’s lots more location filming than usual for a Carry On… film, mainly around the streets of Ealing in west London.
The ‘police station’ is Hanwell Library, Cherington Road, north of Uxbridge Road in Hanwell W7, west of Ealing. Originally a Carnegie Library, one of many funded by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it remains virtually unchanged today – apart from the addition of ramp access... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Carry-On-Teacher.html   Locations: London.

The third in what was to become the long-running series has radio and TV comedian Ted Ray, making his only appearance with the Carry On… team, as headmaster ‘Wakie’ Wakefield, whose new position is threatened (Oh, matron!) by the posting of a trendy child psychologist (Leslie Phillips) to his school.
‘Maudlin Street Secondary Modern School’ is Drayton Green Primary School, Drayton Grove, West Ealing, London W13. Virtually unchanged since the Fifties... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Education.php   Locations: London.

Lynn Barber’s memoir (surprisingly adapted by Nick Hornby, author of laddish books About A Boy and High Fidelity) is set at the dawn of the 1960s, with precocious 16-year-old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) beginning to feel pangs of rebellion as her parents and teachers groom her for a university education.
As home to the famous film studios, the area around Twickenham, southwest London, is regularly required to stand-in for other parts of the country, so it seems strangely perverse that this story, which is set in Twickenham and filmed at the studios, finds its exterior locations around Ealing.
The suburban home in which Jenny is stifled by her pushy but reactionary dad (Alfred Molina), is 45 Carbery Avenue, north of Gunnersbury Park in Acton Town, W3. Although some scenes were indeed filmed in the house, the interior was rebuilt in the Twickenham Studios to allow the camera more flexibility... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/h/Hellboy.php   Locations: Prague.

Guillermo del Toro’s film of Mike Mignola’s comic book is clearly a labour of love, and del Toro regular Ron Perlman was born to play the otherworldly red curmudgeon.
Set in the USA and Russia, the film was made entirely in the Czech Republic, mainly around Prague.
The forbidding ‘Squeaky Clean Waste Management Plant’ in ‘Newark, New Jersey’, which houses the HQ of the ‘Bureau For Paranormal Research And Defense’, is the National Monument, U Památníku 1900, at Vitkov Hill. The massive building, built in the late Twenties and early Thirties in honour of Czechoslovak legionaries, became the burial place for Communist dignitaries in the Fifties.
It was acquired by the National Museum in 2000 and, after restoration, was opened to the public in 2009. The Memorial contains the Ceremonial Hall, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Klement Gottwald Mausoleum (though the one-time President is no longer on show) and exhibition halls... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/Kind-Hearts-And-Coronets.php   Locations: Kent; Berkshire; Buckinghamshire; London.

Despite a long and illustrious career as one of Britain’s finest character actors, Alec Guinness is probably best known to a new generation as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars.
Guinness never seemed entirely happy about being taken for an ageing Jedi but, since he’d wisely opted for a percentage of the gross – on what many perceived as a low-budget kiddies’ film – there were compensations.
In Kind Hearts..., Guinness famously plays all eight members of the aristocratic d’Ascoyne family, including suffragette Lady d’Ascoyne. This grandstanding turn somewhat overshadows the underrated Dennis Price, in the lead, as Louis Mazzini. The embittered heir to the family estate, Mazzini schemes to remove the d’Ascoynes, who stand between him and what he sees as his rightful inheritance... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/Nightmare-On-Elm-Street-1984.php   Locations: Los Angeles.

Wes Craven’s surreal, reality-shifting movie, elmstreets ahead of the stalk’n’slashers with which it’s usually bracketed – and launching the phenomenon that is Freddy Krueger – was filmed on real locations around Los Angeles.
The school is John Marshall High School, 3939 Tracy Street in Silverlake, which numbers Leonardo DiCaprio among its ex-pupils. A regular screen star, with a resumé stretching back to the Fifties, and two dramas of teenage angst: John Frankenheimer’s 1957 The Young Stranger and Nicholas Ray’s 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause. Since then, it’s featured in 80s romance Pretty In Pink, bodyswap comedy Like Father, Like Son, the original big-screen film of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, Grosse Point Blank, and its playing fields hosted the carnival at the end of Grease... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Mimic.php   Locations: Toronto.

Genetically modified insects are released into ‘New York’ in an attempt to combat a disease being carried by cockroaches. It’s OK, though, the roaches are sterile…
Guillermo del Toro all but disowned the production after interference by the producer (though a Director’s Cut has since appeared on Blu-Ray), but it’s still a genuinely creepy horror with typically imaginative flourishes.
Apart from the occasional establishing shot of Manhattan, the film was made entirely in Toronto.
The opening scene of a strange hospital ward lined with weirdly illuminated beds is the art deco Harris Water Treatment Plant, 2701 Queen Street East, east of downtown on the Lake Ontario shore... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/p/Pans-Labyrinth.php   Locations: Spain.

Not really anything to do with Pan (the title translates simply as The Faun’s Labyrinth), Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film dazzlingly shifts between an elaborate fantasy world and the brutal realities of Forties Spain under the Franco regime.
Set in ‘Navarra’ after the end of the Spanish Civil War, the remaining Republican rebels hide out in the picturesque Scots Pine forests of the mountainous Sierra De Guadarrama region northwest of Madrid.
The old mill, where ten-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) escapes from the world of her fascist stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi López) into the realm of the ambiguous faun (Doug Jones, who also plays the scary Pale Man), was a set built to the very detailed designs of del Toro near the village of San Rafael... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/o/Odd-Couple.php   Locations: New York.

The cast for the big screen adaptation of Neil Simon’s classic play seems so perfect, it comes as a surprise to remember that the original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols) starred Walter Matthau and Art Carney. And the film was almost directed by Billy Wilder.
The apartment shared by slobby Oscar (Matthau) and prissy Felix (Jack Lemmon) is 131 Riverside Drive at 85th Street overlooking Riverside Park on Manhattan’s West Side... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/Abre-Los-Ojos.php   Locations: Madrid.

César (Eduardo Noriega) slips between dream states in the film remade in 2007 by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky. The original (and far better) version is set in Madrid.
César finds himself driving through a mysteriously deserted city, and it’s on Madrid’s main shopping street, Calle Gran Via at Calle de los Tudescos, that he gets out of his car wondering what’s happened to the world.
When he accepts a lift from the desperate girl he knows as Nuria (Najwa Nimri), she suicidally drives the car off the road a little south of Ronde del Sur at Entrevias... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/v/Vanilla-Sky.php   Locations: New York.

Cameron Crowe’s reworking of the 1997 Spanish film Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) relocates the story from Madrid to New York. It’s probably best not to compare the films and enjoy each on its own merit.
The apartment of wealthy publisher David Aames (Tom Cruise) is, of course, the famous Dakota Building, 1 West 72nd Street at Central Park West.
Memorable as the ‘Bramford’ in Roman Polanski’s film of Rosemary’s Baby, the Dakota no longer permits filming, so only the exterior is seen. The studio-built interior looks a lot more glamorous than it did when Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse lived there... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/Killing-Of-Sister-George.php   Locations: London.

Robert Aldrich made his name with tough action movies (Apache, Kiss Me Deadly, The Dirty Dozen), but in 1962 directed camp classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, spawning the overwrought, Grand Dame Guignol genre which provided late-blossoming career opportunities for Hollywood’s ex-leading ladies.
Bold in its day, this broad adaptation of Frank Marcus’ black comedy, about a TV soap star on the verge of losing both her job and her young female lover, Childie (Susannah York), is saved by terrific performances, especially from Beryl Reid, who originated the role on stage. And the film has the proud distinction of having been banned in Norwich... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/f/Fast-And-The-Furious.php   Locations: Los Angeles.

Rob Cohen’s Los Angeles-set street-racing movie belts along with the power and speed of a rice rocket. It opens with Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker) testing his car in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium, 1000 Elysian Park Avenue.
Cohen wanted to emphasise the overlooked neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and sets the world of Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) in a picturesque and popular area of Echo Park, north of downtown Los Angeles.
Toretto’s house is 722 East Kensington Road, and ‘Toretto’s market and diner’, where O’Conner insinuates himself into the community, is the nearby friendly local grocery store Bob’s Market, 1234 Bellevue Avenue at Kensington Road... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/e/Eternal-Sunshine-Of-The-Spotless-Mind.php   Locations: New York; New Jersey.

If you’ve seen Total Recall, you’ll know it’s probably not a good idea to tamper with your memory, as exes Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) and Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) discover when they rashly decide to purge themselves of all traces of their relationship.
The film is set in New York, where Joel supposedly lives in ‘Rockville Centre’ on Long Island, but the rail station at which he makes the apparently spontaneous decision to visit the coastal town of Montauk on a chilly Valentine’s Day, is Mount Vernon East Station, 1 East First Street, Mount Vernon, about 14 miles (30 minutes or so by rail) from Grand Central Terminal in Upstate New York. And around 80 miles from Montauk, which stands on the far eastern tip of Long Island... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/k/Kes.php   Locations: Yorkshire.

A glimpse of hope, in an environment where life consists of little more than getting by, is casually snuffed out in Ken Loach’s still heart-wrenching adaptation of Barry Hines’ book A Kestrel For A Knave.
It’s set in the industrial north of England, in the distant-seeming days when the area was still home to a thriving mining industry. Authenticity is heightened by the use of real South Yorkshire locations, around the villages of Hoyland and Tankersley, at Junction 36 of the M1 between Sheffield and Barnsley, and in Barnsley itself... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/l/Long-Good-Friday.php   Locations: London.

The ultimate ‘London film’? Perhaps. The Long Good Friday is certainly one of the few British thrillers that can stand up against the best from the US, as gangland boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is unwittingly caught up in shady deals with the IRA.
The film opens in ‘Northern Ireland’, with Shand’s right-hand man Colin (Paul Freeman) getting involved in some very shady financial dealing. In fact, the movie was shot entirely in London (with a little ‘Irish’ scenery shot in Scotland) and ‘Fagan’s’, the bar in which Colin hits on the doomed Irish lad, is Grade II listed boozer The Salisbury, Green Lanes, at the corner of St Ann’s Road, in Harringay, north London.
Its slightly faded ambience can also be seen in Richard Attenborough’s biopic Chaplin, and more recently, the pub appears under its own name as the big, bustling pub where Miranda Richardson looks for Gabriel Byrne in David Cronenberg’s Spider.
The pub was looking a bit down at heel, but in 2003 was beautifully renovated to become... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spy-Kids-3.php   Locations: Texas.

Sadly, the wit and invention of the first two movies is replaced by endless slam-bang 3-D cartoon graphics filmed in the studio.
The deserted water park, ‘Agua Park’, in the Chinatown spoof opening is Schlitterbahn Waterpark Resort, Common Street, in New Braunfels.
The final battle, in the real world, is fought on Congress Avenue, in front of... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spy-Kids-2.php   Locations: Texas; Costa Rica.

Robert Rodriguez maintains the level of invention in this sequel, including an homage to animator Ray Harryhausen (reprising the sword-swinging skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts).
The ‘Troublemaker Theme Park’ (named after Rodriguez’s studio, and invented when Disneyland refused permission to film in their park), where Juni (Daryl Sabara) rescues the President’s daughter from the Juggler, is Six Flags Over Texas, in Arlington, at the intersection of I-30 and Highway 360 between Dallas and Fort Worth. Disappointingly – but perhaps not surprisingly – you won’t find the ‘Whippersnapper’, the ‘Vomiter’ or the ‘Juggler’, which were CGI creations... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spy-Kids.php   Locations: Texas; Chile.

Robert Rodriguez’ inventive romp was filmed almost entirely in the Texas state capital, Austin, apart from a glimpse of Chile and a little of the director’s home town, San Antonio.
You probably won’t get the chance to visit the breathtaking location for the wedding of agents Gregario Cortez (Antonio Banderas) and Ingrid (Carla Gugino) in ‘South America’, unless you’re extremely well-connected in Austin. It’s Villa del Sol, the private home of Beau Theriot, owner of the nearby Oasis restaurant, 300 feet above Lake Travis, (formed when the Colorado River was blocked by Mansfield Dam in the late Thirties), some 12 miles west of the capital.
Sadly, you’ve missed the opportunity to stay at the seductively picturesque, stone-walled home of the Cortez family... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/s/Spy-Game.php   Locations: London; Oxfordshire; Hertfordshire; Washington DC; Virginia; Hungary; Morocco; China.

Tony Scott’s typically energetic thriller seems to bounce around the globe but, although there are some far flung locations, a surprising lot of it is simply an imaginative use of London and its environs. Take the ‘Chinese’ prison at ‘Su Chou’ where agent Tom Bishop (Brad Pitt) is held. It’s Oxford Gaol, previously seen in A Fish Called Wanda and Wilde. The ‘US Embassy’ in Hong Kong, where Harry Duncan (David Hemmings) is phoned by Muir, is the HQ of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, but after a quick establishing shot, a crafty edit cuts to the Lloyd’s Building, Leadenhall in London. After receiving a phone call, Nathan Muir (Robert Redford) is soon roaring through ‘Washington DC’. There’s a quick glimpse of the US capital, to sell us the location, but the street Muir drives along is Nash Terrace, NW1... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Working-Girl.php   Locations: New York.

Office worker Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) finally betters boss-from-hell Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver) to make it in the cut-throat world of business in this Oscar-nominated comedy.
The opening shot of Tess and co-worker Cyn (Joan Cusack) was stolen during the morning rush hour as the Staten Island Ferry arrives at New York’s Battery Park. A twenty-minute ride with fabulous views of the Lower Manhattan skyline, the ferry is one of the best free rides you can take. it carries 20 million people a year (60,000 passengers a day, not including weekends) between St. George on Staten Island and Whitehall Street in Lower Manhattan... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Wolfen.php   Locations: New York.

Stylish and bloody eco-horror, from the director of Woodstock, has strangely-accented cop Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) investigating a race of superwolves, descended from Native American hunters, who live by scavenging on the Big Apple’s down-and-outs – and others.
The Van de Veers and their chauffeur get chomped at Battery Park, on Manhattan’s southern tip. Their glitzy apartment is in the Chase Manhattan Bank Building, 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, in Lower Manhattan. The strange black and white sculpture outside is Jean Dubuffet’s A Group of Four Trees... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Wolf-1994.php   Locations: New York; Los Angeles.

Considering the talent involved, this reworking of the werewolf myth in contemporary Manhattan is a bit disappointing.
There are a couple of familiar locations: The estate of Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) is Old Westbury Gardens, 71 Old Westbury Road, Old Westbury, on Long Island, which is probably more familiar as the Townsend house in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, as well as featuring in Love Story and Cruel Intentions... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/d/Daddy-Day-Care.php   Locations: Los Angeles.

The high-concept comedy sees newly-unemployed fathers Charlie (Eddie Murphy) and Phil (Jeff Garlin) finding themselves operating a successful Day Care business looking after the local kiddies.
Charlie’s pleasant suburban home is 351 Congress Place, off Orange Grove Boulevard in the leafy western reaches of Pasadena.
The rival ‘Chapman Academy’, run by ruthless Gwyneth Harridan (Anjelica Huston) is the Milbank and McFie Residence, 3340 Country Club Drive at Arlington Avenue between Pico and Olympic Boulevards, midtown Los Angeles... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/m/Meet-The-Fockers.php   Locations: Los Angeles.

Inevitably the set-up becomes more formulaic in the sequel, but Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand add a bit of sparkle as the hippyish parents of Gaylord Focker (Ben Stiller).
Fans of TV’s Fantasy Island will no doubt find the Fockers’ eccentric ‘Miami’ home strangely familiar, which featured in the show’s opening credits.
It’s the Queen Anne Cottage, in the grounds of the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia, to the east of Pasadena... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/n/Notes-On-A-Scandal.php   Locations: London.

Patrick Marber (who wrote the play Closer) adapts Zoe Heller’s novel, and the lovely Judi Dench gets the chance to play the spectacularly nasty Barbara Covett, a manipulative schoolteacher who exploits her younger colleague’s affair with an underage student.
The film is set mainly around north London, established early on with a shot of Archway Bridge, over Archway Road, the main A1, which gives its name to the area. It’s dubbed Suicide Bridge and it’s not hard to see why... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/i/Inside-Llewyn-Davis.php   Locations: New York; Minnesota.

The Coen brothers follow a week in the life of a Greenwich Village folk musician in 1961, before Bob Dylan catapulted folk into the mainstream. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is loosely based on Dave Van Ronk, who performed in the Village’s bohemian hangouts, and who died in 2002.
The directors claim the screenplay was inspired by Van Ronk’s memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street – but then they also said that Fargo was based on a true story. The cover for he 1964 album Inside Dave Van Ronk does look extraordinarily like the cover for the fictitious Inside Llewyn Davis, though... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/c/Closer.php   Locations: London.

Veteran Mike Nichols (who directed The Graduate) adapts Patrick Marber’s stage play about four people thrown together by chance, engaged in sabotaging their own lives by constantly making the wrong choices at precisely the wrong time. There’s a slight spoiler, but if you’re checking the locations I’ll go ahead and assume you’ve seen the film.
Obituary writer Dan (Jude Law) bonds with the troubled, pink-haired American ‘Alice’ (Natalie Portman) at the A&E department after she’s knocked down by a cab on the streets of London. The hospital exterior was a then-empty building at 1 Seething Lane, on Seething Lane Garden, EC3, behind the Port of London Authority Building (it’s since been redeveloped to become Addendum restaurant, part of the Apex Hotel). Seething Lane, by the way, was once home to diarist Samuel Pepys... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/j/Jack-Ryan-Shadow-Recruit.php   Locations: London; Merseyside; Hertfordshire; New York; Russia.

Another origins story, this time it’s Jack Ryan (Chris Pine) graduating from student to Marine to CIA analyst. Although set mainly in New York and Moscow, most of the movie was made in London and Liverpool.
The opening really is supposed to be London as the young Ryan wakes from a quick snooze on a bench in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn, to realise something’s happenin’.
He follows the crowd past Old Buildings and through the vaulted Undercroft to Houghton Street and the entrance to the famed London School of Economics. The date is 2001 and along with the others, Ryan watches the events of 9/11 on the TV news report... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/w/Wolf-Of-Wall-Street.php   Locations: New York; New Jersey.

Just as with Goodfellas, some critics got upset that Martin Scorsese’s energetic account of the so-unlikely-that-it-must-be-true career of money-magnet Jordan Belfort doesn’t wind up with a finger-wagging homily on just desserts.
The film hits the ground running, almost literally, as the whacked-out Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) at the height of his drug fuelled success, attempts to land a helicopter in the grounds of his Long Island home.
At the time, the real Belfort’s house was 5 Pin Oak Court, off Chicken Valley Road in Old Brookville near to Glen Cove, but the film uses a more screen friendly mock-Tudor estate at 39 Chestnut Hill Drive, still off the bucolic-sounding Chicken Valley Road but a little to the east towards Oyster Bay... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/American-Hustle.php   Locations: Massachusetts; New York.

Con man Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and his equally cunning partner Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) find themselves having to work for enthusiastic but reckless FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) on an ambitious sting to counteract white-collar crime.
David O Russell freely riffs on the Abscam sting operation conducted by the FBI in the late Seventies, wisely choosing to concentrate on the quirky characters more than the historical facts.
Abscam (a contraction of ‘Arab scam’) hinged on the creation of a fictitious Middle Eastern businessman happy to splash around his oil millions. Complaints of racial insensitivity soon had the FBI claiming the name was short for ‘Abdul scam’, after their invented sheikh... ]]> http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/0/12-Years-A-Slave.html   Locations: Louisiana.

Steve McQueen’s largely faithful adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir takes its strength from Chiwetel Ejiofor’s committed performance and a relentless attention to physical detail that plunges the audience into the sordid reality of slavery (only a misjudged cameo by the producer hits the wrong note).
The production makes terrific use of real locations around Louisiana, allowing the camera to turn a full 360 degrees when needed. Even the opening scenes, set in ‘Saratoga, New York’ and ‘Washington DC’ are filmed in the South.
The street in ‘Saratoga’ of the 1840s, where Northup (Ejiofor) and his family go shopping, is Iberville Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter... ]]>