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I have an ongoing love affair with New York, the city that formed me. I was born here, and though I’ve left occasionally, it was never for very long. The pace, color, and excitement of this amazing town always drew me back like a magnet, and holds me still. No surprise then that I love experiencing the potent nostalgia of great films that recall the New York City of my early years.

I will always remember the pure exhilaration I felt watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” for the first time in a theater thirty years ago. The memory is so clear of first realizing that I was experiencing an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, deliriously entertaining but also completely fresh and unique. What made “Pulp” so exciting and distinctive?

Here we go. The holiday parties are over, and once again those of us in northern climes heave an inward sigh and steel ourselves for four months of cold, snow and ice.

Man versus Nature. It’s a struggle as old as the movies—even as old as man himself. (Man, that’s old.) Many movies have thrilled us by pitting their leading characters against the elements. Floods, blizzards, tornados, tsunamis and other cases of severe and, at times, catastrophic weather conditions are the stuff film drama is made of.  It seems that hardly a calendar year goes by without stormy weather whipping around audiences. Earlier his year, Russell Crowe’s “Noah” encountered a flood of Biblical proportions. And just when we thought the memory of Hurricane Sandy was starting to fade, “Into the Storm” arrives in theaters shortly, bringing destructive cyclones and tornadoes with it.

It boggles the mind that only a couple of generations back, women were sometimes referred to as “the weaker sex.” That’s not only sexist, but misleading.  Plenty of tough, cunning, even deadly female characters have graced the screen over the past six decades that prove this idiotic saying wrong.   Here are an even dozen.

In his hey-day, William Powell was the epitome of sophistication, wit and urbanity, with his distinctive baritone voice, custom tailored suits and pencil thin mustache. During the 1930s and 1940s, Powell was a bona fide box-office draw, starring opposite Myrna Loy as a tippling detective in “The Thin Man” series, as the sly hobo-turned-high society butler in the classic screwball farce “My Man Godfrey,” or in “The Great Ziegfeld,” playing legendary theater impresario Flo Ziegfeld.

Film lets us move in with idealized families, the families we would happily join if they were real and would have us. Here, we have gathered our favorites into one warm, harmonious place. We can smell the cookies baking from here…