Movies to Watch before you visit Paris

I have a Paris trip coming up in November, and my preparation so far has been about forty percent logistics and sixty percent lying on the couch watching movies set in Paris. I’ve decided this counts as research. (The logistics half is in my guide to planning a trip to Paris for the first time.)

Here’s the thing about watching Paris movies before you go: you start recognizing places. A set of church steps, a corner café, a bookshop by the river. When you finally stand in front of one of them, you get the small jolt of running into someone you know. That’s worth two hours and a bowl of popcorn.

These are the movies I’d put on your list, with a note on what each one gives you before you land. Most are Paris all the way through. A few only pass through the city for part of the story, and I’ve said so, because you deserve to know before you settle in with a Meg Ryan movie expecting the Eiffel Tower and getting Cannes.

1. Midnight in Paris (2011)

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a screenwriter on vacation in Paris with a fiancée who would very much like him to stop romanticizing the 1920s. Then, one night at midnight, a vintage car pulls up and takes him to the 1920s, where Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein all turn out to be free for drinks.

Watch it for the opening, which is several minutes of nothing but Paris: streets, cafés, rain, sun, more rain. It’s the closest thing to a trailer for the city itself. The steps where the car picks Gil up belong to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, a church in the Latin Quarter near the Panthéon. The steps are real and you can go sit on them. I can’t promise anything about the car.

Paris locations in the movie:

Saint-Étienne-du-Mont church steps, where the car picks Gil up at midnight
Musée de l’Orangerie, home of Monet’s water lilies
Musée Rodin and its gardens
Le Polidor, the Latin Quarter restaurant where Gil meets Hemingway
Hôtel Le Bristol on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where Gil and Inez stay
The Saint-Ouen flea market
Pont Alexandre III, for the last walk in the rain
Versailles, a day trip outside the city

2. American Dreamer (1984)

JoBeth Williams plays Cathy Palmer, a suburban housewife whose husband and two sons mostly notice her when dinner is late. She enters a writing contest built around Rebecca Ryan, the glamorous spy heroine of a popular series of novels, and wins a trip to Paris. Her husband would prefer she didn’t go. She goes. Shortly after she arrives, she’s hit by a car and wakes up in the hospital fully convinced she is Rebecca Ryan. Tom Conti plays Alan McMann, the son of the woman who actually writes the books (Coral Browne), who gets pulled along while Cathy works to stop an assassination plot that exists only in her head. Giancarlo Giannini plays the politician she’s protecting, who keeps getting hurt by her rescues.

It was shot on location in Paris in the fall of 1983, so you get the city as it looked the last time big hair was a reasonable choice. Critics weren’t kind to it when it came out, and it didn’t do much at the box office, but it has fans who will defend it to you at length. I’m one of them. I own a copy and watch it every year before I go to Paris. I’d put it on the list for the setup alone. A woman whose family thinks Paris is a silly idea goes by herself and spends the rest of the movie acting like the heroine of her own spy novel.

Paris locations in the movie:

The Eiffel Tower
The Arc de Triomphe
Notre-Dame
A Bateaux Mouches cruise on the Seine
La Tour d’Argent, where the luncheon for Cathy’s contest win is held
Hôtel de Crillon, Suite 501, where “Demitri” and “Rebecca” live
Stores in the shopping montage:
- Givenchy
- Christian Dior at 30 avenue Montaigne
- Chloé
- Montana
- Thierry Mugler

3. Amélie (2001)

Audrey Tautou plays Amélie, a shy waitress in Montmartre who decides to quietly fix the lives of the people around her. The results are mixed, and a garden gnome is involved. It’s in French with subtitles, which I mention only so nobody is surprised ten minutes in.

This is the movie to watch before you go up to Montmartre, which is where I send you for sunset in my five-day Paris itinerary. The café where Amélie works, Café des 2 Moulins on rue Lepic, is a real place, and people still go there because of this movie. You’ll also see the carousel at the foot of Sacré-Cœur and Amélie skipping stones on the Canal Saint-Martin, which is a nice walk even if you’re not the stone-skipping type.

Paris locations in the movie:

Café des 2 Moulins, 15 rue Lepic
Au Marché de la Butte, 56 rue des Trois Frères, the grocery that plays Collignon’s shop
Sacré-Cœur and the carousel at the bottom of the hill
Canal Saint-Martin
Gare de l’Est, for the photo booth scenes
Studio 28, the Montmartre cinema

4. The Da Vinci Code (2006)

A curator is murdered inside the Louvre, and a Harvard symbologist played by Tom Hanks (who seems like a nice guy) spends the rest of the night decoding clues with a French police cryptologist played by Audrey Tautou (yes, Amélie again; she gets around). Tom Hanks’s hair in this movie is its own mystery, and the film never solves it.

The production got permission to film inside the Louvre, so you get the Grand Gallery and the glass pyramid before you ever buy a ticket. The movie ends at the inverted pyramid beneath the Carrousel du Louvre, the underground shopping area attached to the museum. You can walk in and see it without a museum ticket, which is a good trick to know on a day when the line outside is long and your patience is short.

Paris locations in the movie:

The Louvre: the Grand Gallery, the glass pyramid and the inverted pyramid
Saint-Sulpice church (the exterior only; the church refused to allow filming inside)
The Ritz on Place Vendôme, where Langdon stays
Pont du Carrousel

5. Julie & Julia (2009)

Meryl Streep plays Julia Child, newly arrived in Paris after World War II with her husband Paul and looking for something to do. She enrolls at Le Cordon Bleu and ends up in a class full of men who did not expect her. Running alongside her story, Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, a New Yorker who decides to cook every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year and blog about it. The Julie half is about a woman writing a blog before anyone reads it, and I have no comment.

Watch it for the food. The scene where Julia tastes sole meunière for the first time will make you order it on your first night, and that’s a perfectly good plan. Le Cordon Bleu still operates in Paris, and it runs short classes for visitors if the movie gives you ideas.

Paris locations in the movie (a fair amount of the “Paris” half was actually shot in New York):

Porte des Lilas Métro station, with a vintage train standing in for 1950s Paris
Le Cordon Bleu, the cooking school Julia attends

6. Before Sunset (2004)

This is the sequel to Before Sunrise, which is set in Vienna. You can watch this one on its own, but it lands harder if you’ve seen the first. Nine years after one night together, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is in Paris on a book tour, and Céline (Julie Delpy) turns up at his reading at Shakespeare and Company. He has a flight to catch. They spend the time they have walking and talking, and the movie plays out close to real time.

Of everything on this list, this one is the most like actually walking around Paris. There’s the bookshop, a café, a garden path above the street, and a tour boat on the Seine. Fair warning: it is two people talking for about eighty minutes. If you need something to blow up, go back to The Da Vinci Code.

Paris locations in the movie:

Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Left Bank
Rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre
Le Pure Café
The Promenade Plantée (also called the Coulée Verte), the garden path above the street
The tour boat on the Seine, between Quai de la Tournelle and Quai Henri-IV
Cour de l’Étoile d’Or, the courtyard outside Céline’s apartment

7. Sabrina (1954 and 1995)

In the original, Audrey Hepburn plays Sabrina, the chauffeur’s daughter on a wealthy Long Island estate, who has been in love with the family’s younger son (William Holden) for most of her life. She’s sent to cooking school in Paris and comes back so polished that he finally notices, which is a problem for his older brother (Humphrey Bogart), who needs the younger one to go through with a very profitable engagement.

The 1995 remake, directed by Sydney Pollack, has Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear in the same roles, and sends Sabrina to Paris to work at a fashion magazine instead of a cooking school.

To be honest about it: the Paris part of both movies is short. What you’re really watching is what Paris does to Sabrina, and that’s the part worth borrowing. Watch the 1954 version if you can only pick one. I’ll go further than that. I didn’t like the 1995 version at all. Audrey Hepburn got there first, and she was wearing Givenchy.

Paris locations in the movies:

1954: none, as it turns out. The Paris scenes were shot on a Hollywood soundstage.
1995: the Pont des Arts, where the movie ends

8. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)

Lesley Manville plays Ada Harris, a widowed London cleaning woman in the 1950s who sees a Christian Dior gown in a client’s wardrobe and decides she will have one of her own. She saves, she flies to Paris, and she walks into the House of Dior, where Isabelle Huppert, as the woman who runs the place, is not pleased to see her. It’s based on a Paul Gallico novel.

This is the one I’d hand to any woman thinking about going to Paris on her own. Ada is not young, not rich and not invited, and she goes anyway, with a plan. If the movie sends you looking for Dior, La Galerie Dior on avenue Montaigne is the house’s museum, and it’s a lot easier to get into than the salon was for Ada.

Paris locations in the movie (most of its “Paris” is actually Budapest, including the avenue Montaigne scenes and the Dior salon):

Pont Neuf, where Ada walks with André

9. French Kiss (1995)

Meg Ryan plays Kate, who is afraid of flying and is supposed to be marrying a man who goes to Paris on business and calls to say he’s fallen for a French woman. Kate gets on the plane anyway and ends up next to Luc, a French thief played by Kevin Kline, who has his own reasons for sticking with her.

A fair warning here too: Paris is the first stretch of the movie, and then the story heads south to Cannes and French wine country. If what you want is ninety minutes of Paris, this isn’t it. If what you want is Meg Ryan in 1995 being furious in a very nice hotel, it is exactly that.

Paris locations in the movie:

Hôtel George V, the very nice hotel where Kate loses her bag
Sacré-Cœur and Place des Abbesses in Montmartre
The Champs-Élysées
The Eiffel Tower and the Palais de Chaillot across the river

10. Le Week-End (2013)

Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan play Nick and Meg, a British academic couple who go back to Paris for their 30th wedding anniversary, hoping to get back some of what they had the first time. The hotel they booked is a disappointment, so Meg walks out and they move to one they can’t remotely afford, which sets the tone for the weekend. Jeff Goldblum turns up as Morgan, an old university friend of Nick’s who has done much better in life and would like everyone to know it.

This is the least glossy movie on the list. It’s about a long marriage, money worries and getting older, set in a city that doesn’t care about any of that and stays beautiful anyway. It’s also funny, in a wincing sort of way. If you’d rather stay somewhere you can actually pay for, here’s my review of Hôtel des Comédies in the 10th arrondissement.

Paris locations in the movie:

Hôtel Plaza Athénée on avenue Montaigne, the hotel they can’t afford
Sacré-Cœur
Joséphine Chez Dumonet, the restaurant they land on after rejecting the touristy one, the empty one and the expensive one

11. Something’s Gotta Give (2003)

Diane Keaton plays Erica Barry, a successful playwright, and Jack Nicholson plays Harry Sanborn, a man in his sixties who has only ever dated women under thirty. He has a heart attack at her beach house in the Hamptons, and things develop from there, with Keanu Reeves as the younger doctor who is also very interested in Erica. Nancy Meyers wrote and directed it.

Paris only arrives at the end, so treat this as a bonus. Erica celebrates her birthday at Le Grand Colbert, a real brasserie near the Palais-Royal gardens, which still gets diners who know it from the movie. The last scene is on the Pont d’Arcole, a bridge over the Seine near the Hôtel de Ville. Watching a woman over fifty get the Paris ending is reason enough to include it.

Paris locations in the movie:

Le Grand Colbert, 2 rue Vivienne
Place des Vosges
Pont d’Arcole over the Seine

12. Funny Face (1957)

Audrey Hepburn plays Jo Stockton, a serious young woman working in a Greenwich Village bookshop who has no interest in fashion. Fred Astaire plays Dick Avery, a fashion photographer, and Kay Thompson plays the magazine editor who decides Jo is the new face of her magazine. Jo agrees for one reason: the photo shoot is in Paris, and she wants to hear a philosopher she admires.

It’s a musical, and it goes all over Paris. The best-known moment has Hepburn in a red gown coming down the Louvre’s grand staircase in front of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, shouting “Take the picture!” That staircase and statue are still there. You can stand at the bottom and try it yourself, though the security guards may not share your enthusiasm.

Paris locations in the movie:

The Louvre, including the staircase below the Winged Victory
The Eiffel Tower, where the “Bonjour, Paris!” number ends
The Palais Garnier opera house
The Champs-Élysées
Montmartre
Château de la Reine Blanche in the Chantilly forest, a day trip outside the city

13. Charade (1963)

Audrey Hepburn again (she spent a lot of the 1950s and 60s in Paris, on screen at least). This time she plays Regina Lampert, who comes back from a ski trip to find her apartment emptied and her husband dead. Three men think she knows where he hid a fortune, and Cary Grant keeps appearing to help, under a different name every time she turns around.

If you’re planning a cruise on the Seine, watch this first. Reggie and Cary Grant’s character take a night ride on a bateau-mouche on the stretch of river beside Notre-Dame, and it’s hard to watch without wanting to book one. The chase at the end goes through the colonnades of the Palais-Royal, which are open to the public and much calmer when nobody is being chased.

Paris locations in the movie:

The Seine beside Notre-Dame, for the bateau-mouche ride
The puppet theater in the Champs-Élysées gardens
The Palais-Royal colonnades, for the final chase

14. Ratatouille (2007)

Remy is a rat with a very good sense of taste who wants to cook. He ends up in the kitchen of a famous Paris restaurant, hiding under the hat of a young kitchen worker named Linguini and steering him like a puppet. There is also a food critic named Anton Ego, who is the most frightening character on this list, and I’m including the Da Vinci Code killer.

It’s a Pixar movie, which makes it the easy pick if you’re traveling with grandkids, or taking them to Paris someday and want them to be excited about it. The animated Paris is lovely, all rooftops and river and lights at night. The restaurant is invented, but I’d bet anyone who watches this will want to order ratatouille at least once on the trip.

Real Paris places in the movie (it’s animated, so nothing was filmed, but these are drawn in):

La Tour d’Argent, 15 quai de la Tournelle, the restaurant that inspired Gusteau’s
The Seine and Notre-Dame
The Eiffel Tower

Before you press play

Streaming availability changes month to month, so I haven’t listed where to find each one. A streaming guide like JustWatch will tell you what’s on which service right now. For more trips inspired by what’s on screen, see my movie travel page.

You don’t need to watch all fourteen. Pick two or three that match the trip you’re planning. Then, when you’re sitting on those church steps in the Latin Quarter or ordering the sole on your first night, you’ll know which movie you’re standing in. And if one of them leaves you wanting to stay longer than a week, I understand. I sat next to a stranger on a flight and ended up touring a Paris apartment you can buy a share of.