Every few months, the eternal debate resurfaces: what are the best San Francisco movies of all time? And every few months, people get it wrong. So let's set the record straight.

There's a tier system here, and it matters. At the very top, you've got the films that don't just use San Francisco as a backdrop — they make the city a character. Vertigo is the obvious king. Hitchcock turned our fog, our hills, and our crumbling Spanish missions into a fever dream of obsession. If you haven't watched it, hand in your SF resident card.

Dirty Harry belongs in the conversation not just because Clint Eastwood is iconic, but because it captured a city grappling with real crime and a justice system that couldn't keep up — a plotline that, let's be honest, hasn't exactly aged out of relevance. The Last Black Man in San Francisco is the modern masterpiece: a gorgeous, heartbreaking meditation on who gets to call this city home when the price of admission keeps climbing. If that one doesn't hit you in the chest, you might already be a tech IPO.

Mrs. Doubtfire and So I Married an Axe Murderer are the comfort food picks — pure '90s San Francisco charm, back when a middle-class family could theoretically afford a house in Pacific Heights. Simpler times.

Then there are the deep cuts that cinephiles rightly champion. As one local film buff pointed out, The Conversation — Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid surveillance thriller set in Union Square — is criminally underrated. Same goes for the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which used San Francisco's beautiful architecture to make conformity feel genuinely terrifying. Again, not exactly a dated concept.

Here's our only firm rule: if the movie could've been filmed in Vancouver and you wouldn't notice the difference, it's not an SF movie. We're looking at you, half of Marvel.

The city deserves better than a green-screened Golden Gate Bridge cameo. It deserves Scottie Ferguson driving obsessively through the Presidio. It deserves Jimmie Fails skating through the Fillmore. It deserves Harry Callahan asking some punk if he feels lucky.

Well? Do ya?