OK, so New York has its great movies: Manhattan and Taxi Driver, Wall Street and Escape from New York. But has Earth anything to show more fair – as William Wordsworth, who would surely be working as a successful movie location scout rather than a poet were he living today, put it – than London as a bewitching backdrop for the modern movie? Increasingly, eight out of ten leading film directors prefer it.

Admittedly, David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which opened The Times BFI 51st London Film Festival last night, doesn’t paint the capital in a light you might see in a tourist board promo-tional video (unless the tourist board is looking to attract Russian gangsters keen on knife fights and a spot of throat-slitting). But from Antoni-oni’s Blowupto Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill and Love Actually, London looks ravishing on screen. It offers a beguiling cocktail of culture, couture, metropolitan dash and a skyline that gracefully marries Wren domes with City spires of glass. Woody Allen has fallen in love with making movies in London. And now, with the fashion for remakes, there is no reason why London should not slyly usurp Hollywood’s back catalogue, too.

Allen could rescript Manhattan as London. A Streetcar Named Desire would translate well: just imagine the Marlon Brando character aggressively ordering lager in a Hoxton pub (“Stella! Hey, Stella!”). In Casablanca, Bogart’s line would now run: “Of all the Wagamamas in all of London, you had to walk into mine in Putney!” A remake of The Godfather II as The Blair Years will offer Tony Blair his chance to hiss, knowingly: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”