Paris, Je t’aime and New York I love you are both collections of short films. The format- split up into a succession of tiny stories- presented as innovatory and the fact that the proclaimed specificity of the cities becomes the actual value of the cinematic product, are intriguing. The article explores the partially fictional urban geographies built from the films. The spatial dimensions within the two films are, however, constricted by production criteria. The article goes on to question the films’status from a critical viewpoint, by studying their public reception and considering them as a system that in fact reproduces the representations associated with Paris and New York. The study approach used on these two specific films could at least partly be applied as an analytical framework for other cinematic cities.