The Naked City (Criterion)

"There are eight million stories in the Naked City," as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film-and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin and newspaperman-cum-producer Mark Hellinger's dazzling police procedural was shot entirely on location in New York City, as influenced by Italian neorealism as American crime fiction. A double Academy Award-winner, The Naked City remains a benchmark for naturalism in noir, living and breathing in the promises and perils of the Big Apple, from its lowest depths to its highest skyscrapers.