Chinatown to Nightcrawler to Mulholland Drive to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The city as cinema's second-most-photographed character.
Los Angeles is, with New York, the most-photographed city in modern cinema. The two cities are also structurally different cinematic subjects. New York's specific cinematic register is built on density — the borough geography, the public-transit infrastructure, the street-level human contact (see our New York films list). Los Angeles's cinematic register is built on horizontality — the freeway network, the geographic sprawl, the car-based culture, the specific quality of nocturnal LA light. The films that capture LA's specific texture do so through these features.
Our picks across LA cinema's various sub-registers.
Los Angeles's cinematic specificity is, in some sense, the inverse of New York's. New York-set films typically use the city's specific street-level texture; LA films typically use the city's specific aerial-and-freeway register. The cinematography is consistently different — wider, more-horizontal, with more attention to sky and atmospheric haze. Michael Mann's specific LA-as-character framing across Heat, Collateral, and beyond has shaped subsequent LA cinematography substantially.
The Hollywood-about-Hollywood sub-genre is also specifically LA. The city's industry-town structure produces films that engage the film industry as their actual subject — something New York-set films rarely attempt. Sunset Boulevard, The Player, Mulholland Drive, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, La La Land all operate within this tradition. The Hollywood-on-Hollywood category is, in some sense, what LA cinema is uniquely positioned to deliver.