On Michael Mann's Heat (1995) and why it remains the definitive crime procedural.

Heat is a three-hour film about two men on opposite sides of the law who respect each other in ways that they can't fully articulate. It was preceded by an earlier television version that Mann used as a development exercise, and the theatrical version has a formal maturity that is inseparable from that development.

The famous diner scene between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro is the most discussed scene in the film but not the most formally interesting. The bank robbery sequence and its aftermath — the firefight on the street, the cars, the sound design — is the most technically accomplished action sequence in American cinema and it uses location sound recording in a way that no film before it had.

Mann recorded the gunfire in the actual Los Angeles street location rather than using post-production sound effects. The acoustic properties of the location — the reverberation off glass and concrete — create a sound that has no cinematic precedent. The audience had not heard guns in a film sound like this before because guns in films had never been recorded this way.

Heat is a film about professionalism and what professionalism costs. Both McCauley and Hanna are professionals who have organized their entire lives around their craft, and both pay the same price for that organization.