Directed by Howard Franklin • 1992 • United States Starring Joe Pesci, Barbara Hershey, Stanley Tucci

Loosely inspired by the life of legendary New York City photojournalist Weegee—whose noirish portraits of life and death in the urban jungle seared themselves into the national consciousness—this moody, 1940s-set thriller features a rare leading performance from Joe Pesci (fresh from his Oscar win for GOODFELLAS) as Leon “Bernzy” Bernstein, a tabloid photographer who beats everybody to crime scenes to snap his sensational photographs. When he falls for a beautiful nightclub owner (Barbara Hershey) being menaced by the mob, the streetwise shutterbug finds himself in the kind of trouble he normally only documents.