KING OF NEW YORK

KING OF NEW YORK IS one of the great dirty city films of its era, a gangster picture that feels half crime saga and half fever dream. Christopher Walken plays Frank White, a drug lord fresh out of prison who moves back into New York and decides to beome a modern-day Robin Hood type figure. Frank is monstrous, charismatic, ridiculous and magnetic all at once, and the film understands that the danger of power is often tied to glamour. 

The supporting cast is stacked, with Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, Giancarlo Esposito and Steve Buscemi all moving through Ferrara’s New York, but it’s Walken who gives the film its strange centre of gravity. The BFI called it a 1990 gangster classic and singled out Walken’s turn as a career-best performance, and I think that gets close to why the film has lasted. It didn’t land cleanly with everyone when it first came out, but its standing has grown over time, and it’s now widely treated as one of Ferrara’s defining films.