Critics reviews

[The film's] specificity is thrilling and unusual even today, as cities like New York and Los Angeles are still too often utilized vaguely as shorthand for cinematic myth-peddling... The Naked City’s glorious compositions tell their own truth, offering a portrait of a city that’s teeming with honor and evil and decay and beauty, as well as irreconcilable mixtures of all of the above.

The hero of The Naked City is New York itself, forever encapsulated during the hot summer of 1947... The film [is] both a landmark and some sort of masterpiece.

Any semblance of reality is outdone by the film’s delightfully weird, nearly omnipresent voice-over and its expressionistic recreations of the internal monologues of everyday schlubs in the street. Dassin, who would go on to make the classic proto–heist film Rififi, seems as much interested in Hitchcockian flair as he is in naturalism, anyway

[The Naked City] is hard-hitting, gripping and a hymn to the excitement of New York City where it was shot entirely on location.

Despite its reputation, [The Naked City is] a rather overrated police-procedure thriller which has gained its seminal status simply by its accent on ordinariness and by its adherence to the ideal of shooting on location.

A first-rate police thriller... shot memorably in New York locations. It influenced many other documentary-style thrillers of the period and even launched a TV series.

The drama is largely superficial, being no more than a conventional "slice of life" ... And the incidental details—the "humorous" and "poignant" vignettes—which have been scattered about in profusion seem studiously over-written and even contrived.

Naked City is a boldly fashioned yarn... Throughout, despite its omniscient, stark melodrama, there has been no sight lost of an element of humor.