This week, you belong to the city — or maybe just Michael Mann.

Lots of filmmakers have shot in cities, made movies about cities, blown up cities in intergalactic conflagrations. But none of them can touch Michael Mann as cinema’s preeminent urbanist. From his first feature, Thief (1981), to his most recent, Blackhat (2015), Mann’s films hum and throb with the energy and allure of the city: its streets and people, the dark nooks and rain-slicked alleys that provide shelter to crime, diners and domestic spaces where danger collides with domesticity. While Mann’s filmography is worthy of its own podcast series, on this week’s episode of CINEOPOLIS Christian and Dante dig into three of his most important — and importantly urban — films: Thief, Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004). Together they form a kind of unofficial trilogy of life in the city. But they also act as skeleton keys to understanding Mann’s films, his aesthetic, and what makes him such a singular force in American movies.