Part 1 – The Masterpieces
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
The films at the top of this list share one thing: the crime is the occasion and not the subject.
Heat is about two professionals who recognize each other. Chinatown is about a man who solves the case correctly and gets somebody killed by doing it. Goodfellas is about what thirty years of it does to a marriage.
The second pattern is procedure. M runs a manhunt from both sides at once, High and Low spends an hour in one room before anybody leaves it, and Rashomon simply refuses to tell you which account was true.
Taken at number one is going to cost me some standing with the film school crowd, and I’m fine with that. I rank these by how badly I want to watch them again, and a film that does one thing with total commitment beats a prestige picture that does ten things politely. What ties this tier together for me is respect for competence on both sides of the law. Crime films where everybody has to be an idiot so the plot can move get no credit from me.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the first of seven parts.
Crime fiction runs on withheld information and the cost of getting it. Work the mechanics in the Mystery Writer’s Handbook.
1. Taken (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taken (2008)
RLR: 10++++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Ninety-six hours, one city, and nothing wasted."
Pierre Morel shot Taken for twenty five million dollars and built the entire film around a single competence.
Bryan Mills knows how to find people. The script gives him no arc, no crisis of conscience, no third act doubt. It gives him a phone call, a runway of ninety six hours, and a series of locked doors he opens in order.
The famous phone call accomplishes what a slower film would spend forty minutes on.
Mills tells the kidnapper exactly what he is and exactly what will happen, and the kidnapper says the four words that make the rest of the film inevitable. Everything after that’s execution. The audience already has the contract and spends the remaining eighty minutes watching it get honored.
Critics called the film thin. They were describing the design. Taken stripped the revenge thriller down to the one element that generates forward motion and threw away the rest, and the two sequels proved the point by adding back the family drama and the moral weight and dying under it. The first film works because nothing in it is optional.
Taken sits at the top of my list and it earned the spot. Too many thrillers pad a good premise with family therapy and a sad backstory, and I’m grateful every time I think about how this one had the nerve to cut all of it. That phone call still thrills me, and it’s the purest statement of intent I know in the genre.
2. Heat (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Heat (1995)
RLR: 10+++ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Two professionals who would rather not, and both of them know it."
Michael Mann spends three hours making both men good at their jobs, and the investment is the only reason the coffee shop scene works.
Six minutes of two professionals acknowledging that each will kill the other and would prefer not to. Neither man threatens. Neither man bluffs. They compare notes on a shared condition and go back to work.
Waingro is the loose variable and Mann puts him in the first scene for that reason. One man on the crew who kills when he doesn’t have to, and every catastrophe in the next three hours traces back to that. A professional operation with one unprofessional member is a different film from a professional operation under pressure, and Mann builds the whole collapse on it.
The structure is a mirror. Hanna’s marriage is failing because he can’t stop working.
McCauley’s life is empty because he never started. Mann cuts between the crews so relentlessly that by the final act the audience has a stake on both sides of the line, and the shootout downtown costs something on every casualty because the film returned to every one of those homes.
Chris and Charlene get the scene that costs the most.
She’s turned by the police, she agrees to bring him in, and then she stands at a window and signals him away with one hand while a detective watches her face. Ashley Judd plays it with no dialogue at all. Val Kilmer reads it from a parking lot and keeps walking.
The window is the moment in Heat that hurts me most. One hand, no words, and a woman whose marriage was falling apart decides to save him anyway. Mann could have trimmed it for time and nobody would have complained. He kept it anyway. That tells me everything about why this film sits so high.
The reload during that sequence is the detail people who know weapons point at, and it exists because Mann hired advisers and shot live rounds on location so the reverberation off the buildings would be real. That detail is the film insisting that these are jobs performed by people who trained, and the insistence makes the ending read as loss instead of arithmetic.
3. Casino (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Casino (1995)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Three hours on how a business is run, and then how it stops being run."
Scorsese opens Casino with Ace Rothstein getting into a car that explodes, then spends nearly three hours explaining how a man that careful ended up there. The answer is an accumulation of small tolerances, each one reasonable at the time, each one essential by the end. The bomb is the opening image because the film has no interest in whether he dies.
The count room sequence is the closest any film has come to explaining how the money left. Scorsese shoots it as documentary: the scales, the drop boxes, the man with the briefcase who’s not counted, the courier flight, the envelope opened in a Kansas City back room. Three minutes of procedure and no dialogue that’s not instruction.
The film is obsessed with procedure. How the count room works, how the skim moves, how a dealer signals, how much a cooler costs the house. Ace narrates it like a manual because he’s built his entire identity on the belief that a system run correctly can’t fail. Nicky is the proof that it can, and Nicky is a person problem.
Ginger is the third failure and the one Ace never sees coming, because he categorized her as an asset with known behavior.
Sharon Stone plays her as somebody who told him exactly what she was in their first real conversation. He heard it and decided the system would hold. The film is a long demonstration that competence in one domain buys you nothing in another.
4. No Country for Old Men (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of No Country for Old Men (2007)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"No score at all, and the wind is doing the work."
The Coens strip the score entirely and leave the film with wind, boots on gravel and the compressed-air bolt. Silence accomplishes what a score would, and it does it better because the audience has to listen for threat instead of being told where the threat is. By the midpoint every quiet room is dangerous.
The border sequence is where the film shows what it costs to be Moss. He buys a coat off a college kid on a bridge for five hundred dollars, walks into Mexico bleeding, and wakes in a hospital with a mariachi band playing in the doorway. The Coens play none of it for absurdity and it’s the funniest thing in the picture.
Chigurh is a consequence with a haircut. The coin toss scenes work because he doesn’t care about the outcome, and the gas station attendant survives on a result that means nothing to either of them. Menace built from indifference outlasts menace built from appetite.
Then the film kills Moss offscreen, hands the last twenty minutes to Bell, and ends on a man describing a dream about his father. Audiences walked out angry. The structure is the argument. The thriller machinery was never the subject, and when the film removes it the remaining question is the one Bell has been asking since the opening voiceover.
Audiences walked out angry, and I’d happily have taken another twenty minutes of Bell. A crime film brave enough to walk away from its own showdown and end on an old man’s dream means more to me than any shootout could. What frustrates me is how many later thrillers borrowed Chigurh’s haircut and skipped the part where the film had something to say.
5. Fargo (FX Series, 2014-present) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fargo (FX Series, 2014-present)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.9/10
"An anthology that reinvents itself every season and keeps its own moral weather."
Noah Hawley took a film with a closed ending and built an anthology that borrows its moral weather instead of its plot.
Every season puts an ordinary person in reach of one bad decision, then follows the decision through people who never made it. The Coens’ fingerprints are on the tone. The structure is Hawley’s own.
Season one sets the pattern. Malvo gives Lester Nygaard permission, and that matters because the series is arguing that the capacity was already there and had been for twenty years. Billy Bob Thornton plays Malvo as an accelerant with no agenda of his own, and the show is careful never to explain him, never to give him an origin, and never to let anyone survive understanding him.
What keeps the anthology from being an exercise is the decency at its center. Molly, Lou, Gloria, each season’s competent ordinary person who simply keeps doing the job while the violence escalates around them. The series isn’t cynical about that competence. It treats patient police work as the only real counterweight to chaos, and it lets that counterweight win without making it easy.
Every film in this tier gives the opposition a full interior life. Build one in the Antagonist Handbook.
6. Baby Driver (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Baby Driver (2017)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Cut to the music, never scored on top of it."
Edgar Wright cut the film to the soundtrack instead of scoring the cut, and the difference is visible in every action beat. Gunshots land on downbeats.
Windshield wipers keep time. The opening chase is choreographed to a single track with no edits that fight the tempo, and the sequence was shot to playback so the performers were working inside the rhythm.
The device isn’t a gimmick because it’s a diegetic reason.
Baby runs music constantly to mask tinnitus from the crash that killed his mother, and the film uses that condition to justify its whole formal system. When the music stops, the film loses its footing on purpose. Silence becomes a threat state. Pull a headphone out and the picture loses its footing, and the audience feels that as vertigo before it registers as plot.
The romance is the weakest element and Wright knows it, so he keeps it small and specific. A diner, a name on a nametag, a mixtape. Doc’s arc in the final act is the risk that pays, because Spacey plays him as somebody who has been reading Baby correctly the entire time and simply chose not to act on it until it cost him nothing.
I enjoy Baby Driver from the first chase to the last. Wright plans every gunshot to the beat, and I can feel the care in every cut.
Plenty of directors drop a hit single under a car chase and call it style. This one built the whole picture on the rhythm and never once cheated on it.
7. Wrath of Man (2021) [full review]
► Read the full review of Wrath of Man (2021)
RLR: 10+ / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Ritchie removes his own style and the film is better for it."
Guy Ritchie drops his usual patter completely and shoots this one flat and cold. No banter, no chapter cards, no camera flourishes. Statham plays H with almost no dialogue, and the film withholds his identity for a full act while letting the audience watch him do things a security guard shouldn’t be able to do.
The structure is four-part and non-chronological, and each section resets what the previous one meant.
The armored car robbery in section one plays as a workplace incident. By section three the audience has watched it from the other side and knows who died and why, and the same footage reads as grief. Ritchie is remaking Le Convoyeur and improving the machinery.
What keeps it from being cold for its own sake is the crew. The men H hunts are given enough interior life that their collapse under pressure is legible, and the final vault sequence works because three separate plans are running at once and each one is competent. Nobody in this film is stupid, and the body count comes from incompatible intentions.
8. M (1931) [full review]
► Read the full review of M (1931)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The police and the criminals hunt the same man, and the criminals are better at it."
The city organizes downward as well as upward. Lang gives the beggars’ union a full operational structure, with corner assignments and a reporting chain, and it’s a blind balloon seller who identifies Beckert by the whistle and a beggar who chalks the M onto his coat. The mark is the film’s title and it’s put there by a man who can’t see.
Fritz Lang made his first sound film about listening. Beckert whistles Grieg, and the whistle is what identifies him, so the film’s central clue exists only because the technology was new enough to be interesting. Lang uses silence with equal deliberation, cutting to empty stairwells and an untouched place setting to report a death without showing one.
Beckert is offscreen for most of his own film.
Lang shows the shadow on a wanted poster, the whistle over an empty stairwell, a hand buying a balloon. The audience spends an hour hunting a sound. When Peter Lorre finally fills the frame he’s small, soft and frightened, and the film has to rebuild itself around that in its last twenty minutes.
The city organizes itself in two directions at once.
The police run a methodical grind of records and raids, and the underworld runs a parallel manhunt because the raids are ruining business. Lang cuts between the two councils as though they were the same meeting, and the joke is structural. Both institutions want the same outcome for incompatible reasons.
The kangaroo court at the end is the sequence that keeps the film alive ninety years on. Peter Lorre pleads compulsion to a jury of professional criminals who chose their work, and the film refuses to resolve the question it raises. The state arrives to take him, and the last line belongs to a mother.
The kangaroo court is the scene I’d make every crime writer sit through. A room full of criminals judging a man for being worse than them, Lorre begging for understanding, and I still can’t settle how I feel about any of it. Ninety years on, most crime films don’t have the courage to leave a question that open.
9. Scarface (1932) [full review]
► Read the full review of Scarface (1932)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Held for two years by censors and released with a subtitle it did not want."
Howard Hawks shot Scarface in 1930, and the Hays Office held it for two years, forcing an alternate ending and a subtitle about national shame. The version that survives is still the most violent American film of its decade, and the studio’s anxiety is legible in every frame of the material they bolted on. Thirty two people die on screen in ninety three minutes.
Hawks marks each killing with an X somewhere in the frame.
A ceiling beam, a scoreboard, a scar, a coat rack. The device is systematic enough that audiences started counting, and it converts a gangster picture into something closer to bookkeeping. Tony Camonte’s rise is presented as arithmetic, and the film keeps the ledger in the mise en scene.
The Cesca material is the part the censors understood correctly and objected to for the wrong reasons. Tony’s possessiveness toward his sister is written as jealousy and played as something else, and the film never states it. Paul Muni’s performance is broad everywhere except in those scenes, where he goes quiet and the picture gets uncomfortable.
10. The Maltese Falcon (1941) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Maltese Falcon (1941)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"The bird is worthless, and the film says so out loud."
John Huston shot his first film almost entirely in interiors, with the camera at waist height and long takes that let the actors work. There’s no action to speak of.
Archer dies offscreen in the first ten minutes, and everything afterward is people in rooms lying to each other with enormous precision. The budget was three hundred thousand dollars and the schedule was eight weeks.
Huston cast Sydney Greenstreet at sixty-one in his first film role and Peter Lorre opposite him, and the two of them run most of the middle of the picture. Greenstreet plays Gutman as a man enjoying himself enormously, laughing through threats, and the laugh makes him dangerous. Lorre gives Cairo real fear underneath the perfume.
Spade is the innovation. Bogart plays him as someone with no visible moral center until the last three minutes, and Huston never softens him. He was sleeping with his partner’s wife. He takes Gutman’s money. He plays every party against the others for his own reasons. The audience follows him on competence alone for eighty minutes before it learns he’s a code.
The final scene converts the whole picture. Spade turns Brigid over and explains why in a speech that’s about professional obligation and not about justice, and then he admits he might love her. Huston lets both things stay true. The bird is worthless, the speech isn’t romantic, and the film ends on the correct joke.
Wilder, Chandler and Tarantino are here because of what their characters say while discussing something else. Learn the technique in the Dialogue Handbook.
11. Double Indemnity (1944) [full review]
► Read the full review of Double Indemnity (1944)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"The love story is between the salesman and the claims adjuster."
Wilder opens with Neff bleeding into a dictaphone and confessing the whole plot, so the film spends ninety minutes on a crime whose outcome is already announced. What remains is method, and Wilder makes method thrilling by making it procedural. The train, the crutches, the platform, the timing. Suspense survives the loss of surprise when the audience is handed a plan it can audit against the clock.
The train is the sequence everything else is built to support.
Neff on the observation platform on crutches, the one passenger who won’t leave, the drop, the timing against the schedule. Wilder shoots it in near silence and lets the audience run the plan alongside Neff. They notice the man in the doorway at the same moment he does.
Chandler and Wilder loathed each other and produced dialogue that no one has surpassed in the genre.
The speedometer exchange in Phyllis’s living room is a seduction conducted entirely in traffic-violation metaphor, and neither character breaks the conceit. The audience understands exactly what the two of them are negotiating because neither of them states it. Neither character breaks the conceit for a single line, and neither one has to.
The speedometer exchange is my favorite stretch of dialogue in any American film. Two people negotiating an affair in the language of a traffic ticket, and neither one blinks. Most writers would have had a character spell it out by the second page. Wilder and Chandler trusted the audience, and I’m grateful to them for it.
Keyes is the film’s real love story and Wilder knows it. Edward G. Robinson plays him as a man whose only intimacy is accuracy, and the little man in his stomach is the closest thing the picture has to a conscience. The final exchange over the match, with Neff on the floor, is the payoff for a relationship the film built in fragments.
12. Rashomon (1950) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rashomon (1950)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Four accounts, no adjudication, and a word in the language afterward."
Kurosawa films four accounts of the same killing and gives each one full visual commitment.
The bandit’s version is athletic and comic. The wife’s is a tragedy of humiliation. The dead man’s, delivered through a medium, is a story of honor. The woodcutter’s is squalid. None of them is presented as false while it runs.
The woodcutter’s account is Kurosawa’s addition and it changes the whole argument. He claims to have seen everything, tells a version in which all three participants are cowards, and then a priest points out that he stole the dagger. The one witness with no stake in the killing turns out to have a stake in something else.
The camera moves constantly through the grove, tracking with the actors and shooting directly into the sun, and Kazuo Miyagawa’s work there changed what cinematographers believed was possible. The visual instability is the argument.
There’s no fixed vantage point in the forest and no fixed vantage point in the testimony. Kurosawa refuses to give the audience a stable position from above the grove.
The frame story under the gate is where Kurosawa puts the weight. Three men shelter from rain and try to decide whether anything anyone says can be trusted, and the film answers with an abandoned infant. The woodcutter takes the child. Kurosawa has built an epistemological trap and then escapes it through an action instead of an argument.
13. Some Like It Hot (1959) [full review]
► Read the full review of Some Like It Hot (1959)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Two witnesses to a massacre hide in a band, and the film never forgets the massacre."
Wilder built a comedy on a real massacre. Joe and Jerry witness the Saint Valentine’s Day killings, and the film’s entire premise is two men who will be murdered if they’re recognized. The disguise is survival, and Wilder keeps the gangsters circling through the second act so the stakes never soften.
Shooting in black and white in 1959 was a fight Wilder won because the makeup tests in color made Curtis and Lemmon look grotesque. The choice bought him plausibility, and plausibility lets the audience stay inside the premise long enough for the character work to land. It lets the audience stay inside the premise long enough for the character work to land instead of counting the seams.
Monroe is doing something harder than the two leads. Wilder writes Sugar as a woman who has been used by exactly the type of man Joe is pretending not to be, and Monroe plays the self-knowledge without self-pity. Curtis’s Cary Grant impression is funny. Her performance gives the last twenty minutes a cost, and Wilder ends on a line that refuses to resolve anything.
14. High and Low (1963) [full review]
► Read the full review of High and Low (1963)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"An hour in one room, then a city-wide manhunt, and the cut between them is the film."
Kurosawa splits the film in half and shoots each half in a different mode.
The first hour is a chamber piece in Gondo’s hilltop house, mostly static, widescreen compositions that arrange people by where they stand on the decision. The second hour is a procedural that moves through Yokohama on foot, handheld and hot. Kurosawa blocks the hilltop scenes so nobody regroups after taking a position.
The ransom drop on the bullet train is seven minutes of pure engineering. A window that opens three inches, a bridge the money has to clear, detectives strung along the carriage with cameras, and a schedule nobody can slow. Kurosawa shot it with multiple cameras on a working train and refused to fake any part of the geography.
Kurosawa states the moral problem cleanly and then leaves it alone. The kidnappers took Gondo’s driver’s son by mistake.
Paying the ransom destroys Gondo financially and saves a child who’s not his. Kurosawa refuses to make the choice easy by making Gondo sympathetic, and Mifune plays him as a man calculating right up to the moment he stops.
The kidnapper’s motive is the part that still unsettles. He could see the house from his room. That’s the whole of it, and the final scene behind the glass gives him no confession and no remorse, only a demand to be looked at. Kurosawa built the geography of the film to make that sightline literal.
That scene behind the glass chills me more than any shootout on this page. The kidnapper wants to be looked at and nothing else, and Kurosawa refuses to hand me a tidy reason to hate him. I’d trade a dozen modern serial-killer thrillers with their neat trauma backstories for that one sightline.
Tension in these films comes from incompatible competence, never from stupidity. Take that apart in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
15. Chinatown (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of Chinatown (1974)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"He solves it correctly. That is what gets her killed."
Jerry Goldsmith wrote the score in ten days after the original was rejected, and it’s built on a solo trumpet that never resolves. Four pianos, four harps, two percussionists and strings, arranged so the melody always sounds like it is arriving from another room. The film would be a different picture without it and everybody who worked on it knew so.
Robert Towne wrote a detective who solves the case correctly and gets a woman killed by doing it. Gittes is competent at every stage. He finds the water fraud, he identifies Cross, he works out the relationship between Evelyn and Katherine. Every correct deduction moves the tragedy one step closer. The film is precise about the causal chain and never lets him off it.
Polanski shoots almost everything from Gittes’s vantage, so the audience knows exactly what he knows and no more. The nose bandage runs through most of the film and keeps the detective visibly damaged. It’s a small choice that does enormous work against the genre’s usual invulnerability. He’s not operating above the story. He’s inside it and losing.
Water is the whole case and Polanski keeps showing it in the wrong places. A dry riverbed running at night. A reservoir that drowns a man in the middle of a drought. Salt water in the lungs of somebody found in fresh. Gittes photographs the evidence for two acts before he understands what he’s been looking at.
The ending was Polanski’s and Towne fought it.
Towne wanted Evelyn to survive. Polanski, who had reason to know, insisted the film had to end with the powerful man walking away with the child. Cross is never punished, never exposed, never even meaningfully inconvenienced. The last line is an instruction to stop trying. Cross walks away with the child and the water rights, and nothing Gittes did touched him.
That ending still hurts, and it’s supposed to. Part of me wants Towne’s version, the one where Evelyn gets out, and Polanski was right to deny it to me. A crime film where the powerful man walks away untouched is the most honest thing in this tier, and it’s why the picture has outlasted a hundred tidier ones.
16. The Godfather Part II (1974) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Godfather Part II (1974)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10
"Two timelines, one rising and one hollowing out."
Coppola runs two timelines against each other and refuses to comment on the juxtaposition. Vito builds a family in Little Italy through favors and patience. Michael dismantles his own through suspicion and distance. The cuts between them do the arguing, and the film never once puts a character in a position to state the comparison.
The Senate hearing is the sequence that ties both timelines together. Frank Pentangeli is prepared to testify, Michael arrives with Frank’s brother flown in from Sicily and sits him behind the table, and the brother never says a word. Pentangeli recants on the spot. Nobody makes a threat out loud and the entire room understands what has happened.
The Cuba sequence is the hinge. Michael watches a rebel detonate himself and grenade and understands that the government will fall, and Roth doesn’t. It’s the last moment in the trilogy where Michael’s intelligence buys him an advantage instead of isolating him further. After Havana every correct read he makes costs him somebody.
De Niro built the young Vito out of Brando’s later voice and then worked backward, learning Sicilian and playing most of the role in it. He won the Academy Award for a performance that’s almost entirely watching: Vito on a rooftop tracking Fanucci, Vito in a theater balcony deciding, Vito carrying a wrapped gun through a festival crowd.
Fredo is the film’s actual subject. John Cazale plays weakness as a man who has spent his life in a role he never chose and took one chance at standing up. The kiss in the boathouse and the boat on the lake bracket a relationship the film has been building since the first picture, and Michael ends it alone in a chair.
17. Midnight Run (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Midnight Run (1988)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"A trip that keeps downgrading, and every reduction is a plot point."
Martin Brest made the best-constructed buddy film of the decade by writing two men who are good at incompatible things.
Walsh is a bounty hunter with a grudge and no money. Mardukas is an accountant who stole from the mob and gave the money away. Neither is lying about who they are. Mardukas stole fifteen million from the mob and gave it to charity, and Walsh is broke enough to care.
George Gallo’s script is a relay. The FBI wants Mardukas, Serrano wants him dead, Moscone wants his bond, Dorfler wants the fee, and every one of them has a coherent reason to be on the same road. The plot generates its own complications because the parties keep colliding, and Brest never has to invent a coincidence.
The film’s real work is in the Chicago scene where Walsh goes to his ex-wife’s house and his daughter offers him her savings. De Niro plays the scene without reaching for it, and Grodin watches from the car. Everything about the ending, including the watch, is earned in that driveway. Grodin watches the humiliation from the car and says nothing about it afterward.
Midnight Run makes me happier than any buddy picture I can name, and the driveway is the reason it’s more than a road comedy. De Niro plays the moment his daughter offers her savings without milking a second of it. Most buddy films since have forgotten that the jokes only land when somebody in the car has something to lose.
18. Goodfellas (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Goodfellas (1990)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.7/10
"Thirty years without a wasted scene."
Scorsese stops the film cold eleven times in the first act with freeze frames and Henry’s narration over them. Each one is a moment Henry is still defending thirty years later, and the device announces that the reader is getting an argument instead of a record. The freezes disappear entirely once the paranoia starts and the film has no time left to explain itself.
Scorsese shoots the first ninety minutes as an advertisement. The Copacabana steadicam shot takes Henry and Karen past a line, down a corridor, through a kitchen and to a table that appears from nowhere, and it’s filmed as seduction because Karen is being seduced and so is the audience. Three unbroken minutes of access, filmed as courtship, aimed at the audience as much as at Karen.
Tommy’s made-man sequence is the best-constructed twenty seconds in the picture. The empty room, the new suit, the door that opens onto nothing, and Jimmy on a payphone afterward destroying a receiver against a wall. Pesci had won the audience over by then. The film can afford to do it without a single line of warning.
Then the film turns. The Lufthansa heist converts money into paranoia, the bodies start appearing in trucks and meat lockers, and the editing accelerates until the final day is a helicopter, a stirred sauce and a phone that won’t stop. Scorsese shot that day in a visual grammar the previous two hours never used.
The last shot is the point. Henry in a bathrobe on a suburban lawn, complaining about egg noodles and ketchup, and the punishment is being ordinary. Liotta plays the whole film as a man addicted to being somebody, and the ending takes that away and leaves him alive. Witness protection is the sentence, and he’s alive to notice every day of it.
Casino, Pulp Fiction and Wrath of Man all reorder their own events to change what the story means. Work the structure in the Plot Handbook.
19. Leon: The Professional (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leon: The Professional (1994)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Gary Oldman conducting a massacre while discussing Beethoven."
Besson opens with a hit and spends the rest of the film on domesticity. Leon waters a plant, drinks milk, sleeps sitting up in a chair with a gun, and watches Gene Kelly musicals. The character is built out of routine, and the routine makes the disruption legible when Mathilda arrives at his door.
Gary Oldman plays Stansfield at a tone that shouldn’t work and does, because Besson gives him a rhythm. He’s quiet, then abruptly not, and the pill-taking ritual before each escalation gives the audience a tell to dread. He’s the only person in the film with institutional power and he uses it entirely for appetite.
The relationship is the thing people argue about, and the international cut makes the argument harder. Portman was eleven. Besson’s framing of Mathilda’s declarations is uncomfortable, and the film is better when Leon’s response is bafflement.
The ending, with the plant in the ground, is the image the film earned. Portman was eleven during the shoot, and the longer international cut makes the argument considerably harder to win.
20. Pulp Fiction (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pulp Fiction (1994)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.9/10
"Vincent dies in the middle and is alive at the end."
Tarantino scrambles the chronology and the scrambling is essential. Vincent dies in the middle and walks into a diner at the end, and the film closes on Jules choosing to quit. Told in order, the story ends with a man dead on a bathroom floor. Told this way, it ends with somebody getting out.
One version ends over a toaster on a bathroom floor. The other ends with a man deciding to walk the earth.
The briefcase glows and is never opened, and Tarantino has refused to explain it for thirty years. The point is what it does to scenes. Every person who looks inside reacts, the audience reads the reaction, and the object stays a hole in the middle of the film that each viewer fills differently. A stated answer would be worth less than the argument.
The dialogue is the reason people quote it and the reason it gets imitated badly. Foot massages, Le Big Mac, the pilot for a television show. The conversations are about nothing and they run long because Tarantino is using them to establish that these men are at work and bored, so the violence arrives as an interruption to a shift.
The imitators spoil this film’s reputation for me. A decade of crime pictures copied the pop culture chatter and missed the point entirely.
The point was that these men are bored at work, and Tarantino knew it. His original still plays fresh, and the Jules ending still works because he had the sense to put it last.
The Bonnie Situation is the structural joke. A film full of professionals spends twenty minutes on two men cleaning a car before a wife gets home, and Harvey Keitel arrives to solve it with the gravity of a summit negotiation. The scale mismatch is the comedy, and Tarantino plays it entirely straight. Nobody in the sequence acknowledges the scale mismatch. That’s the joke.
Honorable Mentions: Crime Films Without a Review Here Yet
These have no review on the site so far. Each one belongs in the conversation, and each one is on the list to be written.
The French Connection (1971)
Friedkin shot New York like a documentary crew with no permits and let Popeye Doyle be unpleasant. The chase under the elevated tracks is still the benchmark because the camera stays in the car and the danger is real. The ending is a missed shot and a title card.
Serpico (1973)
Lumet builds an entire film out of a man refusing money. Pacino plays Serpico as somebody whose integrity is a personality disorder in the environment he chose, and the film is honest about the cost. He ends the picture correct, alone and shot in the face.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
Peter Yates and George V. Higgins produced the most convincing criminal dialogue ever put on film, almost all of it men in cars complaining about money. Mitchum plays a low-level gunrunner with no illusions left. Nobody in it is a professional in the Heat sense.
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Melville runs a twenty five minute heist in near silence and spends the rest of the film on fatalism. Every character is already condemned in the opening narration, and Melville shoots Paris in a blue-gray that makes the whole city look like a waiting room.
Thief (1981)
Mann’s first feature and the template for everything he did after. James Caan plays a safecracker who describes his entire life plan from a magazine collage, and the film is about what happens when a man with a plan takes an investor. The diner scene predates Heat by fourteen years.
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Bob Hoskins spends the film trying to work out who’s attacking his operation and never once considers that he might be too small to matter. The last two minutes are a single close-up that does more than most third acts, and the answer turns out to be politics instead of crime.
City of God (2002)
Meirelles covers twenty years of a Rio favela through a kid with a camera and lets the structure fragment on purpose. The cycle is the argument. A younger gangster who watched replaces every dead one, and the film refuses to give the audience an exit.
Mystic River (2003)
Eastwood shoots a Dennis Lehane novel about three men whose lives were decided in one afternoon in 1975. The film is about certainty in the absence of evidence, and it ends with the wrong man dead and a parade. Robbins and Penn are both doing career work.
Gomorrah (2008)
Garrone strips every romantic convention out of the mob film and shoots five unconnected stories in Naples with mostly non-professional actors. Nobody is glamorous, nobody wins and the economics are the subject. The waste disposal thread is the most damning material in the picture.
Collateral (2004)
Mann shot Los Angeles on early digital because film couldn’t hold the ambient light of the city at night, and the result looks like nothing else. Cruise plays a contract killer as a man with a schedule. The whole film happens in one night inside a cab.
Uncut Gems (2019)
The Safdies build ninety minutes of overlapping dialogue and escalating debt around a man who can’t stop taking one more position. Sandler plays Howard Ratner with no self-awareness and no brakes, and the film denies the audience a single moment of relief until the end takes everything.
Killing Them Softly (2012)
Dominik shoots a small-time robbery and its consequences against 2008 campaign audio playing on every television in the background. The thesis is stated too plainly in the last line, and everything before it’s a precise film about what happens when an economy of trust collapses.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and included because failure is instructive. Each of these had the budget, the cast and the material.
Live by Night (2016)
Affleck adapts another Lehane novel and loses the thread completely. The film covers a decade of Prohibition in Tampa with no scene long enough to build anything, and the protagonist has no discernible want. Beautiful production design attached to nothing. This one hurts more than the rest, because it’s a Prohibition story set in Tampa and a film about my part of Florida should have been a gift. The production design deserved a script. Instead it got a man who never wants anything badly enough to drive a single scene.
The Counselor (2013)
Cormac McCarthy wrote the screenplay directly and nobody edited him. The result is a cast of brilliant actors delivering philosophical monologues at each other while a drug plot happens offscreen. The bolito scene works. Almost nothing around it does.
Basic Instinct 2 (2006)
Fourteen years late and missing the only thing the original had. Verhoeven was willing to commit and this director isn’t. Stone is game. The script treats the audience as though the first film never happened and explains its own premise three separate times.
Mortdecai (2015)
A caper comedy where every performance is pitched at a different film. Depp plays broad, Paltrow plays dry, McGregor plays earnest, and the editing can’t reconcile them. The mustache is a running joke that runs for a hundred and six minutes.
The Big Bounce (2004)
An Elmore Leonard adaptation that removed the plot. The cast is deep and relaxed to the point of inertia, the con is never explained, and the film ends as though somebody lost a reel. Leonard is the hardest writer in the genre to adapt and this shows why.
Bad Boys II (2003)
Two and a half hours of escalation with no structure underneath it. Bay destroys a Miami neighborhood, a morgue and most of a Cuban compound, and none of it accumulates. The chase down the hillside shanty town is the clearest example of spectacle detached from consequence in the decade.
What Do You Think?
Twenty films is a small number for a genre this deep, and the ordering comes from how badly I want to see each one again, with critical consensus left at the door. Taken above Chinatown will annoy people, and I’m comfortable with that, because a list that only repeats the critics’ poll tells you nothing about the person who made it. Tell me which film you’d move, and what you’d drop to make room for it.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
