Part 2 – The Near Perfect
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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 heist films in this tier all do the same thing: they show the plan, then show it failing for a reason the plan couldn’t have anticipated. Rififi runs half an hour in silence, The Killing scrambles its chronology, and Le Trou films the concrete-breaking at close to real duration. The other group is procedural refusal. Zodiac never solves it, Memories of Murder never solves it, and Mindhunter opens with a hostage negotiation conducted correctly in which the man dies anyway.
This is the tier I’d defend loudest in any argument about crime films. Every picture here refuses to give the audience the comfortable version, and I find that more thrilling than any tidy last reel Hollywood has ever sold me. A crime story that wraps everything up on schedule feels like a TV movie with a bigger budget. These twenty trust you to sit in the discomfort, and when a film trusts me that much, I’ll follow it just about anywhere.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the second of seven parts.
Every film in this tier withholds something and makes the withholding the engine. Work the mechanics in the Mystery Writer’s Handbook.
1. Fargo (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fargo (1996)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Marge is the most decent person in the film and also the most competent. The genre almost never allows both at once."
The Coens open with a title card claiming the film is a true story and it’s not. They did it so the audience would accept a series of events that read as too stupid to invent, and the gag works because the film treats every stupid decision with total seriousness. Nobody in Fargo is being written down to.
Jerry Lundegaard drives the story, and William H. Macy plays him as a man drowning in a problem he created and can’t describe out loud. The car lot scene with the TruCoat, the phone calls to GMAC, the scraping of the windshield in the parking lot: Jerry is always doing a small task badly while an enormous one collapses behind him.
Marge arrives thirty-three minutes in, unusually late for a protagonist, and the film gives her a pregnancy, a husband who paints ducks and a decent breakfast before it gives her a case. McDormand plays competence as politeness. She’s the smartest person in every room and never once says so.
The wood chipper is what everyone remembers and the scene before it’s the better one. Marge drives Grimsrud in the back of her cruiser and talks to him about the money and the day. The speech is a person unable to understand, and the film ends on her admitting it.
Marge is my favorite cop in the genre. I’m worn out on detectives who are brilliant because they’re miserable, and McDormand plays a woman who’s brilliant because she pays attention and stays kind. The Coens never wink at her once. When she tells Grimsrud in the back of that cruiser that she doesn’t understand, I believe her completely, and that quiet admission moves me more than the wood chipper.
2. Last Man Standing (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Last Man Standing (1996)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Walter Hill licensed the Yojimbo structure properly. Leone had not, for A Fistful of Dollars."
Walter Hill remade Yojimbo as a Prohibition western and shot it in a Texas ghost town with almost no color in the frame. Bruce Willis plays John Smith with none of his usual warmth, narrating in a flat tone that never asks the audience to like him. He’s in it for money and the film is honest about that for the full length.
The structure is the same one Kurosawa took from Dashiell Hammett and it still works. One man, two gangs, information sold in both directions until the town destroys itself. Hill’s addition is scale: the shootouts are enormous, slow and loud, and bodies fly backward off the impact in a way that reads as cartoonish and was deliberate.
Christopher Walken’s Hickey is the reason to watch it. He arrives late, says very little, and carries a Thompson gun with the calm of somebody who has already decided how the evening ends. The film’s best sequence is Hickey walking a corridor while Smith counts rounds in a room he can’t leave.
3. L.A. Confidential (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of L.A. Confidential (1997)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Ellroy’s novel runs four intersecting plots across years, and Hanson and Helgeland cut three of them to keep the three cops."
Curtis Hanson compressed an Ellroy novel that runs eight hundred pages into a two-hour film by cutting subplots and keeping the three cops.
Bud White is muscle with a private code about men who hit women. Ed Exley is ambition wearing glasses. Jack Vincennes sells cases to a tabloid and is the only one who knows exactly what he is.
The film’s argument is that Los Angeles in 1953 ran on an agreed fiction and that everyone profited from maintaining it. Sid Hudgens sells the fiction, Dudley Smith enforces it, Pierce Patchett manufactures women to fit it. The Nite Owl massacre is a crime and also a story somebody needed told a particular way.
Vincennes gets the best death in nineties crime cinema. He works out the answer, walks into Dudley’s house to confirm it, and Dudley shoots him mid-sentence without raising his voice. Kevin Spacey plays the last two seconds as a man realizing he’s been stupid instead of as a man dying.
Rollo Tomasi is the film’s cleanest piece of construction. It’s Exley’s invention, a name he made up for the man who killed his father and got away, and he tells it once in an interrogation. Vincennes carries it to Dudley as a dying word and Dudley repeats it back to Exley without understanding what he’s just confessed.
Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce were both unknown in America and Hanson fought the studio to cast them, on the argument that the audience needed to not know which one would survive. It’s the single most important decision in the production and it’s invisible on screen. That’s what a good casting decision looks like.
4. Infernal Affairs (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Infernal Affairs (2002)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"It runs a hundred minutes against The Departed’s hundred and fifty-one, and the compression is the whole advantage."
Two men, planted in each other’s organizations as young recruits, spend ten years becoming the thing they were sent to impersonate. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak open on the recruitment and then jump the decade, so the audience meets both men already exhausted by a cover they can no longer separate from a life.
The Morse code sequence on the rooftop is the tightest suspense writing in Hong Kong crime cinema. Yan taps a message with a finger against a railing while Ming listens through a wire from a car below, and both men know the other is there. The scene runs on two people trying not to be identified by a rhythm.
Tony Leung plays Yan as somebody whose only proof of his real identity is a file in a dead man’s computer. Andy Lau plays Ming as somebody who has decided he’d prefer the fake one. That asymmetry is the whole film. One man wants his name back and the other wants his erased.
The elevator ending is why the film outlasted its remake. Scorsese’s version resolves the moral question with a bullet.
This one leaves Ming alive, promoted, saluting at a funeral for a man he killed, and unable to prove to anyone that he was ever anything else. That’s the worse outcome and the film knows it.
I’d take this over Scorsese’s remake without a second thought.
The bullet in the remake gives the audience a satisfaction the story never justified and lets everybody off the hook. Lau and Mak leave Ming saluting at that funeral, promoted and trapped inside a lie he can never put down, and I find that far more frightening than any death. A clean punishment would’ve been a mercy for him, and the film is cruel enough to withhold it.
5. Memories of Murder (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Memories of Murder (2003)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"A rural police force with no forensic capability investigates crimes that required one, and loses."
Bong Joon-ho made a serial killer film in which the police never catch anybody, based on a real Korean case that went unsolved for seventeen years after the film came out. The investigation is incompetent, the interrogations are violent, and the countryside is beautiful in a way that keeps refusing to match the subject.
Detective Park believes he can identify a murderer by looking at a face and the film spends two hours proving otherwise.
Song Kang-ho plays him as neither stupid nor corrupt, exactly, but as a man operating inside a system that’s never required him to be right. The torture is procedure. Nobody in the station thinks it’s unusual.
The tonal control is the achievement. A drop kick in an interrogation room is funny, then a body is found in a drainage ditch and the same officers are standing in the rain, and Bong never signals which tone a scene will be in. The audience is left off balance for the entire film, closer to the experience of the case than any procedural rhythm.
The last shot is what the film is about.
Park, years later, out of the police and in business, stops at the same culvert, looks into it, and then looks directly into the camera. A child has just told him another man looked into that culvert recently and had an ordinary face. Bong is looking at the audience for the killer.
Infernal Affairs, Zodiac and True Detective all run on who knows what and when. Take the machinery apart in the Point-Of-View Handbook.
6. Zodiac (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Zodiac (2007)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Fincher shot some scenes across seventy or more takes and built the film almost entirely from the documented record."
Fincher shot the film like a research project and the obsession is the point. Graysmith is a cartoonist, not an investigator, and the film follows him for twenty-two years as the case destroys his marriage and his career and gives him nothing back except a conviction he can’t prove.
The film is scrupulous about what is known. Where the evidence is thin it says so. The handwriting analysis, the fingerprint that doesn’t match, the jurisdictional mess across four counties: Fincher includes all of it, including the parts that make his own candidate look less likely.
The basement scene near the end has no violence in it at all and is the most frightening sequence Fincher has ever shot. A man offers to show Graysmith some posters, the stairs creak overhead, and the film simply lets the audience calculate how badly this could go. Nothing happens. That’s why it works.
The basement scene disturbs me more than any slasher I can name, and nothing happens in it. I have real affection for how stubborn this film is. Fincher could’ve invented a tidy answer, and he chose to respect the evidence and the man who lost twenty-two years to it. My one gripe is the middle stretch, which tests even my patience, but I couldn’t tell you which piece of paperwork to cut, because the paperwork is where Graysmith’s life drains away.
7. In Bruges (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of In Bruges (2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Two hitmen wait in a Belgian town after a job has gone badly wrong, and the waiting is the film."
Martin McDonagh sends two hitmen to a medieval Belgian town to wait for a phone call and spends the first act letting them be bored. Ken wants to see the buildings. Ray wants to die. The comedy is real and the film never uses it to soften what Ray did in the church. It’s stated flatly and left on the table.
Brendan Gleeson plays Ken as a man with a moral position he’s had for years and never had to test. When Harry orders him to kill Ray, Ken makes a decision in about four seconds and then spends the rest of the film paying for it. The tower sequence is the cleanest piece of self-sacrifice in the genre.
Ralph Fiennes turns Harry into a man ruled by a code so rigid it’s almost a joke, and then the film takes the code entirely seriously in the last two minutes. Harry does what he said he’d do. The film gives him no escape and asks for none.
McDonagh writes dialogue the way he writes for the stage. The arguments run long and the characters keep circling back to points they’ve already lost. The restaurant scene with the Canadians, the alcove scene with the tourist, the fight about Bruges itself: all of it is character work disguised as digression.
8. The Dark Knight (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dark Knight (2008)
RLR: 10 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 9.0/10
"The Joker has no origin, no name and no stated want. That removes every lever the genre normally supplies."
Nolan built a crime film and put a cape in it. He structures the bank heist that opens the picture like Heat: professionals, a plan, and a member of the crew who has been instructed to reduce the split. Nolan introduces the Joker as a man who has out-thought his own robbery team.
Heath Ledger’s performance works because the film gives him no origin. He offers three different accounts of the scars and the film refuses to arbitrate. A villain with a backstory can be understood and therefore contained. The film presents this one as a fact of the city that can’t be reasoned about, only responded to.
The ferry sequence is the thesis stated out loud, the film’s main weakness and also its clearest scene. Two boats, two detonators, a deadline. Nolan sets up a prisoner’s dilemma and then has characters explain what a prisoner’s dilemma is, and the explanation is unnecessary because the staging had already made the point.
Dent is the actual protagonist and most of the audience doesn’t notice. His arc makes the argument about whether institutions can be fixed from inside, his fall is what the Joker was building toward the entire film, and Batman’s decision in the final five minutes exists only to protect the story about him.
The IMAX photography makes a bigger difference than you’d expect. Nolan shot six sequences on 70mm and the scale difference is visible in the frame, so the city physically opens up at the moments the film wants weight. The Hong Kong extraction and the truck flip both read as real events in real space because they mostly were.
9. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)
RLR: 9.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The puzzles make an entire city work as a location, running McClane and Zeus across Manhattan on somebody else’s schedule."
John McTiernan brought McClane back to a city instead of a building and the change is the whole film. The first movie was about geography under a character’s feet. This one is about a man being run around Manhattan on a clock by somebody who’s deliberately wasting his time.
Samuel L. Jackson’s Zeus is written as somebody who doesn’t want to be there and says so constantly, and the film never converts him into a sidekick who learns to love the cop. The argument in the car about race isn’t resolved. They finish the day still annoyed with each other. The genre rarely manages that.
Simon Gruber’s riddles are a misdirection at the scale of the whole plot. Every puzzle exists to keep the entire NYPD focused on schools and subway stations while a truck convoy empties the Federal Reserve. The film tells the audience this halfway through and the reveal still works because the misdirection was working on them too.
I’ll happily take the heat for ranking this beside Rififi. I love Zeus.
Action sequels usually sand the second lead down into a cheerleader, and this one lets him stay irritated and stay right about half the time. McTiernan made a blockbuster that finds a grudge between two men more interesting than its explosions, and I’d sooner watch those two bicker in a car than sit through most of the genre’s shootouts.
Rico wants rank, Cody wants his mother, Dixon wants to outrun his father. Build wants that specific in the Deep Character Handbook.
10. Mindhunter – “Episode 1” (S1E1, 2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mindhunter – “Episode 1” (S1E1, 2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"Fincher shoots the interviews as static two-shots of people talking in bad rooms, and it is the most frightening hour on television."
Fincher opens the series with a hostage negotiation that fails, and Holden Ford watches a man kill himself while he’s still talking. The rest of the hour is Ford deciding that the Bureau’s vocabulary for why people do this is inadequate. That’s the whole premise, stated as a professional problem instead of an interest.
The look is deliberately unglamorous. Fluorescent classrooms, motel carpets, a beige FBI basement with a boiler in it. Fincher shoots conversation with locked-off cameras and long takes, and the restraint makes the eventual interview material land as content instead of as style. The most violent thing in the hour happens in the first four minutes and is never shown again.
Jonathan Groff plays Ford as somebody too pleased with his own curiosity, and the series is clear from the first episode that this is a flaw. The road school sequences show him failing to read a room full of police officers who have seen bodies, and the failure is played straight.
The premise is that language is the tool. Sequence killer, not crazy. The episode is about a man arguing for better terminology in a building where terminology is policy, and it makes that argument dramatic by attaching it to a career he’s risking to make it.
11. True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (S1E1, 2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of True Detective – “The Long Bright Dark” (S1E1, 2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.8/10
"Cary Fukunaga directed all eight episodes, unusual for American television and visible in every frame of the Louisiana exteriors."
Cary Fukunaga shot the entire first season himself and the continuity shows in the opening hour. He photographs Louisiana in 1995 as industrial landscape: refineries, canefields, a flooded church. He stages the crime scene under the tree as ritual and the episode refuses to explain any element of it.
The dual timeline is the structural engine. Two detectives are interviewed separately in 2012 about a case from 1995, and both of them are lying to the camera about something. The audience watches the 1995 footage and then hears the 2012 account of the same day, and the gap between them is the episode’s actual suspense.
McConaughey’s Cohle talks and Harrelson’s Hart doesn’t want to hear it. The car conversations are the show’s signature and they work because Hart is a reasonable man being lectured, so the audience shares his irritation while also finding Cohle more interesting. Pizzolatto keeps both responses live.
12. Little Caesar (1931) [full review]
► Read the full review of Little Caesar (1931)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Edward G. Robinson was thirty-seven and this made him a star, and the closing line is among the most quoted in American film."
Mervyn LeRoy made the first great American gangster picture and Edward G. Robinson built the template every performance since has worked from. Rico is small, vain, humorless and entirely without appetite for anything except standing higher than the man above him. He doesn’t want money. He wants the position. At seventy-nine minutes, almost nothing in it is wasted. Rico arrives in the city, joins a crew, kills upward, hosts a banquet in his own honor, and loses everything inside a year. W. R. Burnett’s novel supplied the arithmetic and LeRoy filmed it without decoration.
Joe Massara is the film’s other half and modern audiences find him harder to place. He wants to dance professionally and Rico can’t process that as a real desire. The jealousy in those scenes is written as loyalty and plays as something else, and the 1931 code had no language for it.
Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico. The last line is delivered from a gutter behind a billboard advertising Joe’s dance act, and the composition is the entire moral of the picture in one frame. LeRoy had the sense to hold it and cut.
Seventy-nine minutes and not an ounce of fat, and I wish more modern crime films had that discipline. Half of them need two and a half hours to say what LeRoy says before the popcorn’s gone.
Robinson’s Rico is petty and vain, and I can’t look away, because the hunger for rank burns through every scene. Mother of mercy is the best exit line any screen gangster ever got.
13. The Killers (1946) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Killers (1946)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Hemingway’s story ends exactly where the film’s first act does, with a man told he is about to die who declines to move."
Siodmak opens with the Hemingway story filmed almost word for word: two men enter a diner, wait for the Swede, and the Swede lies on a bed in the dark and refuses to run. Hemingway stops there. The film spends the next ninety minutes explaining the twelve minutes it just showed.
The structure is eleven flashbacks delivered by an insurance investigator working backward through a life. Riordan is a bland man doing paperwork and the film uses him correctly, as a frame that never competes with the material inside it. Every witness has a reason to shade the account.
Burt Lancaster was twenty-nine and had never made a film. Siodmak shoots him mostly in reaction, and the Swede’s defining quality is passivity: he’s out-thought by Kitty in every scene they share and knows it while it’s happening. Ava Gardner plays her without a single moment of visible calculation.
14. White Heat (1949) [full review]
► Read the full review of White Heat (1949)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Cody learns of his mother’s death in a prison mess hall and has to be carried out by six men, shot in a single take."
Raoul Walsh brought Cagney back to the genre after a decade away and gave him a character with migraines, a mother fixation and no impulse control whatsoever. Rico and Tony Camonte were businessmen. Cody Jarrett is a symptom, and the film treats the criminal organization around him as a hospital ward.
Ma Jarrett runs the gang and Cody sits in her lap during a headache in the middle of a hideout full of armed men. Margaret Wycherly plays her without any softness at all. She’s the strategist, she’s the one who says top of the world first, and the operation collapses within days of her death.
The prison mess hall scene is the best thing Cagney ever did on film. He hears about Ma down the table, keeps eating, and then comes apart in stages across sixty seconds until it takes six men to carry him out. Walsh shot it in one take with extras who hadn’t been told what was coming.
Made it, Ma, top of the world. Cody on a gas tank, shooting into it, going up with it. Walsh ends on a line Cody has been saying since reel one and converts it into something the audience has been waiting the whole film to hear in the wrong key.
The mess hall scene devastates me. Cagney goes from eating his dinner to six men hauling him out in about a minute, and I believe every stage of that collapse. Plenty of actors play crazy by shouting.
Cagney plays a son who’s just lost the one person he trusted, and the madness leaks out around the grief. Made it, Ma, top of the world is the gangster ending I measure every other one against.
Rififi gives thirty-two silent minutes to one job and Le Trou gives even more. Learn when to slow down in the Pacing Handbook.
15. Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) [full review]
► Read the full review of Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Preminger reunited the Laura cast and made the harder film, in which the detective is the killer and conceals it."
Otto Preminger reunited the Laura cast for a film about a detective who kills a suspect with a punch and spends the rest of the picture concealing it. Dana Andrews plays Mark Dixon as a man whose violence is a family inheritance he’s trying to outrun by being harder on criminals than anybody else in the department.
The concealment plot drives the film and it’s unusually well built. Dixon moves the body, plants a suspicion, and then watches an innocent man get charged with the killing he committed. Every step he takes to protect himself tightens the case against somebody else, and he keeps taking them.
Preminger shoots the city as a set of rooms with too many exits and Joseph LaShelle lights it flat and hard. The film has no glamour in it anywhere, including in Gene Tierney’s part, and the choice reads as a deliberate correction to Laura six years earlier.
16. The Asphalt Jungle (1950) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Huston built the heist template here: assemble the crew, establish each specialism, execute the job, watch the people fail."
John Huston made the heist film a genre with this one. Plan, crew, execution, unraveling. Every caper picture since has used the four-part structure and most of them have used Huston’s specific insight: the job goes well and the people go wrong afterward.
Doc Riedenschneider is the planner and the film gives him a weakness that’s not greed. He’s caught because he stops to watch a teenage girl dance to a jukebox and loses four minutes he couldn’t afford. Huston makes the flaw specific, small and humiliating. That’s far worse than making it dramatic.
Dix Handley wants to buy back a horse farm in Kentucky and the film takes the ambition seriously instead of treating it as irony. Sterling Hayden plays him with no self-pity. The last scene, with Dix collapsed in a field while horses walk around him, is the only moment of grace Huston allows anybody. Emmerich is the respectable man and the film is precise about what respectability costs. He’s broke, he intends to double-cross the crew from the beginning, and his suicide is staged as paperwork. Huston puts the real corruption in an office.
17. Rififi (1955) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rififi (1955)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"The blacklist made Jules Dassin unemployable in Hollywood and he left for France with nothing and made this."
Jules Dassin was blacklisted out of Hollywood, took a French job he didn’t want, and made the best heist film ever shot. The centerpiece is thirty-two minutes with no dialogue, no score and almost no sound except tools, and audiences in 1955 sat through it in complete silence.
The silence is functional and not decorative. The crew is working directly above an occupied apartment and any noise ends the job, so the film’s formal constraint is the characters’ operational constraint. Dassin makes the audience participate in the problem by giving them nothing to listen to except the risk.
The umbrella and the fire extinguisher foam are real techniques and police in several countries asked Dassin to cut the sequence. He’d done the research, filmed it accurately, and the accuracy is why the scene generates tension: every tool does something the audience can verify. The second half is the genre’s standard collapse and Dassin gives it its own shape. The crew is undone by a mistress, a nightclub rival and a child, and Tony drives home dying with the money in the back seat while the camera watches Paris go past the window.
Half an hour with no dialogue and no score, and I’d put it against any action sequence ever filmed for sheer grip.
Dassin, pushed out of Hollywood and stuck on a job he didn’t want, turned in the heist film people measure everybody else against. Hard to beat that for a comeback. My one small complaint is that the collapse in the second half can’t match the break-in, though I doubt anything could. Tony driving home dying with the money behind him is a brutal way to go out.
18. The Killing (1956) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Killing (1956)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Kubrick was twenty-eight and ran the whole racetrack robbery out of order with a newsreel narrator reading times like a stopwatch."
Kubrick was twenty-seven and shot a racetrack robbery out of chronological order with an omniscient narrator reading times like a stopwatch. Kubrick borrowed the structure from Lionel White’s novel and pushed it further, doubling back over the same afternoon from five vantage points. No other American film of the decade was structured this aggressively, and the studio wanted it recut.
Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Clay assembles specialists who don’t know each other. That’s the correct professional decision and also the reason it fails. The weak point is George Peatty’s marriage, and Elisha Cook Jr. plays a man so desperate to impress his wife that he tells her everything.
Marie Windsor’s Sherry is the best femme fatale of the decade because the film lets her be bad at it.
Her plan is greedy, rushed and poorly executed, and it destroys everything anyway. Competent villains are easier to write. This one wins by accident. The plan survives the racetrack and dies in a living room in Queens over a suitcase.
The Killing and The Asphalt Jungle wrote the heist structure everything since has copied. Study it in the Plot Handbook.
19. Breathless (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of Breathless (1960)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Godard was told to cut twenty minutes and removed them from inside the scenes instead of between them."
Godard shot it in four weeks with a camera in a wheelchair, no permits and no finished script, and then cut it apart in the edit because the first assembly ran long. The jump cuts were a repair that became the most influential formal decision in post-war cinema.
Michel is a thief who has seen too many Bogart films and is performing a version of himself for an audience that doesn’t exist. Belmondo plays the performance instead of the man, running a thumb across his lip in front of a cinema poster, and the film never lets him have a sincere moment he’s not also watching himself have.
Patricia is the one with the real decision and Jean Seberg plays her opaque. She sells papers, half-considers a life with him, and then turns him in and tells him she did it, on the reasoning that if she betrays him she’ll know she’s not in love. The logic is monstrous and the film treats it as ordinary.
20. Le Trou (1960) [full review]
► Read the full review of Le Trou (1960)
IMDb: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Becker films the concrete-breaking at close to real duration, including one stretch that runs several minutes on a single tool."
Jacques Becker cast a man who had participated in the escape, put him in the film as himself, and then shot the digging in real time. The concrete floor sequence runs several minutes with one tool and no cutaways, and the audience feels the duration because Becker refuses to compress it.
Trust between five men who have no reason to extend it is the subject. Gaspard arrives into an existing cell and the others have to decide within an hour whether to tell him. Every later scene is the group re-evaluating that decision while continuing to dig.
Becker died shortly after finishing it and the film was his last.
There’s no score, no romance, no flashback and almost no backstory. The men are defined entirely by how they work and what they’re willing to risk for each other. Becker had been a director for twenty-five years and stripped everything decorative out of his last one.
Becker films the betrayal at the end without any accusation. One man is taken out, comes back, and the final shot is a cell door and a single word from the man he sold. Becker gives it no music and no reaction shot, and it’s more devastating than any confrontation would have been.
Honorable Mentions: Crime Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site so far for any of these. Each one deserves a place in the conversation and each is on the list to be written.
The Long Good Friday (1980)
Bob Hoskins spends the film hunting whoever is 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 outperforms most third acts, and the answer turns out to be politics instead of crime.
Thief (1981)
Michael Mann’s first feature and the template for everything after it. James Caan plays a safecracker who describes his entire life plan off a magazine collage, and the film is about what happens when a man with a plan takes on an investor. The diner scene predates Heat by fourteen years.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)
Peter Yates and George V. Higgins produced the most convincing criminal dialogue ever filmed, almost all of it men in cars complaining about money. Mitchum plays a low-level gunrunner with no illusions left, and 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 condemned in the opening narration, and Melville shoots Paris in a blue-gray that makes the city look like a waiting room.
Serpico (1973)
Lumet builds an entire film out of a man refusing money. Pacino plays Serpico as somebody whose integrity works as a personality disorder inside the department he chose, and the film is honest about the cost. He ends the picture correct, alone and shot in the face.
The French Connection (1971)
Friedkin shot New York like a documentary crew working without permits and let Popeye Doyle be unpleasant. The chase under the elevated tracks is still the benchmark because the camera stays in the car. The film ends on a missed shot and a title card.
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 was watching replaces every dead one, and the film refuses the audience an exit.
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 it.
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 relief until the ending takes everything.
Cop Land (1997)
Stallone put on forty pounds and played a deaf small-town sheriff surrounded by NYPD officers who treat him as furniture. The film is a western in New Jersey and the final sequence, shot from inside his damaged hearing, is the best thing in his filmography.
State of Grace (1990)
Goodfellas, arriving the same autumn, buried Phil Joanou’s Hell’s Kitchen film. Gary Oldman plays the most frightening version of an uncontrolled crew member anybody has committed to film, and the closing shootout runs against a St. Patrick’s Day parade.
Blue Ruin (2013)
Jeremy Saulnier made a revenge film about a man who’s bad at revenge. Dwight is frightened, untrained and physically weak, and every act of violence in the picture is clumsy and takes too long. The genre has almost never been this honest about what it involves.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and included because failure teaches faster. Each of these had the budget, the cast and the material.
Live by Night (2016)
Affleck adapts another Dennis 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. Production design attached to nothing.
The Counselor (2013)
Cormac McCarthy wrote the screenplay directly and nobody edited him. Brilliant actors deliver philosophical monologues at each other while a drug plot happens offscreen. The bolito scene works. Almost nothing around it does.
The Devil’s Own (1997)
Alan Pakula directing Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt through an IRA gunrunning plot that Ford publicly said had no finished script when shooting began. The two leads are acting in different films and the ending was rewritten repeatedly during production.
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.
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.
Vigilante Diaries (2016)
A crime thriller assembled from footage of people standing in front of cars. The plot is unfollowable, the action is shot too close to read, and the film keeps introducing characters past the ninety minute mark. Included as a floor marker.
What Do You Think?
Twenty films is a small number for a tier this deep, and the ordering here’s a rewatch rating and not a critical consensus. Putting Die Hard with a Vengeance beside Rififi will annoy people. Tell me which film you’d move and what you’d drop to make room.
My verdict on this tier comes down to trust. These films trust the audience with failure and with cases that never close, and that trust is what I prize most in crime cinema. Die Hard with a Vengeance sits next to Rififi because both respect a plan and respect your ability to follow one. A fun movie can be a great one, and the snobs who refuse to accept that have been missing half the good films of the last fifty years.
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
