Part 3 – The Excellent
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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 best decision in this tier is Reservoir Dogs, and it was forced. Tarantino couldn’t afford to stage the robbery, so he set the film entirely before and after it. A heist picture became a chamber piece about who talked.
The other pattern is the protagonist nobody would defend. Travis Bickle, Jack Carter, Harry Callahan and Carlito Brigante are all men the film declines to endorse, and each is more durable for it.
Every film in this tier got a nine from me, and I’d put any of them in front of somebody who claims crime movies all run on the same rails. What excites me most here is how few of these protagonists I’d trust with my car keys. The films make you ride along with men they refuse to excuse, and I find that far more gripping than another decent cop learning a lesson in the third act.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of seven parts.
Scorpio, John Doe and Derek Vinyard are all written at full strength and defeated anyway. Build opposition that hard in the Antagonist Handbook.
1. In Cold Blood (1967) [full review]
► Read the full review of In Cold Blood (1967)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"Richard Brooks shot it in the actual Clutter house in Holcomb, using the real rooms where the killings happened."
Richard Brooks shot the film in the actual Clutter farmhouse, on the actual Kansas roads, with the actual gallows, four years after the hangings. Conrad Hall photographed it in black and white on Brooks’s insistence when the studio wanted color, and the result looks closer to news footage than to a 1967 studio picture.
Robert Blake plays Perry Smith as somebody who has been told his whole life that he’s worthless and has half-believed it. The aspirin, the guitar, the drawings, the treasure-hunting fantasy: Brooks keeps the small ambitions in, and they’re what make the murders unbearable instead of merely shocking.
The killings are held back for ninety minutes and then delivered in fragments as Perry describes them, with the camera staying on his face more than on the house. Brooks understood that the audience had come for the scene and gave it to them in a form they couldn’t enjoy.
The execution sequence is the film’s argument and it’s made without a speech. Rain on a window, a hood, a doctor with a stethoscope counting, and the shadow of the rope moving across Perry’s face while he talks about his father. Brooks films the state doing its work at exactly the same temperature he filmed the murders.
The execution is the sequence I can’t forget.
Brooks films the state’s killing with the same cold patience he used on the murders, and he never needs a speech to leave me uneasy about both. He won the fight over color, and he was right to. Color would’ve made this entertainment, and black and white keeps it closer to evidence. That suits a film that treats Perry’s small ambitions with more tenderness than most directors would dare.
2. Point Blank (1967) [full review]
► Read the full review of Point Blank (1967)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Lee Marvin had script approval and used it to strip dialogue out, so the film communicates almost entirely through movement."
John Boorman took a Richard Stark novel and shot it like a European art film. Walker wants ninety-three thousand dollars he’s owed and works methodically up a corporate chain to get it, and Boorman refuses to tell the audience whether any of it is happening or whether Walker died on Alcatraz in the first reel.
Lee Marvin plays the part almost without expression and Boorman shoots him walking. The LAX corridor sequence runs for over a minute on nothing but heels on tile, cut against Chris in an apartment, and the sound arrives before he does. It’s the most imitated walk in crime cinema.
The organization Walker is fighting turns out to be an organization. Offices, receptionists, executives who can’t authorize a payment of that size, a man who explains he doesn’t carry cash. Boorman’s joke is that the mob has become a corporation and nobody inside it can find the money either.
3. Dirty Harry Pentalogy (1971-1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dirty Harry Pentalogy (1971-1988)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"The first film is sharper than its reputation, with Scorpio caught halfway through and released on a procedural failure."
Five films across seventeen years, and only the first two are any good. Don Siegel’s 1971 original is a nasty piece of work about a cop who’s right about the killer and wrong about almost everything else, and it’s been argued about since the week it opened.
Scorpio is the reason the first film survives. Andy Robinson plays him as a whining, physically unimpressive man who screams for a lawyer after being tortured on a football field, and the film puts that scene in knowing exactly what it does to the audience’s sympathy. Siegel refuses to make the villain dignified.
Magnum Force is the sequel that argues with its own predecessor. Harry hunts a death squad of motorcycle officers executing criminals, and the film’s position is that Callahan draws a line those men crossed. It’s a direct answer to the fascism charge and it’s more thoughtful than the original.
The last three are a collapse. The Enforcer is a lazy rerun, Sudden Impact exists for one catchphrase, and The Dead Pool is barely a film. Eastwood was directing better work elsewhere by then and the series had become an obligation. Eastwood was directing Bird and Unforgiven in the same stretch and the gap in ambition is embarrassing.
4. Get Carter (1971) [full review]
► Read the full review of Get Carter (1971)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Newcastle is shot as a real industrial city in decline, on location, with a documentary flatness nothing British had attempted."
Mike Hodges shot Newcastle as an industrial wasteland and put Michael Caine in it wearing a London suit that marks him as foreign in every frame. Jack Carter has come north for his brother’s funeral and stays because the death doesn’t add up, and the film never once suggests he’s doing something admirable.
Caine plays Carter as a man with no warmth available. He’s polite, quiet and completely without hesitation, and the film’s most famous shot is him standing naked in a doorway with a shotgun making a phone call. The violence is quick, ugly and usually inflicted on people who are terrified.
The discovery at the center is the film’s black heart and Hodges plays it with no music. Carter watches a reel of film in a projector room, understands what happened to his niece, and the rest of the picture is a man doing what he was always going to do with an added reason.
The ending is the reason the film matters. Carter finishes the job, walks a beach dumping the evidence, and is shot by a hired man who has been in the background for two acts. No music, no recognition, no last words. The body goes into the tide and the credits run.
British crime cinema never recovered from it. Every UK gangster film since has either imitated the coldness or reacted against it, and the 2000 Stallone remake is instructive mainly because it gives Carter a conscience and thereby removes the entire point. Hodges never made another film with this much contempt in it and neither did anybody else in Britain.
Caine refuses to ask for a drop of sympathy here and I respect him enormously for it. Stars rarely let themselves be this cold, and Hodges backs him with a Newcastle that looks like it’s rusting while you watch.
The beach ending affects me deeply. A man finishes the job and dies anyway when somebody he never noticed shoots him, and the tide carries him off. After this, revenge films that let the hero stroll into the sunset feel like cheating to me.
In Cold Blood withholds the murders and Reservoir Dogs pans off the ear. Work out when to look away in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
5. Mean Streets (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of Mean Streets (1973)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Scorsese made it for around half a million dollars, largely in Los Angeles standing in for Little Italy."
Scorsese made it for under six hundred thousand dollars, shot most of the New York material in Los Angeles because he couldn’t afford permits, and put his own preoccupations directly on screen for the first time. Charlie wants to be a good Catholic and a good earner at the same time and the film is about how that fails.
Johnny Boy is the problem and De Niro plays him as a man who doesn’t understand why anybody expects him to pay debts. He’s funny for an hour. The scene where he explains to Michael exactly why he won’t pay, laughing, is the point where the audience realizes the film has been building toward something bad.
The camera is the other innovation. Scorsese straps it to Keitel for the bar entrance, shoots the fight in slow motion to a jukebox, and runs the whole picture on needle drops at a time when nobody was scoring films that way. Everything Goodfellas does in 1990 is already here in rough form.
6. Badlands (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of Badlands (1973)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Malick’s debut is narrated by Sissy Spacek in a register borrowed entirely from teenage magazines while the bodies accumulate."
Terrence Malick’s first film takes the Starkweather killings and narrates them through a fifteen-year-old girl reading her own life as a movie magazine romance. Sissy Spacek describes multiple murders in the tone of a teenager describing a holiday, and the gap between the voice and the events is the entire film.
Martin Sheen plays Kit as a man performing James Dean and being complimented on the resemblance. He takes the compliment seriously. He’s not intelligent, not charismatic in any real way, and utterly convinced he’s a figure. The film treats that delusion as the most dangerous thing about him. Malick shoots the Dakota badlands as pastoral. Golden light, wheat, a treehouse built out of a Swiss Family Robinson fantasy, all of it beautiful and none of it commenting on the killings happening inside it. The landscape declines to participate and that’s the argument.
Kit gets exactly what he wanted in the ending. He’s caught, he’s famous, the soldiers escorting him ask for souvenirs, and he distributes his possessions like a celebrity signing autographs. Malick lets the audience watch the system that’s about to execute him confirm the delusion.
7. The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) and The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974) and The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The 1974 film’s real pleasure is competence under irritation, with everybody annoyed and nobody heroic."
Joseph Sargent’s 1974 film is about the New York transit system and the 2009 remake is about two men talking on a phone. That difference explains why one of them still works. Sargent spends real time on the control room, the dispatcher screens, the tunnel geometry and the physical problem of moving a train without a driver.
Robert Shaw plays Blue as a former mercenary running a military operation on a commercial subway car, and the crew’s discipline is what generates the tension. They have a timetable, they have fallback positions, and they kill on schedule instead of in anger. Walter Matthau opposite him is tired, rude and competent.
The 2009 version replaces the procedure with psychology. Travolta shouts, Denzel confesses to a bribe, and the two of them develop a relationship the original had no interest in. Tony Scott shoots trains in a way that makes the geography unreadable. That’s fatal for a film about where a train is.
The original’s last shot is a sneeze. Matthau has one piece of evidence, he knocks on a door, and the film ends on a reaction from a man who thought he’d escaped. Sargent cuts immediately. The remake ends with a chase across a bridge and explains itself twice on the way.
I firmly prefer the 1974 version. I love a thriller that bothers to explain how the subway works, and Matthau solving the case while tired and rude is my kind of hero. The remake mostly shouts, and Tony Scott’s cutting loses the train entirely. That sneeze is my favorite last shot on this page, and Sargent is smart enough to cut the instant it gets the laugh.
8. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"It was shot on the street where the events happened, largely improvised, and the crowd becomes a participant."
Lumet shot it without a score, in sequence, in Brooklyn heat, and the film feels like a day that won’t end because it was made like one. Sonny robs a bank to pay for his partner’s surgery, the vault holds almost nothing, and everything after that’s improvisation in front of a growing crowd.
Pacino plays Sonny as a man with no plan and enormous nervous energy, and the Attica chant is the moment the film turns from a robbery into something else. He works the crowd, the crowd works him back, and the police lose control of the street before they lose control of the bank.
The phone call with Leon is the best scene in either actor’s career. Chris Sarandon plays it from a hospital bed, exhausted and unimpressed, and Sonny is reduced to pleading with somebody who has heard all of it before. The robbery stops mattering for six minutes.
The airport ending is filmed as anticlimax on purpose. A car ride, a quiet agent, and then a movement nobody sees coming, over in a second. Lumet gives Sal no last words and no music, and the final shot is Sonny on tarmac watching a body get loaded.
9. Taxi Driver (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Taxi Driver (1976)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"Schrader wrote it in about two weeks while living in a car and has been open about where the loneliness came from."
Schrader wrote it in a fortnight while living in his car, and Scorsese shot it during a New York garbage strike so the streets are full of refuse. Travis Bickle can’t sleep, can’t connect, and writes a diary that the film uses as narration without ever endorsing a word of it.
De Niro plays Travis as a man assembling a personality out of fragments he’s observed. The Secret Service agent conversation, the political rally, the gun purchase, the mirror: each is him trying on a role. Nothing about him is stable and the film never provides a diagnosis.
Bernard Herrmann’s last score does enormous work. The saxophone line makes the city sound romantic at exactly the moments Travis finds it intolerable, and the brass under the violence is closer to a horror film. Herrmann finished the recording and died that night. Scorsese has said the brass under the massacre was Herrmann’s idea and that he argued for it.
Here the ending is the argument nobody agrees about. Travis kills three men, is called a hero by the newspapers, and drives away looking fine. Scorsese has said it’s real and Schrader has implied otherwise, and the film gives the audience one shot in a rear-view mirror to decide with.
Foster was twelve and the production required a welfare worker on set and a body double for some material. Her scenes with De Niro in the diner are the only moments where Travis is talked to like a person by somebody who’s not afraid of him, and she’s the only character who sees him clearly.
Taxi Driver is a hard film to love and I love it anyway.
Travis frightens me more than most movie killers because the film won’t explain him. Herrmann’s score is the part I’d point anybody toward. That saxophone makes a filthy city sound romantic right when Travis is sick of it, and the clash puts me inside his head better than his diary ever could. Scorsese and Schrader were wise never to settle the ending, because that glance in the rear-view mirror keeps the argument alive.
Travis Bickle, Lefty Ruggiero and Jack Carter are three completely different kinds of character. Build people that specific in the Character Writer’s Handbook.
10. Blood Simple (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Blood Simple (1984)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The Coens funded it by cutting a trailer for a film that did not exist and showing it to Minnesota investors door to door."
The Coens made their first film for a million and a half dollars raised door to door from Minnesota investors, shot it in Texas, and built the whole plot on a simple condition: nobody in it knows what anybody else has done. Four people, four partial accounts, and not one correct understanding among them.
M. Emmet Walsh’s private detective drives the film and he’s frightening because he’s casual. He takes money from a man to kill two people, kills the man instead, and spends the rest of the film cleaning up in a tone somewhere between irritated and amused. He’s never once nervous.
The burial sequence is the film’s centerpiece and it’s almost unwatchable. Ray drives into a field with a man he believes is dead, discovers otherwise, and has to finish the job with a shovel while headlights approach on a distant road. Barry Sonnenfeld lights it with one flashlight and the car.
11. Once Upon a Time in America (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Leone’s cut ran close to four hours and the American release was reduced to around a hundred and thirty-nine minutes."
Leone spent a decade on it, delivered a four-hour film, and the American distributor cut it to a hundred and thirty-nine minutes and reassembled it in chronological order. The butchered version was released, reviewed as a disaster, and the full cut wasn’t widely seen in the United States for years.
The structure is three time periods and Leone moves between them on objects and sounds.
A telephone ringing across thirty-five years, a frisbee, a station locker. Noodles in 1968 is remembering and the film refuses to confirm whether the memory is reliable. The audience is asked to hold three decades at once and Leone never supplies a single caption.
The opium den ending is Leone’s last image and the most argued-about frame in his work. Noodles smiles at the ceiling in 1933 and the film cuts to credits. Either the whole 1968 material was a hallucination or the smile is a man deciding to stop remembering, and Leone gave no interviews that settled it.
The film’s treatment of Deborah and of Carol is the reason it remains difficult to recommend without warning. Two extended assault sequences, filmed at length, from a perspective that doesn’t condemn them clearly enough for most viewers. Leone’s defense was that Noodles isn’t a hero, and it’s not a sufficient defense.
12. The Naked Gun (1988, 1991, 1994, 2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Naked Gun (1988, 1991, 1994, 2025)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Nielsen plays every line straight and the films bury three or four more jokes in the background of every shot."
The Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams built the joke density of Airplane onto a police procedural and cast Leslie Nielsen, who plays every line as though he’s in a serious film. That commitment is the entire mechanism. Nielsen never signals a joke and the films never cut for a reaction.
The first film is the tightest. The Queen Elizabeth sequence, the baseball umpire material, the press conference, the parking lot: each set piece has a clean premise and then buries three visual gags in the background of every shot. Repeat viewings find jokes nobody caught the first time.
The sequels decline on a predictable curve. The Smell of Fear is thinner and Final Insult leans on celebrity cameos, and by 1994 the formula is visible. The 2025 revival with Liam Neeson works better than it should, for the same reason the original did: it cast a man known for playing straight.
13. The Thin Blue Line (1988) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Thin Blue Line (1988)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Morris’s reenactments were controversial because documentary orthodoxy held reconstruction to be dishonest, and the film freed a man."
Errol Morris set out to make a film about a Dallas psychiatrist who testified in death penalty cases, met Randall Adams by accident, and ended up producing the documentary that got a man off death row. The film was released in 1988 and Adams was freed the following year.
The reenactments were controversial and they’re the point. Morris films the shooting repeatedly, differently, according to each witness’s account, and the milkshake hitting the road in slow motion is the same image every time while the details around it change. He’s dramatizing testimony instead of events.
Philip Glass scores it as a loop, and the repetition does exactly what the reenactments do. The film is about a story being told over and over by people with reasons, and the music never resolves because the accounts never do. Glass wrote it before the final cut existed and Morris edited against the music.
The last scene is a tape recorder on a table. David Harris, who almost certainly did it, talks himself close enough to a confession that the Texas courts had to act, and Morris shows nothing but the machine. No face, no reaction, no commentary. Texas vacated the conviction in 1989 and Adams walked out after twelve years inside.
This is the documentary I’d hand to anyone who thinks eyewitness testimony settles anything. A film got a man off death row, and that still astonishes me. Morris did it without a single lecture, by staging each account side by side until the case fell apart under its own weight. That tape recorder at the end unsettles me, a voice talking itself into trouble with no face attached.
Carlito’s Way opens on its own ending and Once Upon a Time in America runs three decades at once. Take the shapes apart in the Story ARC Handbook.
14. Thelma & Louise (1991) [full review]
► Read the full review of Thelma & Louise (1991)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Callie Khouri wrote it in her spare time while working as a music video producer and won the screenplay Oscar for it."
Callie Khouri wrote it in her spare time while producing music videos and it won her an Academy Award. Ridley Scott shot the American southwest as enormous and empty, and the film converts a weekend fishing trip into a flight across three states inside about twenty minutes of screen time.
The parking lot scene is the hinge and Scott films it without any ambiguity. Louise shoots a man who has already stopped, because of what he says afterward, and the film is clear that she’s committed murder and equally clear about why she can’t go to the police. Everything else follows from that.
Geena Davis plays Thelma’s transformation as a series of small competences acquired fast. She robs a store using words she heard J.D. use the night before, and Scott shows it on a surveillance tape instead of directly, so the audience watches her become somebody through a security camera.
People argued about the ending before the film opened, and Scott held the frame on the car in the air and cut to white. He shot an alternative with the car landing and refused to use it. The decision is the difference between a tragedy and a news item.
15. Reservoir Dogs (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Reservoir Dogs (1992)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.3/10
"Tarantino could not afford to stage the robbery, so he set the film entirely before and after it."
Tarantino made it for a million and a quarter dollars and structured the whole film around a heist the audience never sees. The robbery happens between scenes. What’s on screen is a warehouse, a bleeding man, and six professionals trying to work out which of them is police.
The budget constraint produced the structure and the structure is the film. One location, flashbacks to fill in each man, and a slow bleed in the middle of the floor functioning as a clock. Mr. Orange is dying in real time for the entire second half and the audience knows why and nobody in the room does.
The ear scene made the reputation and the reason it works is the camera moving away. Michael Madsen dances, the frame pans to an empty doorway, and the audience listens. Tarantino shot the violence directly as well and cut to the pan because the sound was worse.
Mr. Orange’s extended cover story is the best-constructed sequence in the film. He rehearses an anecdote about a drug deal in a men’s room, and Tarantino stages the anecdote as though it happened, with Orange walking through his own lie while narrating it. A fabrication rendered at full strength.
The robbery we never see is the smartest decision Tarantino ever made, and money forced it on him. I get a real thrill watching a filmmaker boxed in by a budget turn the box into the story. The pan away from the ear upsets me more than anything he could’ve shown, and Mr. Orange bleeding on that warehouse floor keeps me tense through the entire second half.
16. Carlito’s Way (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Carlito’s Way (1993)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"De Palma opens with Carlito bleeding on a station floor beneath a mural advertising the retirement he never reaches."
De Palma and Pacino made a second crime film together and it’s better than Scarface in every way that matters. Carlito is out of prison on a technicality, intends to retire, and spends the film being pulled back by obligations he can’t refuse without becoming somebody he’s decided not to be.
Sean Penn’s Kleinfeld is one of the great supporting performances. A coked-out lawyer who got Carlito released and now expects a return, and Penn plays the deterioration across months without ever asking for sympathy. The scene on the boat is where the film turns and neither man says what has happened.
The Grand Central sequence is De Palma at his best. Escalators, a concourse, a ticket hall, a shifting geometry of pursuers, and Carlito ninety seconds from a train to Miami. De Palma stages it with total clarity and the audience knows where everybody is at every moment.
The film opens with Carlito dying and then explains how he got there. Every decision he makes is watched with the outcome already known. The billboard of a beach over the platform is the last image, and it’s the retirement he was ninety seconds from reaching.
17. Get Shorty (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Get Shorty (1995)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Elmore Leonard’s dialogue survives the adaptation almost intact, a rare thing, because Scott Frank kept the rhythm."
Barry Sonnenfeld adapted Elmore Leonard and got the thing almost nobody gets right: the rhythm. The characters talk past each other, the plot advances through misunderstandings about who owes what, and nobody delivers a speech. Scott Frank’s screenplay is the best Leonard adaptation on film. Travolta plays Chili Palmer as a loan shark who discovers that the movie business runs on exactly the skills he already has: leaning on people, reading a room, and never raising his voice. The joke is that Hollywood is a softer version of the work he’s trying to leave.
Gene Hackman’s Harry Zimm is a schlock producer with no money and enormous confidence, and Hackman plays him as a man who has been failing successfully for thirty years. The scene where he pitches a film he doesn’t own to people who can’t fund it’s the comedy of the whole industry in four minutes.
Get Shorty and Dog Day Afternoon both run on people talking past each other. Learn the technique in the Dialogue Handbook.
18. Se7en (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Se7en (1995)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
"The city is never named, the year is never given, and the killer is not seen until he surrenders covered in blood."
Fincher took a studio thriller and refused to light it. The city has no name, it rains for six of the seven days, and Darius Khondji shot on stock that was processed to crush the blacks so that entire scenes take place in rooms the audience can’t fully see.
The structure is a countdown that the detectives never get ahead of. They arrive after every murder. The sloth victim is alive and that’s worse. John Doe isn’t caught, he walks into a police station covered in blood and surrenders, and the last act is him directing the ending he wrote.
Kevin Spacey’s name was kept off the posters and out of the opening credits so the audience wouldn’t anticipate him, and the studio agreed. He appears with forty minutes left and the car ride to the desert is the film’s best writing, with Doe calmly explaining that he’s not special and that the world made him necessary.
The box was the fight. New Line wanted an alternative ending with a chase and Fincher and Pitt both refused, and the shooting script Pitt signed for had the original. Fincher never shows what’s inside, and the entire third act depends on the audience building it from a courier’s face and Somerset’s reaction.
Fincher and Pitt stood up to the studio over that box, and I’m grateful to them for it. A chase ending would’ve turned the sharpest thriller of the decade into one more cop movie. My only gripe is the rain, since it edges toward self-parody by the fifth day, but Doe’s calm little speech in the car still disturbs me.
19. Donnie Brasco (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Donnie Brasco (1997)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Al Pacino plays Lefty as a man who has given thirty years to an organization that has never promoted him."
Mike Newell made the only mob film that’s about the cost to the undercover officer. Joe Pistone spends six years inside the Bonanno family, his marriage collapses in the background, and the film keeps returning to a house in New Jersey where nobody recognizes him anymore. Al Pacino plays Lefty Ruggiero as a career failure. Twenty-six hits and still not made, still answering to younger men, still borrowing money. He vouches for Donnie because nobody has ever needed him before, and the film is precise about how much that costs when the truth arrives.
The final scene is Lefty emptying his pockets onto a dresser, leaving his jewelry and his watch for his wife, and going out to a car he knows is taking him somewhere he won’t return from. Pacino plays it as routine. The film gives him no speech and no confrontation.
20. American History X (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of American History X (1998)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Edward Norton was nominated for Best Actor and fought the studio over the cut, and the released version is his."
Tony Kaye shot the black and white flashbacks as Derek’s past and the color present as his attempt to undo it, then fought the studio so publicly over the edit that he tried to have his name replaced with Humpty Dumpty. The version released is Edward Norton’s cut and it’s the better film.
Norton’s performance is the reason it survives its own sermonizing. He plays the curbstomp sequence and the prison laundry conversations as the same man at different temperatures, and the physical transformation is the least interesting thing about it. The dinner table scene is twelve minutes of a family being taken apart by one person’s certainty.
The prison material is where the film is strongest and it’s also the part that gets least discussed. The Aryan Brotherhood abandons Derek because he applied their principles consistently, and the man who talks him out of it is doing laundry and refuses to make it a lesson.
Its weakest choice is the ending, and it’s deliberate. Danny is killed in a school bathroom by a boy he humiliated, and the closing narration reaches for a quote that the rest of the film had been too careful to need. Kaye and Norton disagreed about this and both had a point.
Honorable Mentions: Crime Films Without a Review Here Yet
None of these has a review on the site so far. Each belongs in the conversation and each is on the list.
Prince of the City (1981)
Lumet spent three hours on a narcotics detective who agrees to testify and then discovers he can’t control which of his friends go down with him. Treat Williams is in almost every frame and the film refuses to give him a clean motive at any point.
Q&A (1990)
Lumet again, with Nick Nolte as a detective who executes a man in the first scene and then supervises the investigation into it. The film is about how a department closes around one of its own and it’s uglier about race than American crime cinema usually permits.
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Ben Affleck adapts Dennis Lehane and builds the whole film toward a choice with no good answer. The last twenty minutes ask whether a child is better off with an inadequate mother or a decent kidnapper, and the film declines to tell the audience who was right.
The Chaser (2008)
Na Hong-jin sends an ex-cop turned pimp after a client who’s killing his women, and the police have the murderer in custody for most of the film and can’t hold him. The failure is bureaucratic and the tension comes from watching paperwork lose.
Charley Varrick (1973)
Don Siegel put Walter Matthau in a small-town bank job that accidentally takes mob laundering money, and the whole film is a competent man working out how far ahead he needs to be. Joe Don Baker plays the enforcer sent after him as a salesman with a clipboard.
Straight Time (1978)
Dustin Hoffman plays a career burglar on parole who’s pushed back into work by a parole officer with a grudge, and the film refuses to make either man sympathetic. The supermarket robbery is shot without any tension music at all.
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 precise about what happens when an economy of trust collapses.
Manhunter (1986)
Michael Mann adapted Red Dragon five years before Silence of the Lambs and built the whole film on Will Graham reconstructing a killer by occupying his perspective. The house in the last act is lit entirely in blue and white and scored to Iron Butterfly.
The Drop (2014)
Another Lehane, with Tom Hardy playing a Brooklyn bartender who appears slow and isn’t. James Gandolfini’s last role is a cousin who has lost his bar and can’t accept it, and the film’s final revelation reframes every earlier scene.
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Abel Ferrara and Harvey Keitel made a film about a Catholic policeman in complete moral collapse and refused to structure it as redemption. The baseball subplot runs underneath the whole picture and the ending is a debt being paid in the only currency left.
Public Enemies (2009)
Mann shot Dillinger on early digital and the result divides people. The Little Bohemia sequence is among the best gun battles he’s staged, and Depp plays Dillinger as a man who knows the era is ending and refuses to adjust.
Collateral (2004)
Mann shot Los Angeles on 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 and the whole film happens in one night inside a cab.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and worth naming because each had the cast, the budget and a source worth adapting.
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
Brian De Palma adapted Tom Wolfe and miscast every part. Hanks can’t play a man the audience should dislike, the satire is blunted to protect the cast, and the production was documented in a book about its own failure that’s better than the film.
Triple 9 (2016)
John Hillcoat assembled Ejiofor, Affleck, Harrelson, Mackie, Winslet and Gal Gadot for a heist film with no protagonist and no argument. The film introduces and kills characters before the audience can place them, and explains the Russian mob plot three separate times.
The Snowman (2017)
Tomas Alfredson has said publicly that ten to fifteen percent of the script was never shot, and it shows in every reel. Michael Fassbender plays a detective whose investigation skips steps the film forgot to film, and another actor dubs Val Kilmer throughout.
Kiss of the Dragon (2001)
Jet Li deserved better than a plot assembled from photocopies. The fights are good and everything between them is a hostage exchange nobody wrote. Included because competence in one department can’t carry a film.
Jersey Boys (2014)
Eastwood directing a jukebox musical about mob-adjacent musicians, staged with neither the energy of a musical nor the tension of a crime film. The fourth-wall narration rotates between four characters and none of them has anything to say.
Getaway (2013)
Ethan Hawke drives a Shelby around Sofia for ninety minutes while a voice on a phone issues instructions. The editing averages under two seconds a shot, the geography is unreadable, and the film is a useful floor marker for what incoherent action looks like.
What Do You Think?
Everything in this tier rates a 9, so the ordering inside it’s chronological and not a ranking. Taxi Driver sitting level with The Naked Gun will bother people, and the rewatch scale is doing something different from a critical list. Tell me which one you’d promote to Part 1.
Some critics would sneer at The Naked Gun sharing a tier with Taxi Driver, and that sneer is snobbery, plain and simple. The original kept Leslie Nielsen reading absurd lines like a charge sheet from start to finish, and that’s as hard a piece of filmmaking as anything Scorsese pulled off. It deserved its nine. What these twenty share is nerve. Each one made a choice a timid studio would’ve fought, and several of them had to fight to keep 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
