Part 4 – The Very Good
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 best decision in this tier is Reservoir Dogs, and it was forced. Tarantino could not 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 rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of seven parts.
Sexy Beast runs a whole act on one man refusing a request. Take apart where tension actually lives in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
1. Sexy Beast (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Sexy Beast (2000)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Ben Kingsley plays Don Logan as somebody who will not accept the word no under any circumstances and will not leave."
Jonathan Glazer came out of commercials and music videos and made a crime film that is almost entirely a man refusing to take a job. Gal is retired in Spain, sunburnt and content, and the plot is one former colleague arriving to ask a favor and declining to accept the answer.
Ben Kingsley plays Don Logan as something closer to a weather event than a character. He does not negotiate, does not threaten in the usual sense, and simply repeats the request with escalating contempt until refusal stops being available. The performance is built on the refusal to modulate.
Ray Winstone plays the other half and it is the harder job. Gal is physically larger and genuinely frightened, and Winstone carries the fear in small things: a hand on a table, a change in how he sits, the way he keeps offering food. The film is a home invasion conducted entirely through conversation.
The heist itself is almost an afterthought and Glazer shoots it underwater in a swimming pool, the only sequence in the film that behaves like a genre picture. The real climax happened forty minutes earlier in a Spanish living room and the film knows it.
2. Traffic (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Traffic (2000)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Mexico is blown-out yellow, Ohio is cold blue, San Diego is warm daylight, and the audience always knows where it is."
Soderbergh shot three storylines in three color grades and operated the camera himself on all of them. Mexico is bleached yellow, Ohio is blue and cold, San Diego is warm and natural, and the audience knows which thread they are in before a face appears.
The structure argues that the drug war is a system nobody inside can see whole. A judge appointed as drug czar whose daughter is using, a cartel wife discovering what her husband did, two DEA agents guarding a witness, a Tijuana officer working for a general who is working for a cartel. None of them meets most of the others.
Benicio del Toro carries the Mexican thread almost entirely in Spanish and won the Oscar for it. Javier Rodriguez wants a lit baseball field for kids in his neighborhood and that is the whole of his ambition, and the film ends on him sitting in the stands watching a game.
Michael Douglas gets the weakest material and the film knows it. The Wakefield family scenes are the most conventional writing in the picture, and the resignation speech is the one moment where Soderbergh reaches for a statement the rest of the film had been too smart to need.
3. Lord of War (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Lord of War (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The opening follows a single bullet from manufacture to a child’s head. That is the film’s entire argument."
Andrew Niccol opens on a bullet, following it from a factory line through a shipping crate to a boy’s forehead in Africa, and the film never recovers its moral footing afterward because it was never trying to. Yuri Orlov narrates his own career as an arms dealer with total composure.
Nicolas Cage plays Yuri as a salesman who has decided that supply is morally neutral. The narration is precise, unembarrassed and frequently funny, and the film’s method is to let him explain the business well enough that the audience follows the logic before noticing where it has taken them.
The closing card is the argument. The five largest arms exporters in the world are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Niccol spends two hours on an individual and then reveals that the individual was a rounding error, and the interrogation scene twenty minutes earlier says so out loud.
4. A Bittersweet Life (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of A Bittersweet Life (2005)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The mercy is never explained and Lee Byung-hun plays it as a man who does not understand his own decision either."
Kim Jee-woon takes a hotel manager who has spent seven years being perfectly reliable and destroys him over a single moment of discretion. Sun-woo is asked to watch his boss’s young mistress and kill her if she is unfaithful, finds that she is, and decides not to. Nobody in the film ever explains why.
Lee Byung-hun plays the part with almost no expression for the first act and the restraint is what makes the collapse land. He is competent, well dressed, and completely without a life outside the work, and the film establishes all of that through a dessert, a suit and a routine before anything goes wrong.
The violence is choreographed as labor. Sun-woo fights badly when he is outnumbered, gets hurt, and takes a long time to kill anybody, and Kim shoots it in wide takes so the audience can see how much of it is simply exhausting. The hardware store sequence is a man shopping for tools.
The last exchange is the film. Sun-woo asks his boss why, and the answer he gets is not about betrayal or business. The film gives him a reason that is both petty and entirely human, and then refuses to let it be enough for either man.
Traffic runs three threads in three color grades and Man Bites Dog turns its own camera crew into suspects. Work the mechanics in the Point-Of-View Handbook.
5. The Departed (2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Departed (2006)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Scorsese relocates Infernal Affairs to a Boston where the Irish institutional texture does real work the original lacked."
Scorsese remade Infernal Affairs, moved it to South Boston, doubled the running time and won the Academy Award he had been denied for thirty years. The additions are mostly profanity, a psychiatrist both men are sleeping with, and Jack Nicholson doing whatever he decided to do that day.
Nicholson’s Costello is the film’s most argued-about element. He improvised heavily, brought a dildo to a set nobody expected it on, and plays the part at a volume the original’s restraint never approached. It is entertaining and it costs the film the quiet menace that made the Hong Kong version unbearable.
DiCaprio is doing the best work in the picture and it took years for that to be acknowledged. Billy Costigan is falling apart continuously, medicated, unable to prove he is a policeman to anybody, and the panic attacks are played as a man running out of physical capacity instead of as a performance of stress.
The elevator is where the film separates from its source. Scorsese kills almost everybody in the last ten minutes and then adds an execution the original refused, converting an ambiguous ending into a resolved one. The rat on the railing is the one moment where the film explains itself out loud.
6. American Gangster (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of American Gangster (2007)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"Ridley Scott runs two biographies in parallel, with Frank Lucas rising and Richie Roberts failing at everything except the job."
Ridley Scott runs Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts on parallel tracks for two hours before putting them in a room, and the structure works because both men are professionals with the same relationship to their own organizations. Both are surrounded by people who think they are fools for their principles.
Denzel plays Lucas as a businessman whose innovation was supply chain. Buying direct in Southeast Asia, cutting out the Italians, branding the product, controlling quality. The film is precise about the economics and lets Lucas explain them with the pride of somebody who solved a logistics problem nobody else had attempted.
Crowe’s Roberts is the harder part because his integrity is presented as a social failure. He turns in a million dollars in unmarked bills and every officer in the department treats it as a betrayal, and the film never suggests they are wrong about what it means for them.
The final third loses its grip. The Vietnam material is compressed, the court sequence is rushed, and the closing text about how many officers were convicted arrives as assertion instead of as a scene. Scott had a three-hour film and released a two-and-a-half-hour one. Scott had a three-hour cut and released a two-and-a-half-hour one, and the seams are in the last reel.
7. Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Scorsese directed the pilot and the production rebuilt the Atlantic City boardwalk at a cost HBO has never repeated."
Terence Winter came off The Sopranos and built five seasons around Atlantic City during Prohibition, with Nucky Thompson as a treasurer who runs the county through envelopes. Scorsese directed the pilot and the money is visible in every frame of it. Scorsese directed the pilot and HBO spent eighteen million dollars on it, most of it on a boardwalk built at Greenpoint.
The series is best when it is about the machinery of political corruption. Ward bosses, vote counts, a boardwalk built on federal grants, liquor moving through a legal fiction about medicinal alcohol. Nucky is a functionary who happens to be a criminal, and not the reverse.
Richard Harrow is the achievement. A disfigured sniper with half a face and a tin mask, written over five seasons from a curiosity into the most complete character on the show, and Jack Huston plays him almost entirely through posture and a single visible eye. The scrapbook sequence is the best thing in the series.
The final season is a mistake and everyone involved has said so. A flashback structure to Nucky’s youth explains material the show had been stronger for leaving implied, and the ending reduces five seasons of political machinery to a personal grievance. Winter has said so in interviews, and the cast agreed at the time.
8. Prisoners (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Prisoners (2013)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Villeneuve refuses to resolve the moral question, giving Keller just enough justification to keep the audience uncomfortable."
Villeneuve and Roger Deakins shot a missing-child film in Pennsylvania in permanent November rain, and the film is two hours and thirty-three minutes of almost unrelieved pressure. Two girls disappear on Thanksgiving and the first suspect is released within a day for lack of evidence.
Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover as a survivalist carpenter whose preparedness is useless against the one thing he prepared for. He abducts and tortures the released suspect across several days, and the film neither endorses it nor lets the audience look away from what it does to him.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s Detective Loki is the counterweight and the performance is built almost entirely on restraint and a facial tic. He is competent, methodical and solves the case correctly, and the film’s structure means he arrives everywhere later than the audience wants. Deakins was nominated and lost. That was becoming an annual event by then.
The ending is a whistle under the ground and a cut to black. Villeneuve holds on Loki hearing something he may not have heard, and the film stops. It is the single most argued-about final second in modern American thrillers and it is exactly right.
9. O.J.: Made in America (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of O.J.: Made in America (2016)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.9/10
"It runs nearly eight hours and spends the first two on Los Angeles policing before the trial is reached at all."
Ezra Edelman made seven hours and forty-seven minutes about a murder trial and spends the first two on Los Angeles policing, redlining and the Watts rebellion before Simpson has done anything of consequence. That decision is why the film works. ESPN released it as a five-part series and it won the Academy Award for documentary feature.
The argument is that the verdict cannot be understood without thirty years of LAPD conduct in Black neighborhoods, and Edelman builds the case with archive instead of assertion. Eula Love, the choke hold deaths, Latasha Harlins, Rodney King. By the time the jury is selected the audience understands what is being decided.
Simpson himself is handled with unusual precision. Edelman shows a man who spent decades constructing a version of himself that was not Black in any way white sponsors would have to notice, and then required a Black jury to save him. The contradiction is presented without comment.
The last hour is about what happened afterward and it is the bleakest material in the film. The Brentwood house, the memorabilia, the Las Vegas hotel room, a man performing a version of himself for people who no longer care. Edelman ends on a prison photograph.
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman are kept present throughout. Most coverage of the case failed to do that. The crime scene photographs are shown, once, at length, and the film makes the audience look at what the trial spent nine months converting into a procedural question.
Boardwalk Empire explained its lead in the final season and subtracted five years of work. Learn what to cut in the Revisions Handbook.
10. American Made (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of American Made (2017)
RLR: 9 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Liman shoots it as a comedy about a man who keeps saying yes. That is the correct register for Barry Seal."
Doug Liman made a film about Barry Seal that is funny for ninety minutes and then stops being funny without changing register. Seal flies for the CIA, then the Medellin cartel, then the DEA, then Oliver North’s operation, and the film’s joke is that nobody at any agency ever coordinated with anybody else.
Cage gives Seal no interiority at all and it is the correct choice. He is a pilot who likes flying and money and has no politics and no curiosity about what he is carrying. The absence of a moral position is the film’s subject instead of a gap in it.
The money sequence is the best thing in the picture. Seal has so much cash he is burying it in the yard, storing it in barns, filling luggage, and stops being able to count it. Liman plays the accumulation as a logistics problem and it is genuinely funny until it is the reason he is exposed.
11. The Getaway (1972) and The Getaway (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Getaway (1972) and The Getaway (1994)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Peckinpah’s 1972 version has Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw and a marriage that is genuinely hostile from the first scene."
Peckinpah adapted Jim Thompson in 1972 and then threw out Thompson’s ending. That is the difference between the film and the novel. Doc McCoy gets out of prison through a deal his wife made, and the marriage is poisoned by what she had to do to make it before the first robbery happens.
McQueen and Ali MacGraw play the McCoys as two people who are barely speaking while executing a bank job together, and the tension between the professional competence and the domestic wreckage is the whole picture. The train station sequence with the switched bags is Peckinpah at his most precise.
The 1994 remake with Baldwin and Basinger is technically proficient and completely inert. Roger Donaldson reproduces the plot beats accurately and none of them mean anything, because the marriage at the center is not damaged in any way the audience can see. Same script, no wound.
12. Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Hannibal – “Apéritif” (S1E1, 2013)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Bryan Fuller made a network procedural that looks like nothing else on television, with the food photographed like an advertisement."
Bryan Fuller opened a network procedural with a man reconstructing murders by standing in the room and imagining himself committing them, and then made the show look like an art film. The pendulum sweeping the crime scene backward is the visual grammar of the entire series established in the first ten minutes.
Hugh Dancy plays Will Graham as somebody whose gift is a symptom. He cannot stop occupying other people’s perspectives and it is visibly costing him, and the pilot is careful to show that Jack Crawford knows this and is going to use him anyway. Fuller cast him off Adam and the choice looked strange until the second episode aired.
Mads Mikkelsen’s Lecter is introduced doing paperwork and cooking, and Fuller’s decision to never wink at the audience about the food is what makes the whole conceit work. The meals are photographed beautifully. Nobody comments. The joke is left entirely to the viewer. Mikkelsen had not read the Harris novels and deliberately never watched Anthony Hopkins in the part.
The Hobbs kill in the last act is where the series announces its real subject. Will shoots a man ten times and then sits holding the daughter’s wound closed, and Lecter watches from a doorway with the expression of somebody who has found a project.
13. The Public Enemy (1931) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Public Enemy (1931)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The grapefruit scene was improvised and made Cagney a star, and it was imitated and parodied for the next forty years."
William Wellman shot it in twenty-six days and it made Cagney a star by accident, after the leads were swapped a few days into production. Tom Powers is a Chicago kid who moves from petty theft to beer trucks and the film compresses a decade into seventy-one minutes.
Cagney’s physical energy is the whole film. He moves faster than anybody else in the frame, he is casually violent in a way that reads as carelessness instead of menace, and the grapefruit at the breakfast table is famous because it is done without any buildup at all.
The ending is the most brutal image in pre-Code cinema. Tom is delivered to his mother’s house wrapped and bound and falls through the doorway, and the camera holds while a phonograph plays upstairs. Wellman gives the audience no reaction shot and no line. The film ran into censor trouble immediately and the closing title card was added to placate it.
Prohibition Chicago, 1973 Los Angeles and Atlantic City are all doing real work here. Build settings that carry weight in the Dynamic Backgrounds Handbook.
14. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) [full review]
► Read the full review of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"It was adapted while Robert Burns was still a fugitive, and several states changed their penal laws afterward."
Mervyn LeRoy adapted Robert Burns’s memoir while Burns was still a fugitive, and the film was credited with helping end chain gangs in several states. James Allen comes home from the war, cannot find work, is present at a robbery he did not plan, and gets ten years.
The chain gang sequences are the reason the film had political effect. LeRoy shoots the work, the shackles, the food and the punishments as procedure, at length, without melodrama, and the accumulation is what makes the escape feel necessary instead of heroic. Burns himself was recaptured and escaped again while the film was in theaters.
Paul Muni plays Allen as a man being ground down in stages. The performance has almost no self-pity in it. That is what lets the film avoid becoming a lecture, and by the second act he has stopped expecting anything from anybody. Muni was thirty-seven and had come out of the Yiddish theater with an entirely different technique.
The last scene is the best ending in pre-Code Hollywood. Allen meets his former lover in the dark, she asks how he lives, and the lights fail as he backs away. The answer is two words delivered from blackness and then the film ends. The lights failing was an accident on set that LeRoy decided to keep.
15. The Long Goodbye (1973) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Long Goodbye (1973)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Altman takes Chandler’s Marlowe, a man of 1940s principles, and drops him into a Los Angeles of health food and yoga."
Altman took Chandler’s Marlowe, moved him to 1973 Los Angeles without updating him, and let the incongruity be the subject. Elliott Gould plays him as a rumpled man from another decade muttering to himself, driving a 1948 Lincoln through a city of yoga and gated beach houses.
The camera never stops moving and almost never settles, zooming slowly through windows and across rooms in a way that makes every scene feel observed from outside. Vilmos Zsigmond flashed the negative to wash the color out, and the whole film has the look of a faded photograph.
The plot is deliberately hard to follow and Altman does not care. Marlowe spends the film being lied to by people he is trying to help, and the running joke is that he keeps saying it is okay with him. The cat in the first ten minutes is the only relationship in the film with any honesty in it.
The ending was the outrage. Chandler’s Marlowe does not do what this one does, and Altman knew exactly what he was destroying. It is the last two minutes of a film that has spent two hours establishing that loyalty is a quaint position, and then it prices it.
16. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"It was made for around a hundred thousand dollars and sat unreleased for four years while the ratings board refused it."
John McNaughton made it for a hundred and ten thousand dollars, sat on the shelf for four years while the MPAA refused to rate it, and produced the least entertaining serial killer film ever released. That is the achievement and it is deliberate. The MPAA offered an X and the producers released it unrated instead of cutting it.
Michael Rooker plays Henry with no charisma, no intelligence and no pattern. He kills opportunistically, he is not building toward anything, and nobody is hunting him. The film removes every structure the genre uses to make this material watchable. Rooker was working as a janitor during production and stayed in character between setups.
The home invasion scene is filmed on a television screen as a video recording being played back, and then the tape is rewound and watched again. McNaughton makes the audience sit through a replay, implicating the viewing itself in a way the genre had never attempted.
17. The Untouchables (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Untouchables (1987)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"De Palma stages the Union Station sequence as a direct quotation of Battleship Potemkin and never pretends otherwise."
De Palma and David Mamet made a Prohibition film that behaves like a western, and Ennio Morricone scored it as one. The historical accuracy is negligible and the construction is superb, a trade the film makes openly in the first reel. Ness never met Capone, the Union Station shootout never happened, and Malone did not exist.
Sean Connery’s Malone is the engine and Mamet wrote him the best dialogue in the picture. The Chicago way speech, the rooftop recruitment, the question about what a man is prepared to do. Connery won the Oscar and the film loses most of its heat when he leaves it.
The Union Station sequence is De Palma quoting Battleship Potemkin at length and making it work. A pram on the steps, slow motion, a shootout timed to a crying baby, and Andy Garcia sliding across marble. It is technically extraordinary and entirely unnecessary to the plot. That is the De Palma position.
Costner is the weak link and the film works around him. Ness is written as a straight-arrow accountant with a family to protect, and Costner plays him at exactly that level, so the interesting material all goes to Connery, Garcia and De Niro’s Capone. De Niro gained thirty pounds and insisted on silk underwear made by Capone’s own tailor.
Don Logan, Frank White and Henry are three completely different kinds of threat. Build opposition that specific in the Antagonist Handbook.
18. King of New York (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of King of New York (1990)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Frank White is genuinely courteous and entirely without conscience, and a hospital for the South Bronx is the plan."
Abel Ferrara gave Christopher Walken a character who returns from prison intending to fund a hospital in the South Bronx with drug money, and plays it completely straight. Frank White believes the plan. The film neither mocks him nor endorses him. Ferrara shot it in New York in the winter of 1989 with a crew that mostly worked for scale.
Ferrara shoots New York in permanent blue-black and the film has an unreal quality that several critics mistook for incompetence. Frank moves through a city that never looks occupied, and the Plaza Hotel suite he lives in is lit like a mausoleum. Several critics called the film incompetent on release and Ferrara has never adjusted the approach.
Walken’s performance is built on stillness and sudden movement. He dances alone in a club, he executes a man mid-sentence, he delivers a speech about being away for a long time in a register somewhere between menace and genuine grievance. Nobody else could have held the part together.
The subway sequence is the film’s best scene and it is almost silent. Frank, wounded, riding a car full of ordinary passengers, pursued by a detective, and Ferrara plays the whole thing on faces and fluorescent light. The film ends in a cab in traffic. That is the correct ending for it.
19. Man Bites Dog (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Man Bites Dog (1992)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A Belgian documentary crew follows a serial killer and progressively becomes complicit, starting by holding the equipment."
Three Belgian film students made a mock documentary about a serial killer for almost no money and cast themselves as the crew. Ben talks to camera about architecture, poetry and ballast weights while murdering people, and the crew carries the equipment and gradually starts helping.
The film’s real subject is the crew. They hold the light. They dispose of a body. They accept a drink. Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel put themselves on screen crossing each line in sequence, and the audience watches documentary neutrality decay into complicity over ninety minutes.
Benoît Poelvoorde is genuinely funny for the first half hour. That is the trap. He is charming, articulate and absurd, and by the time the film stops being funny the audience has already been laughing with him for long enough to have a problem. Poelvoorde’s real family appear as Ben’s family, the single strangest production fact in the film.
20. The Mask (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Mask (1994)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"It is adapted from a Dark Horse comic that is considerably more violent, and the tonal change to comedy is total."
Chuck Russell adapted a Dark Horse comic that was considerably more violent and built a cartoon around Jim Carrey at the exact moment Carrey became the biggest comic actor alive. The mask itself is Loki’s, the effects were state of the art, and none of that is why the film works.
Stanley Ipkiss is written as a bank clerk who is bullied by his landlady, his mechanic and his own best friend, and Carrey plays the pre-mask material with real defeat in it. The transformation has stakes because the film spent twenty minutes establishing somebody worth escaping.
It belongs on a crime list because the plot is a bank robbery, a gang war and a corrupt nightclub, and Peter Greene’s Dorian is playing it as a genuine gangster in a film where the lead is made of rubber. The tonal mismatch is deliberate and mostly holds.
Cameron Diaz was twenty-one and had never acted, and Russell cast her out of a modeling agency after a dozen auditions. The nightclub entrance is staged as an old Hollywood reveal and she carries it, no small thing for a first film.
Honorable Mentions: Crime Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these yet. Each earns a place in the conversation and each is on the list.
The Yards (2000)
James Gray made a quiet film about subway contract corruption in Queens with Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and James Caan, and almost nobody saw it. The family dinner scenes carry more menace than the violence does.
We Own the Night (2007)
Gray again, with a car chase in rain shot entirely from inside the vehicle so the audience can see nothing the driver cannot. It is the most frightening pursuit sequence of the decade and it is almost silent.
Animal Kingdom (2010)
David Michod put a teenager inside a Melbourne criminal family and let Jacki Weaver play the matriarch as warmth with nothing behind it. The film is about a boy working out that the safest person in the house is the one kissing him goodnight.
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985)
Friedkin made a second great chase film and then had his Secret Service protagonist killed with forty minutes left. Willem Dafoe plays a counterfeiter as an artist, and the counterfeiting sequence is shot as a documentary about printing.
Good Time (2017)
The Safdies run one night in Queens at a pace that never lets up, with Pattinson as a man improvising increasingly bad solutions to problems he created. The amusement park sequence is a masterpiece of escalating panic.
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.
Deep Cover (1992)
Bill Duke put Laurence Fishburne undercover in a Los Angeles cocaine operation and let Jeff Goldblum play a lawyer who enjoys the work far too much. The narration is written as a confession and the film is angrier about federal drug policy than anything else from the period.
Atlantic City (1980)
Louis Malle gave Burt Lancaster a part as an aging numbers runner who never was anybody and is finally handed a chance to have been. The city is being demolished and rebuilt around him and Malle films the wrecking balls as the plot.
One False Move (1992)
Carl Franklin followed three killers from Los Angeles to a small Arkansas town where a local sheriff is waiting, and the film turns on a connection the audience works out before either party does. Billy Bob Thornton co-wrote it and plays one of the three.
Dead Presidents (1995)
The Hughes brothers followed Vietnam veterans into an armored car robbery in the Bronx and shot the heist in whiteface. The film is uneven and the last thirty minutes are as bleak as American crime cinema gets.
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.
Cutter’s Way (1981)
John Heard plays a disfigured, alcoholic veteran convinced a local businessman committed a murder, with no evidence and enormous conviction. The film is about whether an unreliable man can still be right, and it declines to make that comfortable.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a cast, a budget and in most cases a source worth adapting.
Hoffa (1992)
Danny DeVito directing a David Mamet script with Nicholson under prosthetics, and the result has no argument in it. The film admires Hoffa without deciding what for, and the framing device strands the whole picture in a truck stop parking lot.
Stolen (2012)
Simon West and Nicolas Cage made a heist film in New Orleans that reuses the Taken premise without any of the competence. The daughter is in a taxi trunk for the entire running time and the film cannot find anything for her to do there.
The Iceman (2013)
Michael Shannon is genuinely frightening as Richard Kuklinski and the film around him is a chronology with no shape. Decades pass in title cards, the marriage plot never develops, and a first-rate performance is stranded in a timeline.
Killerman (2019)
Liam Hemsworth plays a money launderer with amnesia, two premises fighting each other for ninety minutes. The film keeps explaining its own plot in flashback and the explanations do not reconcile.
Gangster Squad (2013)
A period Los Angeles crime film with Penn, Gosling, Brolin and Emma Stone that manages to be about nothing. The film had a cinema shootout scene cut after Aurora and reshot around it, and never recovered a shape.
Righteous Kill (2008)
Pacino and De Niro finally carrying a film together, thirteen years after Heat, in a police procedural with a twist visible from the opening scene. Both men are coasting and the film has no interest in either of them beyond the billing.
What Do You Think?
The top of this tier rates a 9 and the bottom an 8, so the spread inside it is wider than the number suggests. Putting The Mask on a crime list will annoy people and the bank robbery plot is the defense. Tell me which one you would move and where.
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