Part 5 – The Solid Craft
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.
The Usual Suspects, Lock Stock and The Bank Job are three completely different convergence structures. Take them apart in the Plot Handbook.
1. The Usual Suspects (1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Usual Suspects (1995)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
"Verbal Kint improvises the entire account from objects on a corkboard behind a customs agent’s head."
Bryan Singer made it for six million dollars and Christopher McQuarrie built the screenplay backward from a twist. That is the film’s great strength and its permanent limitation. Verbal Kint tells a customs agent a story in an office, and the entire film is the story being told.
Kevin Spacey won the Oscar for a performance that has to work in two directions at once and does. Every tic, every hesitation, every piece of physical weakness is a construction, and the film only lets the audience see the construction in the final ninety seconds.
McQuarrie took the title off a Village Voice column before the screenplay existed, and Singer shot the whole film in thirty-five days on locations borrowed across San Pedro and downtown Los Angeles. Almost the entire budget went on the cast and it shows in every scene in the lineup room.
The problem is that it survives exactly one viewing intact. A second pass reveals that the plot has no obligations because none of it happened, and scenes that played as suspense become a man improvising at a desk. That is a defensible design and it is a cost.
Chazz Palminteri’s Kujan is the film’s real engine and gets less credit than anybody. He is intelligent, aggressive, and being played for ninety minutes by somebody he correctly identifies as the weakest man in the room. The bulletin board is the cruelest shot in nineties crime cinema.
2. Rush Hour (1998, 2001, 2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rush Hour (1998, 2001, 2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"The pairing works because Chan and Tucker are not attempting the same job, one physical and one entirely verbal."
Brett Ratner built three films on one working idea: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker are funny because neither can slow down for the other. The plots are interchangeable and nobody involved pretended otherwise after the first one. New Line released the first in 1998 and it took a hundred and forty-one million dollars domestically off a thirty-three million budget.
Chan was forty-four when the first film shot and the physical comedy is the real product. The pool hall sequence, the scaffolding, the fall down the banner in the third film: all of it performed without a double, and the outtakes over the credits exist to prove it.
Tucker is doing something harder than it looks. The Carter character is loud, self-regarding and wrong about almost everything, and Tucker plays the confidence without ever making him stupid. The film works because he is competent under the noise. Tucker was paid twenty-five million for the third film, briefly the highest fee in Hollywood.
The decline across three films is steep and predictable. The first is tight, the second is a holiday in Hong Kong, and the third is a Paris travelogue with a plot nobody bothered to finish. By 2007 the two leads are performing an act instead of a partnership.
3. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Ritchie made it for around a million pounds, financed partly by people he met in pubs, and it changed British crime cinema."
Guy Ritchie’s first film cost under a million pounds, raised partly from people Ritchie met in pubs, and it introduced a register British crime cinema has never quite escaped. Four friends lose a card game, owe half a million, and try to solve it by robbing the flat next door.
The structure is the achievement. Five separate criminal operations converge on one address over one night, and Ritchie tracks all of them without losing the audience once. The shotguns change hands four times and the geography is always legible. Ritchie storyboarded the convergence before writing dialogue and the sequencing never slips.
The dialogue is where it has aged least well and best at the same time. The rhyming slang and the narrated set-ups were genuinely fresh in 1998 and have been imitated into meaninglessness since, a measure of the influence and not a fault of the film.
Nobody in it is competent. That is the joke and it is what separates the film from the hundred imitations that followed. Every character believes they are running the operation and every one of them is a step behind, and the final scene is a man standing on a bridge with a phone ringing in his pocket.
4. The Big Lebowski (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Big Lebowski (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"It is structurally a Chandler plot, with a kidnapping, a millionaire, a missing woman and a detective who would rather bowl."
The Coens wrote a Raymond Chandler plot, cast Jeff Bridges as a man with no interest in solving it, and produced a film that failed on release and became the most quoted comedy of its decade. The Dude wants a rug replaced. Everything else is imposed on him.
The Chandler structure is exact. A wealthy client, a missing woman, a nihilist gang, a pornographer, a private detective in a Volkswagen, and a protagonist who is passed from one interested party to the next accumulating information he cannot use. The Coens borrowed the shape and removed the competence.
John Goodman’s Walter is the film’s engine and the most carefully written part in it. Every escalation is his. He introduces the ransom fake, he brings the gun to the bowling alley, he throws the briefcase, and the film keeps his Vietnam material just credible enough to be genuinely uncomfortable.
The film lost money on release and assembled its audience on video across a decade, and there is now an annual festival in Louisville that draws thousands. The Coens have said they find the whole phenomenon baffling and they have never gone back to the characters.
The dream sequences and the cowboy narrator are the elements people argue about, and they are the film telling the audience what it is. Sam Elliott appears, compliments the Dude for taking it easy, and admits he lost his train of thought. The film is not going to resolve.
Keyser Soze, The Dude and Nikolai Luzhin all carry weight before they do anything. Learn what a name is worth in the Character Naming Handbook.
5. Payback (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Payback (1999)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Kris Kristofferson, the voiceover and the warmer ending are the reasons the theatrical cut works and the director’s cut does not."
Two films exist under this title and the difference is instructive. Brian Helgeland adapted Richard Stark’s The Hunter, delivered a desaturated film in which Porter is genuinely unpleasant, and was removed from the project. Paramount reshot roughly a third of it with a new ending, a narration track and Kris Kristofferson at the top of the organization.
The Straight Up director’s cut restores Helgeland’s version and is the weaker film. Stripping the narration removes the only thing giving Porter a register, losing Kristofferson removes the one antagonist with any size to him, and the colder final act ends on a flatness the picture has not built toward. The theatrical version is the one that holds.
The amount is the joke in both versions. Porter wants seventy thousand dollars, everybody he asks assumes he wants more, and the film’s running gag is a criminal organization unable to process a man who means exactly what he says about a small number. Stark wrote twenty-four Parker novels and never once let the character be likeable.
6. Chicago (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Chicago (2002)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Every musical number takes place inside Roxie’s imagination, solving the problem of characters bursting into song in real rooms."
Rob Marshall solved the oldest problem in screen musicals by staging every number inside Roxie Hart’s imagination, so nobody ever bursts into song in a real room. The device is stated in the first ten minutes and never broken, and it is why the film worked for audiences who dislike musicals.
The subject is genuinely crime. Two women kill men, a lawyer converts both cases into press coverage, and the film’s argument is that the trial is a performance and the performance is what acquits. The Cell Block Tango is six murder confessions staged as a chorus number.
Richard Gere’s Billy Flynn gets the film’s thesis in the ventriloquist sequence and the press conference tap number, both of which show a lawyer physically operating a client. Marshall shoots them as vaudeville because the film’s position is that the courtroom already is. Gere learned to tap dance for the part at fifty-three and Marshall shot it in one continuous run.
Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones are doing different jobs and both work. Velma is a professional performer and Roxie is an amateur who learns fast, and the final number is the two of them onstage together having destroyed each other to get there. The film took six Academy Awards including Best Picture, the first musical to manage it since Oliver in 1968.
7. Road to Perdition (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Road to Perdition (2002)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Conrad Hall won a posthumous Academy Award for the photography, and the rain-lit machine gun sequence is why."
Sam Mendes followed American Beauty with a Depression-era gangster film adapted from a graphic novel, and Conrad Hall shot it as a series of paintings. Hall died before the Academy Awards and won posthumously, and the photography is the reason the film is remembered. Hall had shot Butch Cassidy and American Beauty and this was his last film.
Tom Hanks plays an enforcer and the casting is the whole argument. Michael Sullivan is a man who kills for a living and goes home to a family who do not know, and Hanks plays the domestic half with the warmth audiences expect and the working half with none of it.
The rain sequence is the best-known thing in the film. Sullivan machine-guns a man outside a hotel in a downpour and Mendes removes the sound entirely, so the whole killing happens under weather and a piano. It is the most beautiful murder in American cinema and the film knows that is a problem.
Jude Law’s Maguire is a crime scene photographer who has started creating his own subjects, and the character is the film’s one genuinely strange invention. He is not in the graphic novel in this form and he gives the picture a register of horror it otherwise lacks.
8. Dark Blue (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dark Blue (2002)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"It is set in the days before the 1992 Los Angeles verdict and the riots arrive in the third act as consequence."
Ron Shelton directed a James Ellroy story set in the five days before the 1992 Los Angeles riots, with Kurt Russell as a third-generation LAPD officer who has never questioned any of it. The verdict lands in the third act and the city burns around a plot that was already finished.
Russell is doing the best work of his career and almost nobody noticed. Eldon Perry is a drunk, a racist and an effective detective, and the film refuses to separate those facts or arrange them into a redemption. The hotel room scene with his wife is played without any self-knowledge at all.
The riot material is where the film overreaches. Shelton needs the verdict to arrive exactly when his plot peaks, and the coincidence is visible. The individual scenes in the burning city are strong and the structural dependence on real events is not earned. Ellroy wrote the story and David Ayer did the screenplay, three years before Training Day.
9. Monster (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Monster (2003)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Charlize Theron altered her posture and gait completely, and the transformation dominated coverage of a better performance."
Patty Jenkins made her first film about Aileen Wuornos and Charlize Theron gained thirty pounds, wore prosthetic teeth and won the Academy Award. The transformation dominated the coverage and the performance underneath it is what the film actually runs on. Roger Ebert called it the best film of the year and Theron has said the weight was the easiest part.
The structure refuses the serial killer template. There is no investigation, no profile, no pursuit for most of the running time. The film is a relationship between two women in Florida motels and the killings happen in the gaps, a decision that cost it the audience it might have had.
Christina Ricci’s Selby is the harder part and the more thankless. She is needy, dishonest and entirely willing to benefit from what Aileen is doing while maintaining that she does not know, and Ricci plays it without asking for any sympathy. Ricci was twenty-three and had spent a decade being cast for exactly the quality she withholds here.
The first killing is the film’s pivot and Jenkins shoots it as self-defense with no ambiguity. Everything after it is not, and the film never uses the first one to excuse the rest. The moral accounting is exact and it is why the film is not exploitation.
Layer Cake gives its lead a set of rules and breaks each one in order. Work out how escalation is built in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
10. Layer Cake (2004) [full review]
► Read the full review of Layer Cake (2004)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"Matthew Vaughn produced Ritchie’s films and this directorial debut is considerably colder than either of them."
Matthew Vaughn produced Guy Ritchie’s first two films and then directed the one that does what those were reaching for. Daniel Craig’s unnamed dealer considers himself a businessman with an exit strategy, and the film spends two hours demonstrating that the exit does not exist.
The tone is the difference. Vaughn drops the comic register almost entirely, and the violence has consequences that persist across scenes. Nobody recovers from anything, the Serbian subplot is genuinely frightening, and the geezer material that Ritchie played for laughs is played here for menace.
Craig got the Bond job off the final shot and it is easy to see why. The whole performance is a man maintaining composure while being handed progressively worse information, and the last thirty seconds remove the composure in a single expression on a set of steps.
11. Eastern Promises (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Eastern Promises (2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"The tattoos record a sentence served, a rank achieved or a crime committed, they cannot be faked, and the film teaches you to read them."
Cronenberg followed A History of Violence with another film about a man performing an identity, and set it in the Russian mafia in London. Viggo Mortensen learned enough Russian to pass, studied the tattoo system, and the film treats the ink as a readable criminal record.
The bathhouse fight is the sequence everybody knows and it deserves the reputation. Mortensen is naked, unarmed and fighting two men with linoleum knives, and Cronenberg shoots it in long takes with no score. It takes a long time, he is badly hurt, and nobody in it looks competent.
Naomi Watts carries the other half and the film gives her the least interesting material. The midwife investigating a dead girl’s diary is a device for entering the organization, and the film’s interest visibly drains whenever it leaves Mortensen and Vincent Cassel. Watts had worked with Cronenberg before and the part was written for her after the fact.
The reveal reframes the whole picture and Cronenberg refuses to celebrate it. The last scene is Nikolai sitting alone at the head of a table having achieved exactly what he was sent to achieve, and the film shoots it as a life sentence instead of a victory.
12. The Bank Job (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Bank Job (2008)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"It dramatizes the 1971 Baker Street robbery, subject to a reported government D-Notice that suppressed all press coverage."
Roger Donaldson made the most tightly plotted heist film of the 2000s out of the 1971 Baker Street robbery, and the film’s premise is that the real robbery was a intelligence operation to recover compromising photographs. The D-notice that suppressed press coverage is real. The tunnel, the radio transmissions and the amateur who picked them up are all documented fact.
Statham is working outside his action register and it is the best thing he has done. Terry Leather is a car dealer in debt who takes the job because he is out of options, and Statham plays the fear instead of the competence for most of the running time.
The structure is the achievement. Five separate parties want the vault contents for five incompatible reasons, and Donaldson keeps every thread legible without slowing down. The radio operator on the roof, the amateur who picks up the transmissions, the police who cannot triangulate. Donaldson had made No Way Out twenty years earlier and the plotting instincts had not softened.
The third act is where the film separates from the genre. The money is the least important thing in the vault, everyone who wanted the photographs arrives at once, and Terry has to negotiate his way out with an institution instead of shooting his way out of a warehouse.
13. The Town (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Town (2010)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"The neighborhood is the plot, and Charlestown’s reputation for armed robbery is stated in an opening card."
Ben Affleck adapted Chuck Hogan’s novel and shot Charlestown as a place with a trade passed between generations. The opening card about the neighborhood’s armed robbery rate is the film’s thesis, and the picture largely earns it before the last act arrives. Affleck grew up in Cambridge and shot in Charlestown with residents in most of the background roles.
The procedural detail is the strength. Bleach on the scene, burned vehicles, nun masks, police scanners, an armorer who is also a florist. Affleck shoots the jobs with geography the audience can follow, and the North End chase through streets too narrow for the vehicles is the best-staged sequence in his filmography.
Jeremy Renner’s Jem is the reason it works and he was nominated for it. He is dangerous, loyal and completely without a future, and the film’s best scene is him asking Doug for help with something before telling him what it is. Affleck as the lead is fine and Renner is the film.
The romance is the weakest element and the Fenway finale pushes past what the rest had established. A film this careful about procedure ends in body armor and a firefight inside a ballpark, and the last twenty minutes belong to a different and less interesting picture.
14. The American (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of The American (2010)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.3/10
"Corbijn films a gunsmith cleaning, filing, measuring and testing, and the process is the entire characterization."
Anton Corbijn came out of photography and made a film about a gunsmith in an Italian hill town that is almost entirely silence, process and landscape. George Clooney says very little, the plot is minimal, and the film was mis-sold as a thriller to audiences who were annoyed by it.
The gun assembly is the centerpiece and it runs for a long time. Corbijn films Jack machining a suppressor, testing a weapon in a field, filing components, and the sequences work as character because the competence is the only thing the man has instead of a life.
The Abruzzo town does an enormous amount of work. Narrow streets with one exit, a priest who asks questions, a café where the same people sit every day. Jack has chosen a place where he cannot be anonymous and the film never explains why he made that mistake.
John Wick delivers an entire criminal underworld through gold coins and hotel rules with no exposition. Study the method in the World Builder’s Handbook.
15. Seven Psychopaths (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Seven Psychopaths (2012)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"McDonagh wrote a film about a screenwriter trying to write a film called Seven Psychopaths. That is the apparatus."
McDonagh followed In Bruges with a film about a screenwriter failing to write a film called Seven Psychopaths, and the self-reference is the whole apparatus. Colin Farrell plays Marty, Sam Rockwell plays a friend who keeps supplying material by committing crimes, and the screenplay being discussed is the one being watched.
Christopher Walken’s Hans carries the film’s only real emotion and it arrives from nowhere. The hospital scene with his wife is played completely straight in a picture that has been arch for an hour, and Walken’s stillness in the desert sequence is the best work in it.
The film openly criticizes its own treatment of women through a character complaining that the women in Marty’s script have nothing to do, and then does not fix the problem. McDonagh has acknowledged this. Naming a fault is not the same as correcting it and the film ends up demonstrating both.
The shootout that the whole structure has been building toward is deliberately refused. Hans proposes that the characters simply talk instead, the film half-agrees, and the result is a final act that is smarter than a gunfight and less satisfying than one. McDonagh clearly intended that.
16. John Wick (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of John Wick (2014)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"Stahelski keeps the camera still, frames at full body and lets takes run. That is a claim the genre had stopped making."
Chad Stahelski and David Leitch came out of stunt work and built an action film on the principle that the audience should be able to see what is happening. Wide frames, long takes, no shaky camera, and a lead who trained for months so the fights could be shot without cutting away.
The premise is famously thin and that is the design. A retired hitman’s dog is killed and the film spends ninety minutes on the consequences. The economy of it means every scene can be about execution instead of motivation, and nobody has to explain anything twice.
Reeves was forty-nine during production and trained for months in judo, jujitsu and three-gun competition shooting. Stahelski had been his stunt double on The Matrix fifteen years earlier, so the film knows exactly what it can ask him to do on camera without cutting.
The world-building is the innovation and it is delivered entirely in passing. Gold coins, the Continental, a cleanup service, rules nobody states in full. The film assumes the audience will keep up and refuses to stop and explain. That is why the sequels had somewhere to go.
Keanu Reeves does most of his own work and the gun handling is the detail people who know the subject point at. Magazine changes, target transitions, the specific close-quarters technique the film uses throughout. It is accurate enough that shooting instructors show clips of it.
17. Black Mass (2015) [full review]
► Read the full review of Black Mass (2015)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
"Johnny Depp plays Whitey Bulger with contact lenses and a receding hairline, and the dinner table scene is the best of it."
Scott Cooper adapted the Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill book about Whitey Bulger and the FBI informant arrangement that protected him for two decades, and the film has the material for a study of institutional corruption. What it delivers is a sequence of killings. Bulger was on the run for sixteen years and was arrested in Santa Monica in 2011 with eight hundred thousand dollars in a wall.
Depp’s performance is the thing people argue about. The prosthetics, the contact lenses and the receding hairline are extensive, and underneath them is a man playing stillness and menace effectively in individual scenes. The dinner table sequence about the steak marinade is genuinely frightening. Depp spent four hours a day in the chair and the lenses made it hard for him to see the other actors.
Joel Edgerton’s John Connolly is the actual subject and the film keeps losing him. A Southie kid who joins the Bureau and spends his career protecting a man from his own neighborhood, and the story of how an agency lets that happen is more interesting than anything Bulger does on screen.
18. Godfather of Harlem (2019-2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Godfather of Harlem (2019-2025)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Forest Whitaker plays Bumpy Johnson returning to Harlem in 1963 to find the Italian families have taken his territory."
Forest Whitaker plays Bumpy Johnson returning to Harlem in 1963 after eleven years in Alcatraz to find the Italians running his territory, and the series builds its whole premise on placing a crime story inside the civil rights movement instead of beside it. Chris Brancato created it after Narcos and the first season aired on Epix in 2019.
Malcolm X is a main character and the show takes the relationship seriously. Nigel Thatch plays him across the Nation of Illinois split and the Mecca pilgrimage, and the series argues that Bumpy’s money and Malcolm’s platform needed each other in ways neither man was comfortable with.
The heroin material is where the show is strongest and most uncomfortable. Bumpy is financing community institutions with a product destroying the community, the series states that plainly, and Whitaker plays a man who has decided not to examine it. Bumpy Johnson was real and died of heart failure in a Harlem diner in 1968.
Across four seasons the quality holds better than most crime series manage. The Genovese material sags in the middle seasons and the show recovers by widening instead of escalating, moving into the Vietnam heroin pipeline and the politics around it. Four seasons ran to 2025 and the show never had the audience its cast deserved.
Havoc has first-rate action attached to a script assembled from parts. Learn to spot the failure in the Awful Writing Handbook.
19. Havoc (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Havoc (2025)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.9/10
"Gareth Evans made The Raid, and the question here was whether the choreography would survive an American production."
Gareth Evans made The Raid and then spent years trying to get an American film made, and this is the result. Tom Hardy plays a detective moving through a Christmas-lit city after a drug deal collapses, and the action choreography is as good as anything Evans has shot.
The nightclub sequence is the reason to watch it. Several minutes of continuous combat in a confined space with practical squibs, real geography and a clear count of who is left, and Evans holds shots long enough that the audience can follow the exchange of weapons.
The script is the problem. The corruption plot is assembled from parts that have been used better elsewhere, the political subplot resolves through a coincidence, and Hardy is given an interiority the film has no room to develop. The action is first-rate and the connective tissue is not.
20. Dexter – “Dexter” (S1E1, 2006) [full review]
► Read the full review of Dexter – “Dexter” (S1E1, 2006)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
"The solution to keeping an audience with a serial killer is a code, stated in the first ten minutes and never broken."
The pilot hands the audience a serial killer as a protagonist and solves the problem with a rule. Dexter kills only killers, taught by an adoptive father who recognized what the boy was and built a code around it instead of trying to remove it.
Michael C. Hall narrates constantly and the narration is the show’s main device and its eventual weakness. In the pilot it works, because the gap between the friendly blood-spatter analyst and the interior voice is the entire joke and the entire threat. Hall had come off six seasons of Six Feet Under and the casting reads as deliberate misdirection.
The Miami photography is deliberate. Bright sun, blue water, pastel buildings, and a man cutting up a body in a shipping container. The visual register refuses the expected darkness and the mismatch is doing the same work Hannibal would do seven years later with food.
The Ice Truck Killer is introduced in the first episode as a bloodless body, and the choice to make the season antagonist someone who intrigues Dexter instead of threatening him is what gives the first season its shape. He is being courted, not hunted. The season was adapted from Jeff Lindsay’s first novel and diverges sharply from it at the end.
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 to be written.
The Yards (2000)
James Gray made a quiet film about subway maintenance contract corruption in Queens with Wahlberg, Phoenix and James Caan, and almost nobody saw it. The family dinner scenes carry more menace than any of the violence does.
We Own the Night (2007)
Gray again, with a car chase in heavy rain shot entirely from inside the vehicle so the audience sees 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 boy works out that the most dangerous person in the house is the one kissing him goodnight.
Good Time (2017)
The Safdies run one night in Queens at a pace that never lets up, with Pattinson improvising increasingly bad solutions to problems he created. The amusement park sequence is a masterpiece of escalating panic.
Bob le Flambeur (1956)
Melville built the French heist film here, twenty years before Le Cercle Rouge, around an aging Montmartre gambler planning to rob a casino. The ending is a joke about luck and it is the warmest film Melville ever made.
Night and the City (1950)
Jules Dassin shot London as a trap five years before Rififi, with Richard Widmark as a hustler whose every scheme is one degree too ambitious. The last twenty minutes are a man running out of people who will hide him.
The Big Heat (1953)
Fritz Lang put Glenn Ford on a corruption case after his wife is killed by a car bomb meant for him, and Lee Marvin throws boiling coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in the most notorious scene of the decade.
Across 110th Street (1972)
Barry Shear made a Harlem crime film that is genuinely about the neighborhood, with Anthony Quinn and Yaphet Kotto as police who dislike each other for reasons the film takes seriously. Bobby Womack wrote the title song.
The Onion Field (1979)
Joseph Wambaugh adapted his own book about the 1963 kidnapping of two LAPD officers, and the film spends half its length on the trial and what it does to the surviving officer. James Woods is genuinely frightening.
At Close Range (1986)
Christopher Walken plays a rural Pennsylvania crime boss who recruits his own teenage sons, based on the Johnston gang. Sean Penn is the son who works out what his father will do to protect himself, and the film is unbearable from there.
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.
Drug War (2012)
Johnnie To made a mainland Chinese police procedural under censorship rules that forbid ambiguity about criminals, and produced the bleakest film of his career anyway. The final roadblock sequence is twelve minutes of everybody dying badly.
Dishonorable Mentions: Crime Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and named because each had the cast, the budget and in most cases a source worth adapting.
Gangster Squad (2013)
A period Los Angeles crime film with Penn, Gosling, Brolin and Emma Stone that manages to be about nothing. A cinema shootout was cut after Aurora and reshot around, and the picture never recovered a shape.
Hoffa (1992)
Danny DeVito directing a David Mamet script with Nicholson under prosthetics, and no argument anywhere in it. The film admires Hoffa without deciding what for, and the framing device strands the whole picture in a truck stop lot.
Bright (2017)
David Ayer put orcs and elves into a Los Angeles buddy cop film and the world building contradicts itself in the first ten minutes. The racial allegory is stated out loud repeatedly and never survives contact with its own premise.
Misconduct (2016)
Pacino and Anthony Hopkins in the same legal thriller and neither shares a scene worth the fee. The plot is explained in flashback four separate times and the explanations do not agree with each other.
88 Minutes (2007)
Pacino is told he has eighty-eight minutes to live and the film runs a hundred and eight. Every suspect is introduced with a caption, the killer is obvious from the second reel, and the clock is abandoned halfway through.
Once Upon a Time in Venice (2017)
Bruce Willis as a Venice Beach detective in a comedy that cannot decide what it is about. The dog kidnapping plot, the graffiti subplot and the loan shark material never connect, and the narration exists to paper over the gaps.
What Do You Think?
This tier is where the rewatch scale and critical opinion separate hardest. The Usual Suspects sits level with Rush Hour and Dexter is at the bottom on a 7 despite a pilot most people rate higher. Tell me which one is wrong and by how much.
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