40. “Miss Bala” (2011)
Shortly to get a remake from “Twilight” director Catherine Hardwicke and starring Gina Rodriguez, the new English-language take on “Miss Bala” will have a mean feat ahead of it to improve on Gerardo Naranjo’s original. It’s a slick, bruising look at the cartel wars, featuring a young aspiring beauty queen (Stephanie Sigman) who is forced against her will to work for the local cartel after witnessing them commit a massacre. Falling somewhere between the social realism of the Dardennes and a visceral action movie, and anchored by a tremendous performance by Sigman, it captures better than most the true terror of the cartels, and makes its heroine a fascinatingly compromised symbol of the way that they grind up ordinary Mexicans, with Naranjo wringing every drop of tension from his premise.
39. “A History Of Violence” (2005)
The first and best of the two crime pics that David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen made together back-to-back, “A History Of Violence” doesn’t initially seem like the sort of thing that the body-horror master would make, but like its lead character, soon reveals itself to have all kinds lurking under the surface. Based on a graphic novel, it sees Tom, a seemingly ordinary family man (Mortensen) praised as a hero after killing two men trying to rob his diner, only for a mysterious, scarred criminal (Ed Harris) to turn up and claim that Tom has a past, and that these were far from the first people he’d killed. Cronenberg and his cast (particularly William Hurt, whose Oscar-nominated supporting turn can practically be seen from space) don’t hide from the comic book nature of the material, but for all the ultraviolence (and two of the most narratively effective sex scenes in history), there’s something deeply human here, about an attempt to escape your nature, and whether there really are second acts in American life.
38. “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” (2013)
After “Pete’s Dragon” and “A Ghost Story,” David Lowery’s fast becoming one of the most interesting American filmmakers we have, and with due respect to his underseen debut “St. Nick,” that really began with his lyrical breakthrough “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.” Shot in virtually perpetual twilight by the legendary Bradford Young, it’s a sort of twist on the lovers-on-the-run archetype, as Texan Ruth (Rooney Mara) is reunited with her ex, and father of her daughter, Bob (Casey Affleck), recently escaped from the prison he was sent to after taking the fall for shooting a cop (Ben Foster). Utterly gorgeous, with a dreamlike, Malickian touch and a hefty dose of melancholy, it won’t satisfy the most high-octane crime fans, but the rest of us deeply appreciate the film’s lovely, earnest, soulful approach.
37. “Hell Or High Water” (2016)
The rural bank robbery movie updated for the post-financial collapse era, “Hell Or High Water” wears its influences on its sleeves, but what excellent fucking sleeves they are. From “Sicario” writer Taylor Sheridan, and “Starred Up” director David Mackenzie, it sees Chris Pine and Ben Foster play a pair of bank robbers, the latter increasingly unpredictable and violent, with Jeff Bridges as the elderly marshall hoping to bring them in. It’s free of fuss and flair, stripped down but full of plenty of texture, from that show-stealing waitress to the instant-classic of a final scene, a Western but not, and simply and purely watchable in a way that too few modern crime pictures are. It proved a surprise hit on release last year, and it couldn’t have been more deserved that it was.
36. “Collateral” (2004)
Michael Mann’s made some damn fine crime movies in this century (we even like the often-derided “Miami Vice” and “Public Enemies”), but his finest hour of late remains the gripping “Collateral,” the most minimalist, tense and purely commercial film of the director’s career. The story of an LA cabbie (Jamie Foxx) and the hitman (Tom Cruise) who forces him to drive him around for a night, it’s a truly great Los Angeles movie (with Mann starting to experiment digitally to striking effect), sleek and suspenseful, and driven by a truly Cruise performance that’s easily one of his best. It follows a more conventional narrative thread than some of Mann’s subsequent work, but this remains, “Heat” aside, his most satisfying delve into the criminal underbelly.
35. “Gomorrah” (2008)
The organized crime movie is so well-worn at this point that it sometimes feels like it’s eternally doomed to go over the same ground over and over again. But then comes along something like Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah,” based on a non-fiction book by Roberto Saviano, which almost feels revolutionary to the extent that it deglamorizes the genre. Taking a wide, almost docudrama-ish scope that feels indebted to “The Wire,” it looks at the Casalesi clan in southern Italy, amidst a feud kicked off by murders in a tanning salon that soon have ramifications from the top of the hierarchy to the very bottom. It showcases crime not as a business, but as a disease, spreading from its root to infect almost every element of life that we’re shown, and proves utterly chilling by the end.
34. “The Yellow Sea” (2010)
He truly cemented his status as one of the most exciting up-and-coming Korean filmmakers with last year’s brilliantly demented horror pic “The Wailing,” but Na Hong-Jin turned heads a few years back with this gripping and stylish thriller. It stars Ha Jung-woo (who also starred in Na’s very good “The Chaser,” and more recently cropped up in “The Handmaiden”) as an ethnic Korean man in China who goes to South Korea in part to assassinate a businessman to clear his debts to the local mob, and partly in the hope of searching for his wife, who has disappeared there. Energetic, noirish, twisty and visceral, it stretches the realms of plausibility in places, but also feels emotionally grounded enough that you roll with it, and will feel utterly rewarded for the effort by the end.
33. “John Wick” (2014)/“John Wick: Chapter 2” (2017)
We couldn’t pick between the two Keanu Reeves-reviving badass-fests here: the first has a purity to it, plus Willem Dafoe and that adorable puppy for the first reel, the second embellishes and extrapolates the film’s strange world and amps the arthouse-action vibe up to eleven. And while they’re action movies first and foremost, they’re also definitely crime films, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch building a fascinating pulp-comic-book underworld more compelling, and full of more intriguing characters and rules, than we’ve seen in this genre for a while. Plus, of course, it has Reeves at his taciturn, quietly psychotic best, it looks beautiful, and it has some of the best shootout sequences since Sam Peckinpah shuffled off the mortal coil. Bring on ‘Chapter 3,’ as soon as humanly possible.
32. “Foxcatcher” (2014)
We ummed and aahed a bit about including a movie like “Foxcatcher,” which is undoubtedly based on a true crime case, but only gets to said crime near the end. But Bennett Miller’s gripping movie is such a slow-motion spiral towards that crime, a look at both the motives behind, and the unknowability of why it happened, that we couldn’t not include it. It stars an unrecognizable Steve Carell as wealthy heir John du Pont, and Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo as the Schultz Brothers, Olympic wrestlers who du Pont befriends and invites to train on his Foxcatcher farm, with ultimately tragic consequences. Like a sort of evil “Great Gatsby,” it examines the rottenness of American privilege and entitlement in a way that only something like “The Jinx” can compete in recent years, pulled off with Miller’s usual meticulousness (DP Greig Fraser does particularly great work here).
31. “Bullhead” (2011)
The film that brought us both Matthias Schoenearts and director Michael Roskam (who went on to reteam for the nearly-made-this-list “The Drop,” and have “The Racer & The Jailbird” on the way), this moody, striking Belgian thriller, an unlikely Oscar nominee, takes an unusual approach to the mob movie. Schoenaerts stars as Jacky, a brutish cattle farmer injecting himself with cow steroids, who is tied up with a local mob selling illegal hormones in rural Limburg, and unable to escape his tragic past. It’s a striking original picture, equal parts character study, tragic romance, Mob thriller and werewolf movie, and Roskam’s stylish direction, and Schoenaerts’ extraordinary physical performance, make it one that lingers long in the memory.
