30. “Blue Ruin” (2013)
It’s hard to make a revenge movie feel fresh, but Jeremy Saulnier’s tremendous breakthrough “Blue Ruin” did exactly that, simply by making its lead character not some ultra-efficient Denzel-ish killing machine, but an ordinary, somewhat bumbling guy. Macon Blair, in a wonderful performance, plays Dwight, a drifter who upon learning that the man who murdered his parents has been released from jail, sets out to avenge them, only to botch the revenge killing and become a target of the family. It’s a rare movie that aims for a Coen-ish tone and actually pulls it off without looking stupid, Saulnier and his team achieving an extremely accomplished, and often nail-bitingly tense, picture on a meagre (and partly crowd-funded) budget. Between Saulnier’s “Green Room” and Blair’s “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore,” it’s managed to kick off an exciting new lease of life for the indie thriller.
29. “Traffic” (2000)
There’s stuff in “Traffic,” the movie that deservedly won Steven Soderbergh his Oscar, that doesn’t really work, notably the often-questionable storyline featuring Michael Douglas and his crack-head daughter (Erika Christensen), which feels like pandering. But when it’s at its best — not coincidentally, when it steers into the crime genre which Soderbergh had just nailed with two of his most recent movies, “Out Of Sight” and “The Limey” — it’s thrilling, gripping and visceral. Aside from Douglas, the other major strands involve Benicio Del Toro’s honest south-of-the-border cop, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as the woman who takes over her husband’s trafficking business (with Don Cheadle as the DEA agent trying to bring her down), and Soderbergh directs the shit out of it all, pulling out every trick he’d learned over the previous decade into a movie that, still, to some extent, defines the hopeless war on drugs.
28. “Winter’s Bone” (2010)
If we get a noir movie these days, it tends to be something closer to pastiche: fedoras and femme fatales and 1940s settings, imitating the classics without ever quite bringing something new to the party. So it was thrilling to see something like “Winter’s Bone,” an honest to god film noir transplanted to the poverty-stricken Ozarks. Debra Granik’s film, adapted from Daniel Woodrell’s novel, focuses on Ree (Jennifer Lawrence in her breakthrough role), who sets out to search for her missing, meth-manufacturing father when he goes missing before they lose their home. It’s an utterly gripping thriller with both a winning feminist streak and a terrific sense of atmosphere, but it’s best elements come in its performances: not just Lawrence’s stellar turn, but also the terrifying (and rightly also Oscar-nominated) one from John Hawkes as her Uncle Teardrop.
27. “Monster” (2003)
She’s on top of the world right now thanks to the success of “Wonder Woman,” but anyone who saw “Monster” has known that Patty Jenkins has had the goods for a long time. Her debut feature tells the story of Aileen Wuornos (an Oscar-winning Charlize Theron), a sex worker executed in Florida in 2002 for murdering six men, at least the first of which came when she defended herself from a john. Beginning initially as a queer romance before shifting gears, it never feels exploitative or grindhouse-y, being an utterly sympathetic portrait of Wuornos while rightly falling short of claiming her as a hero either. Christina Ricci is a little miscast as Wuornos’ girlfriend, but Jenkins’ assured direction, and the mighty lead turn from Theron mean that it doesn’t even remotely matter.
26. “In Bruges” (2008)
We found it hard to choose between the two breakthrough features by the McDonagh brothers, but as wildly entertaining as John Michael McDonagh’s “The Guard” is, we ultimately went for the slightly earlier, slightly more soulful “In Bruges” by younger brother Martin (in part, we suspect, because of how excited we are about this fall’s “Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Missouri”). The feature debut of Oscar-winning playwright McDonagh, it might have been yet another post-Tarantino bore — the story of two hitmen (Colin Farrell, still his best performance, and Brendan Gleeson) who are exiled to the purgatorial Belgian city of the title by their boss (a revelatory Ralph Fiennes) after a job goes horribly wrong. But as quotably hilarious as the film is, it’s the Catholic guilt pathos that McDonagh lends it that elevates it to something truly special.
25. “We Own The Night” (2007)
We love both of James Gray’s Joaquin Phoenix/Mark Wahlberg starring 21st century crime flicks, but “We Own The Night,” probably the most accessible and enjoyable thing that the director has made to date, just edges it for us. A sprawling family crime epic, it sees Joaquin Phoenix as the club-owning black sheep of an NYC cop family (Robert Duvall and Mark Wahlberg) in the 1980s, who agrees to cooperate with the authorities after his brother is targeted by Russian kingpin Vadim (Alex Veadov). Just close enough to the mainstream that it frustrates some when it doesn’t quite get there, it features typically fine work from its cast (Phoenix in particular, of course), and a couple of set pieces that aren’t just the best that Gray have made, but some of the best in the genre in recent years.
24. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” (2004)
After the high-profile flop of “The Long Kiss Goodnight,” Shane Black more or less disappeared for a full decade. But the wait was worth it when he returned (and making his directorial debut, no less): “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” gave a noirish sheen to Black’s ever-quotable buddy-buddy action formula, and the result was an instant classic. Robert Downey Jr (in the part that, despite the film’s underperformance, managed to revive his career and lead to “Iron Man,” a favor he repaid by getting Black to direct “Iron Man 3”) plays a petty thief who’s mistaken for an actor, flown out to L.A (at Christmas, of course), and becomes embroiled in a pleasingly convoluted mystery with the help of his childhood sweetheart (Michelle Monaghan) and P.I. Gay Perry (Val Kilmer). It’s funny, exciting, smart and steeped in a love of the genre: spiritual sequel “The Nice Guys” came close, but this remains the real deal.
23. “A Hard Day” (2014)
If there’s one country consistently producing cleverly reimagined genre-inflected fare right now, it’s probably Korea, so it’s no surprise that one of our biggest discoveries of the past few years should hail from there. It’s only director Kim Seong-hun‘s second film — the underperformance of his prior movie apparently sent him into a confidence tailspin from which it took 8 years to emerge. But be glad he did, because this is the absolute real deal: a careening energetic and inventive black comedy leading to a movie in which every single scene seems to have been precisely calibrated and imagined down to the tiniest detail for maximum tension, comedy or catharsis. Also featuring two or three of the nuttiest extended fights you’re likely to see, this story of a corrupt cop very reluctantly finding the path to righteousness via his extraordinarily hard day only had a minuscule stateside theatrical release, which, as a silver lining, means many of you must still have this treat in store.
22. “Red Road” (2006)
It might be a little bit of a stretch to describe “Red Road” as a crime movie, but we think Andrea Arnold’s stunning debut qualifies: it’s a revenge movie at its heart, once it spills all of its secrets, one dressed around an ever-topical voyeuristic CCTV motif. Based on a ‘concept’ by Lars Von Trier, it sees a CCTV operator (Kate Dickie) seemingly become fixated on a man around a Glasgow council estate (Tony Curran) who’s recently been released from prison. There’s a lot more to it than we won’t give away here, the hypnotic, paranoid brutalism of the first two thirds giving way to the provocative, powerful conclusion, and though it’s now over ten years old, it hasn’t aged a day since. And even if it’s only crime-genre-adjacent, there’s enough here to make us with that Arnold tackles the genre head-on at some point too.
21. “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead” (2007)
Sidney Lumet had one of the most extraordinary directing careers in movies, spanning fifty years and taking in classics from “12 Angry Men” and “Fail Safe” to “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network” and “The Verdict,” and he closed out, aged 83, with a film that arguably ranks among his best. A bleak Greek tragedy of a crime picture, it stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a drug-addicted finance whizz who enlists his brother (Ethan Hawke), who unbeknown to him is having an affair with his wife, to help rob the mom & pop jewellery store run by their actual mom & pop (Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris), only for the crime to go horribly wrong. It’s old-fashioned in some respects, closer to an Arthur Miller melodrama than the whiz and zip of a Tarantino, but it totally works: even in his ninth decade Lumet knew how to direct the hell out of a movie, and he couldn’t ask for a better cast than the one he assembled here (also featuring Marisa Tomei, Brian F. O’Byrne, Michael Shannon and Amy Ryan). It was overshadowed a bit in a strong year, but it’ll only gather more fans with time.
