Cops and robbers, kidnappers and gangsters. Since the beginning of cinema, there’s been a fascination with the dark underbelly of society. From small-time crooks to international criminal empires, we’ve flocked to theatres for decades to indulge our fascination with the criminal element.
For this list, we’re staying away from movies that fit more squarely into another genre. So, heist movies such as Ocean’s 11 are out, as are psychological thrillers such as The Silence of the Lambs. Here we’re just looking at straight up crime movies.
But what makes a crime movie truly great? As with any other genre, they have to have well-rounded characters, be they the good guys or the bad guys. Also, the crime itself has to matter. A simple pickpocket scheme isn’t interesting if it’s merely the latest iPhone being stolen, but if it’s an iPhone with nuclear codes, you’ve got yourself a movie (But no stealing, because that’s OUR idea! IPhone Apocalypse, hitting theatres near you, probably never…)!
These are the 20 Best Crime And Gangster Movies, Ranked!
20. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
British cinema is rife with many, many brilliant crime movies. The Krays, Legend, The Long Good Friday, and The Italian Job all take a look at the often notoriously violent criminal empires that exist in the land of bowler hats, cricket, and cups of tea. But by the 1990s, most of these movies had been and gone and British cinema needed a fresh voice. Along came Guy Ritchie, Matthew Vaughn, and a fresh-faced cast (including a former athlete by the name of Jason Statham) to breathe new life into the genre.
Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels is largely comedic and loaded with witty banter between the primary cast. But, it also takes violence to a place that few movies of its era dared to. Many American movies of the time that used violence to tell the story - Fight Club, for example - were heavily criticized for it. And yet, audiences cheered for the excessive violence of Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. Let’s face it: the traffic warden had it coming.
What set the movie apart, aside from the near-perfect dialogue, was the feeling that the main four cast really were family. They fought, argued, and bumbled, but when it came down to it, they were covering each other’s backs as family tends to do. While the various crimes, from the theft of antique shotguns, to stealing cash from drug dealers, overlapped in hilarious and unforeseen ways, each plot thread was tied up neatly for audiences. Unlike Ritchie’s Rock ‘n’ Rolla, it managed to be smart.
19. The Usual Suspects
Spoilers ahead!
What often marks a movie as truly great is when you walk away from it and are left satisfied, yet still wanting more. Throughout The Usual Suspects, minor criminal Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey) sits in front of his interrogator, Customs agents Dave Kujan, and recounts the story of how he and his companions were brought together to complete a job at the behest of uber-criminal mastermind, Keyser Soze and caught up in various robberies and eventually a lethal shoot-out which only Verbal appears to have survived.
Verbal tells the story, we the audience see, and Kujan deduces that former cop Dean Keaton, part of the criminal gang, is in fact Keyser Soze based on Verbal’s story. After Verbal’s bail is posted and he leaves the station, Kujan looks at the notice board behind him and sees wanted posters, and various other clues which all tie to Verbal’s story. The entire narrative had been made up on the spot by the lone survivor of the shoot-out, and the supposedly crippled Verbal was in fact Keyser Soze all along.
Celebrated for being one of the finest plot-twists in cinematic history, The Usual Suspects leaves the audience wondering which aspects of the story actually happened, and which parts were simply Verbal’s misdirection. While the hijackings, jewel heists, and the shoot-out over the cocaine shipment all happened, the details are all provided by Verbal, making him the very definition of unreliable narrator.
18. Once Upon a Time In America
Once Upon a Time in America is a masterpiece, but a difficult one in many ways. It’s also the perfect conclusion to Sergio Leone’s career. Initially released in a heavily edited form, the movie was a flop. Later, the definitive four and a half hour movie was released and it became rightly seen as a truly great epic masterpiece of cinema, and one of the best gangster movies of all time.
Unlike most movies on this list, Once Upon a Time in America is an incredibly slow burn. But there’s no sense that any part of the movie is superfluous. Scenes are deliberately stretched out, moments deliberately linger in the air to give the movie a distinctly European feel. Leone does this, largely, due to the movie making of the ‘80s having become increasingly drawn to fast-paced action, which simply didn’t suit him. He’s an old-school director, the equivalent to a master composer in a world full of techno-music. He’s out of step, but not a dinosaur. He’s got one last epic in him and he makes the most of it by delivering some of the finest scenes in cinema.
17. Heat
While two of the finest veterans of the crime movie genre are undoubtedly Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro, they hadn’t been face to face in the same movie until 1995’s Heat. While each had been in The Godfather Part 2, they were in stories set in different time periods. Here, they are set as each other’s nemesis, both playing parts that were far from the roles that had cemented their place in the genre. Pacino, as LAPD Robbery/Homicide Detective Lt Vincent Hanna is a world away from Michael Corleone, or Frank Serpico. DeNiro’s master thief Neil McCauley is a professional criminal, unencumbered by the emotional connection he had to the criminal world he shows as the young Vito Corleone. Despite this, each actor wears their part like a finely-tailored suit.
Much of the movie’s success is down to Michael Mann’s flawless direction which still looks great two decades later. His use of the colour blue to evoke feelings of sombre professionalism before a heist was used many times in The Dark Knight as an obvious homage.
One of the finest moments in the movie is where professional cop and professional criminal sit down and talk, face-to-face in a diner. Beautifully understated, the scene shows just how much Hanna’s relentless pursuit of McCauley has cost each man. Their lives are solitary, each has sacrificed everything, but there’s a respect each man has for the other which is rare in crime cinema.
And then there’s the shoot-out in downtown L.A, Val Kilmer’s use of an M16 is pure gun-porn and one of the best action sequences of all-time.
16. The Maltese Falcon
To today’s audiences, the archetypes of: Mary Astor’s Femme Fatale, Peter Lorre’s weasel-like gangster, Sydney Greenstreet’s fat man who plots in the background, and of course Humphrey Bogart’s world-weary private detective all seem like clichés. But that’s because The Maltese Falcon is the 1941 film-noir that established these tropes to begin with.
While John Huston’s direction is incredible for a first-timer, his use of low-key lighting and interesting camera angles were revolutionary for its day, it’s largely accepted that the movie succeeds thanks to Humphrey Bogart’s performance as the morally ambiguous Sam Spade. He’s chronically cynical, greedy and yet honourable. He’s a son of a bitch, but a likeable one at that.
While the riddle of the Falcon itself is never fully solved, the many people prepared to kill and double-cross to poses it serves as a cautionary tale for all those who would choose untold riches over anything else.
15. Reservoir Dogs
Possibly the greatest independent movie ever made, Reservoir Dogs pays homage to numerous crime movies (Tarrantino has gone to great lengths to state that he played deliberate homages as opposed to being a plagiarist) such as The Killing, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Django, and City on Fire.
Shot on a tiny budget of 1.2 million dollars, Reservoir Dogs never actually shows the central crime, in this case a heist, and uses non-linear storytelling (a favourite of Tarrantino’s) to show the planning of the crime, where each character is given a colour to use in place of a name, and the aftermath where Orange is wounded and Nash is brutally tortured while tied to a chair.
While the central heist wasn’t shot due to budgetary restrictions, it allowed Tarrantino to focus on the criminal’s themselves with each character given a little more to do than merely take part in the caper. The numerous references to pop-culture, the group’s debate over the ethics of tipping a waitress, even the scene where Blonde pulls out a straight razor, all made Reservoir Dogs a classic and made huge stars of almost everyone involved.
14. Get Carter
Widely regarded as one of the greatest crime movies ever produced by British cinema, Get Carter is based on Ted Lewis’ novel Jack’s Return. Michael Caine plays the titular Jack Carter, a London hard-man who travels to Newcastle in the north of England to investigate the death of his brother and unleash hell on those responsible.
While Get Carter is also a revenge-thriller, the bone crunching violence along with the grim and moody atmospherics help to highlight how Carter’s life mirrors the world he lives in. He’s become a little more dapper since living in London, but when he returns to his roots he becomes as bleak and brutal as his once-familiar surroundings.
Caine is at his best here, and he delivers his brilliant dialogue flawlessly. The ing cast of Ian Hendry, George Sewell, and John Osborn round out what is arguably one of the crowning moments of British crime-classics and heavily influenced the Brit-Flicks of the late ‘90s which sought to imitate Get Carter's clever dialogue and stylish violence. Not only did Jack Carter get there first, he did it best.
13. Fargo
The Coen Brothers have used elements of crime or criminal activity in many of their movies, but this is by far the best example in their impressive repertoire. As much a black comedy as a straight-up crime drama, Fargo juxtaposes the colourful residents of a backwater Minnesota town against the bleak and snow-covered landscape they find themselves in.
While the plot isn’t especially original, in that William H Macy hires two criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife and attempts to extort a hefty ransom from his wealthy father-in-law, it’s Fargo’s style and sense of humour that ensures its place as a cult-classic.
Aside from Francis McDormand’s Academy Award-Winning performance as the cop assigned to solve the case, Fargo’s other characters work specifically because they don’t fit normal cinematic tropes. The movie is authentic, simply because the characters don’t always behave as one would expect a movie character to behave, but people often behave unpredictably in real life. Also, the grand plan each character has is quickly undone by the banality of simple real-life events. There’s no deus ex machina to allow for things to fall into place.
Fargo doesn’t really fit into a specific box. It’s not afraid to be funny, but it’s also not afraid to be violent. It simply does its own thing, and tells its story in its own way. It neither follows established tropes, or deliberately tries to circumvent them.
12. L.A Confidential
L.A Confidential is a rare and wonderful thing: an instant classic which only grows better with repeated viewings. The movie follows the story of three very different 1950s cops who are each drawn to the Night Owl murder case. The cops themselves couldn’t be more different. There’s the by the book Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), the son of a hero cop who is desperate to escape his father’s shadow; the blunt instrument Bud White (Russell Crowe) who is called in to beat a confession out of suspects; then there’s Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) who is as slick as the Hollywood types he associates with and desperately wants to be. The pitch-perfect set designs and costumes immerse the viewer in the era so much so that the movie feels like a time-capsule come to life.
Set against 1950s scandal-filled Hollywood, L.A Confidential plays out as a complicated whodunit which leaves it to the last minute to reveal the full extent of corruption and cover-ups at the highest levels of the police. With multiple plot threads interweaving with each other, L.A Confidential could have easily fallen over itself but manages to keep its story straight. Like Chinatown, L.A Confidential not only raises its game to become a classic, it asks the audience to raise their game too. It’s a movie you have to pay attention to, but you’ll feel so much more satisfied if you do.
11. Bonnie and Clyde
Beautiful looking bad guys might not seem so revolutionary now, but back in 1967 it was an extremely fresh idea. Instead of bad guys who looked as crooked as their schemes, here were bad guys that oozed charm and sex appeal. Sitting at a key moment of sea-change between the old-Hollywood and the new wave of American cinema, Bonnie and Clyde re-wrote the rulebook on realistic violence and tense sexuality. The movie dares to be different and set much of the tone for the experimental film-makers of the 1970s.
Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway have never been better playing the real-life pair of bank robbers and would-be Robin Hoods as they carve a bloody trail across Depression-hit middle America. Even for those who know their history and know all too well the final fate of the pair can’t help but jump at the gut-wrenching and bloody finale. Even fifty years later, it still stings.