The best films to watch after a breakup are the ones that make you forget, then make you feel something that has nothing to do with what just happened.
The 80s and 90s are where a lot of cinema's DNA was written. Films that set the templates still running today.
The best crime films understand that most criminals aren't monsters. They're people who made a series of choices.
Officer Chan Ka Kui manages to put a major Hong Kong drug dealer behind the bars practically alone, after a shooting and an impressive chase inside a slum. Now, he must protect the boss' secretary, Selina, who will testify against the gangster in court.
Murakawa, an aging Tokyo yakuza tiring of gangster life, is sent by his boss to Okinawa along with a few of his henchmen to help end a gang war, supposedly as mediators between two warring clans. He finds that the dispute between the clans is insignificant and whilst wondering why he was sent to Okinawa at all, his group is attacked in an ambush. The survivors flee and make a decision to lay low at the beach while they await further instructions.
A young street hustler attempts to escape the rigors and temptations of the ghetto in a quest for a better life.
Andrea Beaumont leaves her father to return to Gotham, rekindling an old romance with Bruce Wayne. At the same time, a mysterious figure begins to hunt down Gotham's criminals, wrongly implicating Batman in the murders. Now on the run from the law, Batman must find and stop the culprit, while also navigating his relationship with Andrea.
A kidnapped boy strikes up a friendship with his captor: an escaped convict on the run from the law, headed by an honorable U.S. Marshal.
These films don't romanticise crime - they examine it. The best of them leave you uncertain about who you were rooting for.
Set in 1929, a political boss and his advisor have a parting of the ways when they both fall for the same woman.
A year after the murder of her mother, a teenage girl is terrorized by a masked killer who targets her and her friends by using scary movies as part of a deadly game.
A renowned ophthalmologist is desperate to cut off an adulterous relationship...which ends up in murder; and a frustrated documentary filmmaker woos an attractive television producer while making a film about her insufferably self-centered boss.
In the midst of trying to legitimize his business dealings in 1979 New York and Italy, aging mafia don, Michael Corleone seeks forgiveness for his sins while taking a young protege under his wing.
A young transgender man explores his gender identity and searches for love in rural Nebraska.
There are films that remind you, without sentimentality, that people are capable of extraordinary things. These are some of them.
These films work because they take their characters seriously - even the ones doing terrible things.