Flights are underrated for cinema. No domestic distractions. Nowhere else to be. The altitude helps, somehow. This is a list worth saving for the gate.
In retrospect, the 2010s were a decade of quiet excellence - films doing serious work without demanding credit for it.
The best crime films understand that most criminals aren't monsters. They're people who made a series of choices.
After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.
Super-assassin John Wick returns with a $14 million price tag on his head and an army of bounty-hunting killers on his trail. After killing a member of the shadowy international assassin's guild, the High Table, John Wick is excommunicado, but the world's most ruthless hit men and women await his every turn.
An FBI agent teams with the town's veteran game tracker to investigate a murder that occurred on a Native American reservation.
An undercover cop has his loyalties tested when the boss of the corporate gang he's spent years infiltrating dies.
An idealistic FBI agent is enlisted by a government task force to aid in the escalating war against drugs at the border area between the U.S. and Mexico.
The crime films worth your time are the ones where the moral calculus is genuinely complicated. Not every villain is a monster. Not every hero is clean.
An ambitious lobbyist faces off against the powerful gun lobby in an attempt to pass gun control legislation.
Deep in the heart of Jakarta's slums lies an impenetrable safe house for the world's most dangerous killers and gangsters. Until now, the run-down apartment block has been considered untouchable to even the bravest of police. Cloaked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness and silence, an elite swat team is tasked with raiding the safe house in order to take down the notorious drug lord that runs it. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and news of their assault reaches the drug lord, the building's lights are cut and all the exits blocked. Stranded on the sixth floor with no way out, the unit must fight their way through the city's worst to survive their mission. Starring Indonesian martial arts sensation Iko Uwais.
Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the disappearance of a weary patriarch's niece from 40 years ago. He is aided by the pierced, tattooed, punk computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander. As they work together in the investigation, Blomkvist and Salander uncover immense corruption beyond anything they have ever imagined.
Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1971. Carlos Robledo Puch is a 19-year-old boy with an angelic face, but a vocational thief as well, who acts ruthlessly, without remorse. When he meets Ramón, they follow together a dark path of crime and death.
In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.
A film earns your tears by making you believe in its characters first. These films do that work thoroughly, then use it.
The best crime films stay with you because they refuse to let you feel entirely comfortable about who you were rooting for.