A Sunday film should do one thing above all else: justify the afternoon. Not exciting enough to feel like you should be doing something else. Just right.
Go back far enough and you find films that had no idea they'd become classics. The 80s and 90s produced more of them than any other era.
Crime cinema at its best is a mirror - not a celebration of lawbreaking, but an examination of what drives people to it.
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.
What sets great crime cinema apart is consequence. Every action has a cost. These films make you feel that cost.
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.
The films that stay with you aren't always the ones that answer every question. Sometimes it's the ones that leave you with better questions.
The best crime films stay with you because they refuse to let you feel entirely comfortable about who you were rooting for.