Late nights with no sleep call for a very specific kind of film. Absorbing enough to stop the thoughts. Good enough that you don't resent still being awake.
The 2010s were defined by a wave of filmmakers who understood that the best genre films work on multiple levels simultaneously.
Crime as a genre works because it forces moral clarity in situations designed to resist it.
During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City while becoming an infamous psychopathic crime figure.
A bullied teenage girl forms an unlikely friendship with a mysterious young man who protects her from her assailants, while she copes with the pressures of her final examinations.
Keller Dover is facing every parent's worst nightmare. His six-year-old daughter, Anna, is missing, together with her young friend, Joy, and as minutes turn to hours, panic sets in. The only lead is a dilapidated RV that had earlier been parked on their street.
Raised in a poverty-stricken slum, a 16-year-old girl named Starr now attends a suburban prep school. After she witnesses a police officer shoot her unarmed best friend, she's torn between her two very different worlds as she tries to speak her truth.
After seven months have passed without a culprit in her daughter's murder case, Mildred Hayes makes a bold move, painting three signs leading into her town with a controversial message directed at Bill Willoughby, the town's revered chief of police. When his second-in-command Officer Jason Dixon, an immature mother's boy with a penchant for violence, gets involved, the battle between Mildred and Ebbing's law enforcement is only exacerbated.
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.
A former assassin, known simply as The Bride, wakes from a coma four years after her jealous ex-lover Bill attempts to murder her on her wedding day. Fueled by an insatiable desire for revenge, she vows to get even with every person who contributed to the loss of her unborn child, her entire wedding party, and four years of her life. After devising a hit list, The Bride sets off on her quest, enduring unspeakable injury and unscrupulous enemies.
A New York stockbroker refuses to cooperate in a large securities fraud case involving corruption on Wall Street, corporate banking world and mob infiltration. Based on Jordan Belfort's autobiography.
On the night she plans on taking her own life, 17-year-old 'Lisa McVey' is kidnapped and finds herself fighting to stay alive and is raped. She manages to talk her attacker into releasing her, but when she returns home, no one believes her story except for one detective, who suspects she was abducted by a serial killer. Based on horrifying true events.
Jin-seok, 21-year-old, moves into a new house with his family. He suffers from a slight schizophrenia but he carries an ordinary life under the warm care of the family. His older brother Yu-seok is a decent college student, a mentor, and role model for Jin-seok. One night, his beloved brother is kidnapped by unidentified assailants before Jin-seok's eye. Jin-seok can't recognize their faces, but can remember only the VIN that matches with no car. After long silence of 19 days, suddenly Yu-seok returns home, but remembers nothing which had happened in the meantime. And soon Jin-seok feels Yu-seok is a total stranger.
Lynn, a brilliant student, after helping her friends to get the grades they need, develops the idea of starting a much bigger exam-cheating business.
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.