The film you watch at 2am when sleep has given up on you should earn your full attention without demanding you pay for it the next morning.
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.
Free after years in prison, Carlito Brigante intends to give up his criminal ways, but it's not long before the ex-con is sucked back into the New York City underworld.
Three detectives in the corrupt and brutal L.A. police force of the 1950s use differing methods to uncover a conspiracy behind the shotgun slayings of the patrons at an all-night diner.
Elliot Ness, an ambitious prohibition agent, is determined to take down Al Capone. In order to achieve this goal, he forms a group given the nickname "The Untouchables".
Jake Blues, just released from prison, puts his old band back together to save the Catholic home where he and his brother Elwood were raised.
Two young men, Martin and Rudi, both suffering from terminal cancer, get to know each other in a hospital room. They drown their desperation in tequila and decide to take one last trip to the sea. Drunk and still in pajamas they steal the first fancy car they find, a 60's Mercedes convertible. The car happens to belong to a bunch of gangsters, which immediately start to chase it, since it contains more than the pistol Martin finds in the glove box.
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 indifferent hitman, his infatuated business partner and an ex-convict search for love and meaning as their lives cross paths in Hong Kong.
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
Beleaguered police detective Nishi takes desperate measures to try and set things right in a world gone wrong. With his wife suffering from leukemia and his business partner paralyzed from a brutal gangster attack, Nishi borrows from a yakuza loan shark and then robs a bank to clear his debt.
A small-time hustler makes a deal with a notorious gangster to whom he owes money: marry his teenage son to the latter's daughter. However, the young lovers are not as agreeable.
Defense attorney Martin Vail takes on jobs for money and prestige rather than any sense of the greater good. His latest case involves an altar boy, accused of brutally murdering the archbishop of Chicago. Vail finds himself up against his ex-pupil and ex-lover, but as the case progresses and the Church's dark secrets are revealed, Vail finds that what appeared a simple case takes on a darker, more dangerous aspect.
An ending is everything. It's the last thing you carry with you. These films understand that - and they make it count.
The best crime films stay with you because they refuse to let you feel entirely comfortable about who you were rooting for.