The best films for a group don't flatten the experience - they create one. You want something that generates opinions, debates, a reason to stay up later than planned.
Crime as a genre works because it forces moral clarity in situations designed to resist it.
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
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.
A botched robbery indicates a police informant, and the pressure mounts in the aftermath at a warehouse. Crime begets violence as the survivors -- veteran Mr. White, newcomer Mr. Orange, psychopathic parolee Mr. Blonde, bickering weasel Mr. Pink and Nice Guy Eddie -- unravel.
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.
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 card shark and his unwillingly-enlisted friends need to make a lot of cash quick after losing a sketchy poker match. To do this they decide to pull a heist on a small-time gang who happen to be operating out of the flat next door.
An insurance representative is seduced by a dissatisfied housewife into a scheme of insurance fraud and murder that arouses the suspicion of his colleague, a claims investigator.
Best friends Peppe and Mario are thieves, but they're not very good at it. Still, Peppe thinks that he's finally devised a master heist that will make them rich. With the help of some fellow criminals, he plans to dig a tunnel from a rented apartment to the pawnshop next door, where they can rob the safe. But his plan is far from foolproof, and the fact that no one in the group has any experience digging tunnels proves to be the least of their problems.
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.
In Prohibition-era Chicago, musicians Joe and Jerry witness a mob hit, and flee the state in an all-female band disguised as Josephine and Daphne, but further complications set in.
The best endings don't resolve - they resonate. You're still thinking about them on the way to bed. These qualify.
These films work because they take their characters seriously - even the ones doing terrible things.