If you go and see “Baby Driver” this weekend expecting another gag-heavy comedy in the vein of Edgar Wright’s earlier films, you’ll likely be in a shock. The absolutely tremendous car-chase-musical (read our review) is funny, sure, but that’s not its primary aim: in a big departure from Wright, it has more in common with classic 70s crime cinema than with, “Hot Fuzz” (for example) using the director’s formal gifts in service of a surprisingly hard-boiled heist movie.
“All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said, and the crime film has been one of cinema’s most enduringly popular genres since the silent era, from the Warner Bros. gangster movies of the 1930s to the Tarantino knock-offs of the 1990s and 2000s. With Wright entering the genre with such flair, and making one of the best crime films in years, we thought it was a good time to have a proper look at the recent history of the genre, and have picked out (as we’ve done with action, sci-fi, foreign language and others) the 50 best of the 21st century so far.
It was a tough task to narrow it down just to 50, but the final list is a strong one, showing the variety and breadth that the genre is capable of. See our picks below, and let us know your favorites, and what you think we’ve forgotten, in the comments.
50. “Layer Cake” (2004)
It would have been easy, given his long history as Guy Ritchie’s producer, for Matthew Vaughn’s directorial debut to be yet another of the countless post-“Lock Stock” films that littered British cinema in the late 90s and early 00s. But “Layer Cake” proved to be something more sophisticated than that altogether. Based on J.J. Connolly’s novel, it stars Daniel Craig (practically auditioning for Bond here) as an unnamed drug dealer who believes himself to be above the violence of the criminal world, but swiftly finds himself dragged into it (with a cast also including future stars like Tom Hardy, Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins and Sienna Miller). It’s tighter, less eager-to-please and tenser than Ritchie’s movies, at once sleek and oddly mournful in a way that’s pleasingly reminiscent of 70s crime classics. It remains, by some distance, Vaughn’s best film.
49. “The Bling Ring” (2013)
Easily dismissed by some as another shallow, surface-level look at the woes of the rich from Sofia Coppola, “The Bling Ring” has aged remarkably well in the last few years, revealing itself to be a clever and savagely satirical look at a generation. Based on the real case of a group of mostly privileged San Fernando Valley teens who started breaking into the homes of celebrities to steal their clothes and jewelry. Coppola’s admittedly not that interested in weaving a true-crime narrative here: as ever, mood is king, though Coppola’s style (working for the final time with the great Harris Savides, who died before the film was released) mutates in interesting ways in here. But the mood captures something: both the silly, materialistic shallowness of the Instagram generation (exemplified by a terrifically funny Emma Watson performance here), but also Coppola’s empathy for teens desperate to be part of a world that won’t quite let them in.
48. “Prisoners” (2013)
Even its greatest defenders have to admit that the plot of “Prisoners” is, frankly, claptrap — a pulpy page-turner where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a character called Detective Loki, there’s a ludicrous scene involving boxes and boxes of snakes, and the villain’s motivation is ‘a war on God.’ But boy, is it tremendously entertaining, terrifically executed claptrap, elevating what in lesser hands might have been DTV fare to the level of art. Denis Villeneuve’s thriller follows the aftermath of the kidnapping of two children in rural Pennsylvania, as Loki (Gyllenhaal) tries to find the perpetrators, and a grieving father (Hugh Jackman, in his best turn) looks outside the law for answers. As ludicrous as the twists and turns can be, they undeniably pull you along, and from the photography by Roger Deakins to Johann Johannson’s score to the utterly game cast to the pleasing ethical muddiness of Aaron Guzikowski’s screenplay, every element is as good as you could possibly hope for here.
47. “American Hustle” (2013)
There are plenty of reasons to be thankful for “American Hustle,” but one of them is that it proved so successful. It’s almost the opposite of the high-concept franchise, a movie where attempts to give it the old elevator pitch treatment turn into ‘ok, so fat Christian Bale is a con man and he’s with Amy Adams but also Jennifer Lawrence and there’s the Mafia and Jeremy Renner as a politician and really aggressive Bradley Cooper and it’s the 70s?.’ Based on the real-life ABSCAM scandal, it sees David O. Russell perfect the loose, freewheeling style he’d been developing across his previous couple of movies and deploy it on a fascinating, wildly entertaining story, whose occasional sloppiness feels utterly of a piece with the messy narrative it’s telling. Russell’s next movie “Joy” saw him take the chaotic feel too far, but here, it’s like the great 70s caper that Altman never took enough coke to make.
46. “Gangs Of Wasseypur” (2012)
Outside of the U.S, we think of plenty of other nations of having a long tradition of gangster movies, from France and Italy to South Korea and Japan. India’s not traditionally numbered among them, but recent two-part, five-hour epic “Gangs Of Wasseypur” has likely changed that. Stylish, action-packed and more accessible than most to Western audiences, Anurag Kashyap’s decade-spanning story follows gangs grappling for control of the titular mining town from the 1940s through to the 1990s. You can spot the influences (“The Godfather,” principally), sure, but they feel hugely exciting in this new context, and Kashyap keeps the pace relentless in a way that puts most blockbuster helmers to shame.
45. “Out Of The Blue” (2006)
Maybe the least-seen movie on this list, Robert Sarkies’ restrained, gripping docudrama tells the story of the Aramoana massacre, which took place in a remote part of New Zealand in November 1990, and left 13 people dead at the hands of gun enthusiast David Gray, and the police operation to bring him in. It’s a sensitively done, deeply upsetting picture full of tension and well-drawn detail, reminiscent of Paul Greengrass’ early work, and is all the more chilling because of the relative lack of familiar faces (Karl Urban stars, but disappears effectively into the role), and the sense of a peaceful community torn apart. Well worth tracking down if you’ve never seen before, and we hope that Sarkies re-emerges soon enough with something just as powerful.
44. “Romanzo Criminale” (2005)
Another epic of the kind that prefigured the return of the AAA TV miniseries (in fact, this has gone on to become an Italian TV series too), Michele Placido’s two-and-a-half hour crime pic looks inside the Banda della Magliana, an upstart organized crime group founded in Rome in the 1970s, and went on to have ties to everyone from the Cosa Nostra to Freemasons and fascist terrorists. If anything, it probably could have benefited from a little more time (the Director’s Cut, at nearly three hours) is better, so much ground does it try to cover), and it was overshadowed a bit by “Gomorrah” around the same time, but it’s still a stylish, gripping take on the genre more than a little influenced by Scorsese (the soundtrack is terrific), but that works best when it ties up its anti-heroes with the Italian politics of the time.
43. “A Bittersweet Life” (2003)
He hasn’t yet attracted the kind of critical adulation that countrymen Park Chan-Wook and Bong Joon-Ho rightfully get — he’s more of a straight-up genre guy to some extent, though last year’s “Age Of Shadows” won deserved raves — but Kim Jee-woon is nevertheless a hugely talented filmmaker, and “A Bittersweet Life” is one of the clearest and bloodiest demonstrations of that. An action-thriller that verges on the operatic in places, it sees Lee Byung-hun play a mobster who falls in love with his boss’s mistress Hee-soo (Shin Min-ah), a classic noir premise that nevertheless feels extremely fresh here, in large part to the soulful romanticism that Lee inflects it with. Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t deliver on the action front: Kim does that stuff better than 99.9% of filmmakers, and every burst of violence here is impeccably executed.
42. “Killing Them Softly” (2012)
Those hoping for another languid, lyrical bit of American mythmaking and myth-puncturing from Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to “The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford” will undoubtedly have come away kind of disappointed. “Killing Them Softly” (adapted from George V. Higgins’ “Cogan’s Trade”) was a very different kind of movie: a short, sharp smack to the head of American capitalism with the thick end of a pool cue. Telling the story of the aftermath of two junkies (Ben Mendelsohn and Scoot McNairy in breakthrough roles) robbing a Mob-affiliated pool game in New Orleans, it tracks various grimly funny tangents but never attempts anything close to Tarantino-ish cool: this is a scuzzy, dangerous, brutal world, where crime does pay, but at a cost to the rotten soul of the United States Of America.
41. “Gone Girl” (2014)
Few know how to turn darkness into genuine popular hits like David Fincher, and in “Gone Girl” he found his biggest hit, and a movie that sometimes risks painting a bleaker picture of human morality than even “Seven.” Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her best-seller, it sees Ben Affleck’s seemingly perfect suburban writing professor come under suspicion of murdering his wife (Rosamund Pike), but the truth proves to be much more chilling. Fincher and Flynn somehow improve on the already-strong source material, keeping the twists and turns but amping up the satirical qualities and Mazurskian marital drama, the stellar cast (featuring great turns from as unexpected a place as Tyler Perry, as well as a terrific, then unknown Carrie Coon) constantly keeping your sympathies shifting and mutating amidst Fincher’s chilly, but not unfeeling, direction. A savage little treat.