Crime
Branded to Kill: Suzuki's Hit-Man Film That Got Him Sacked
The 1967 yakuza picture so strange the studio fired its director and blacklisted him for a decade
Topic
Crime
31 articles
Crime
The Third Man: The Zither, the Sewers, and the Best Entrance in Film
Carol Reed and Graham Greene turned occupied Vienna into a maze, and made an audience wait an hour for a smile
Crime
Chinatown: The Noir That Poisoned Its Own Ending
Polanski, Towne and the detective story that refuses to let its hero, or its city, be saved
Crime
Blood Simple: The Coens' Debut and the Perfect Small Crime
A first feature made for pocket change that already knew every trick the brothers would spend forty years refining
Crime
David Fincher: The Procedural as Obsession
The most exacting director in American cinema, and the men who work themselves to ruin inside his frames
Crime
Bong Joon-ho: Genre as Scalpel
The Korean director who uses monster movies, murder cases, and heist logic to open up a class system
Crime
Nightcrawler: Gyllenhaal, the Camera, and the Ghoul of Los Angeles
Dan Gilroy's debut turns a self-help creep into the perfect predator for a city that sells its own wounds
Crime
Drive: Refn's Neon Fairy Tale With a Hammer
A getaway driver, a scorpion jacket, and the coldest romance in Los Angeles
Crime
Oldboy: The Corridor, the Twist, and Park Chan-wook's Rage
The Korean revenge film that made the world flinch and look again
Crime
Ten One-Location Thrillers
A jury room, a coffin, a phone booth, a car doing seventy — the films that trap you in a single space and turn the walls into the enemy
Crime
Infernal Affairs: The Original Scorsese Remade
The Hong Kong thriller that The Departed borrowed its bones from
Crime
Korean Genre Cinema: Ten to Start With
The films that turned a national cinema into the most confident genre machine on earth
Crime
City of God: The Favela Epic Shot Like a Bullet
Fernando Meirelles turns a Rio slum into a decade-long war film
Crime
A Prophet: Audiard's Prison as a University of Crime
How a French jail turns an illiterate teenager into a boss
Crime
The Heist Canon: Ten Perfect Scores
The crew, the plan, the thing that always goes wrong — ten heist films that get the process right
Crime
No Country for Old Men: The Coens Kill the Thriller's Comforts
The chase film that withholds the chase's payoff, and hands the genre a coin toss instead
Crime
Prisoners: Villeneuve's Faith, Torture, and the Maze
A missing-child thriller that traps everyone in it, and asks how far a good man will go
Crime
Memento: The Backwards Thriller That Everyone Copied
Christopher Nolan's amnesiac revenge puzzle and the reason its trick has never really been beaten
Crime
Cure (1997): Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Hypnotist and the Empty Detective
The serial-killer film that removed the killer and left only the suggestion
Crime
Sorcerer: Friedkin's Cursed Masterpiece About Four Damned Men
The most expensive suspense film of its decade, buried alive by Star Wars and rescued forty years late
Crime
Thief: Michael Mann's Debut and the Birth of a Style
James Caan cracks safes in rain-slicked Chicago while Tangerine Dream throbs, and every Michael Mann film that follows is already here
Crime
The Killing: Kubrick's Racetrack Robbery in Reverse
A young Kubrick took a pulp heist novel, shattered its clock, and built the fractured-timeline crime film everyone would later steal
Crime
Rififi: The Half-Hour Heist Told in Silence
A blacklisted American in Paris filmed the greatest robbery sequence in cinema with no music, no dialogue and no room to breathe
Crime
Le Samourai: Melville and the Coldest Hit Man in Cinema
Alain Delon in a grey trenchcoat, a caged bird, and a professional killer's ritual filmed until it becomes a religion
Crime
Point Blank (1967): Boorman's Revenge Told in Fragments
Lee Marvin walks through a stolen city collecting a debt nobody wants to pay, in the coldest studio picture Hollywood let slip out
Crime
Get Carter (1971): Caine, Concrete, and No Redemption
Mike Hodges's Newcastle revenge picture stripped the British crime film of every last excuse
Crime
The Long Good Friday: The British Gangster Film That Saw Thatcher Coming
Bob Hoskins plays a London mob boss dreaming of the Docklands — a decade before the developers arrived
Crime
Memories of Murder: Bong's Unsolved Case as National Wound
Before Parasite, Bong Joon-ho turned a real serial-killer case into a portrait of a country that could not protect its own
Crime
Zodiac: Fincher's Procedural About the Cost of Obsession
David Fincher's coldest film is a study of what an unsolved case does to the men who cannot let it go
Crime
Heat (1995): The Diner Scene and the Mirror of Cop and Thief
Michael Mann's crime epic hangs on five minutes at a coffee table