Crime - vo.rs

Drive: Refn's Neon Fairy Tale With a Hammer

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Drive opens with a promise and then keeps it in a way almost no crime film dares. A getaway driver explains, in a flat monotone, the exact terms of his service — five minutes, anything happens in that window he is yours, a minute either side and he is gone — and then Nicolas Winding Refn films the getaway itself as a slow, patient, nerve-shredding game of hide-and-seek through night-time Los Angeles, more about stillness and timing than about speed. It tells you everything. This is a film about a man of absolute competence and almost no words, moving through a neon city with the poise of a knight, and it is going to make you wait for the violence and then punish you for wanting it.

Oldboy: The Corridor, the Twist, and Park Chan-wook's Rage

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Oldboy has been reduced, over twenty years, to three things: a man eating a live octopus, a fight down a corridor filmed in one long sideways take, and a twist so vicious that people who have never seen the film know to be careful discussing it. That reduction does the film a disservice, because underneath the shocks Park Chan-wook made a genuine tragedy — a revenge story so total that it swallows the avenger, the target, and the audience’s own appetite for revenge along with them. Revisited now, with the initial jolt long spent, it plays less like a provocation and more like a Greek drama with the lights turned all the way up.

Infernal Affairs: The Original Scorsese Remade

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

There is a good chance you have seen Infernal Affairs without knowing it, because Martin Scorsese won his only Best Picture Oscar for the remake. The Departed is a fine, foul-mouthed, blood-soaked Boston opera, and it owes its entire skeleton — two moles, one planted by the police inside the mob, one planted by the mob inside the police, each racing to unmask the other before he is unmasked himself — to a taut 101-minute Hong Kong thriller from 2002 that most Western audiences never bothered to find. Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, Infernal Affairs is the leaner, sadder, more elegant film, and revisiting it after the remake is a lesson in how much can be gained by cutting rather than adding.

Korean Genre Cinema: Ten to Start With

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Something extraordinary happened to Korean cinema around the turn of the millennium. Democratisation had lifted decades of political censorship, a screen-quota system protected home-grown films from being crowded out, and a generation of obsessive cinephile directors arrived all at once with the technical confidence to attempt anything and the nerve to blend genres that other national cinemas keep carefully apart. The result is the most tonally daring popular cinema on earth — films that swerve from broad slapstick to a gut-punch tragedy inside a single scene and simply trust the audience to keep pace. When Parasite swept the Academy Awards in 2020, the wider world caught up with something Korean audiences had taken for granted for two decades.

City of God: The Favela Epic Shot Like a Bullet

Sat, 26 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

City of God opens with a knife on a whetstone and a chicken making a break for freedom, and within ninety seconds it has taught you its entire grammar. The camera whips, the cuts land like punches, a boy stands frozen between an armed gang and the police, and the film freezes with him — then spins backwards through years to explain how he got there. Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 film about the drug wars in a Rio de Janeiro housing project is the most propulsive crime picture of its century, and more than twenty years on it has lost none of its capacity to leave you slightly winded. It moves like it is being chased, because everyone in it is.

A Prophet: Audiard's Prison as a University of Crime

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Most prison films are about survival. A Prophet is about tuition fees. Jacques Audiard’s 2009 film follows Malik El Djebena, a nineteen-year-old French-Algerian who arrives at a French penitentiary with a six-year sentence, no family visiting, no reading skills worth the name, and no protection. He leaves — over the length of the film, in real time that feels like an apprenticeship — as the most dangerous man in the building. What happens between those two points is one of the great screen educations, and Audiard shoots it as exactly that: a curriculum, delivered under duress, in a place designed to teach nobody anything.

Twelve Neo-Noirs Worth the Dark

Mon, 26 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Classic noir died with the studio system that made it, somewhere in the late 1950s, when the cheap black-and-white crime picture stopped being cheap and the Hays Code that gave the genre its guilt began to crumble. What came after is neo-noir: the same fatalism, the same doomed men certain they are smarter than the city, filmed in colour and freed to show the corruption the older films could only imply behind a closed door. The best of them keep faith with the original bargain — a small greedy choice, a slow tightening, a last look at a life that is already gone.

The Heist Canon: Ten Perfect Scores

Tue, 06 May 2025 13:00:00 +0000

The heist film is the most reliable machine in crime cinema, and the reason is structural: it comes with a built-in three-act shape that no writer has to force. The team assembles, the plan unfolds, and then the flaw — always there is a flaw, in the mechanism or in a man — brings the whole thing down or lets it slip through. What separates the classics from the knock-offs is process. The great heist film treats the job as a piece of engineering and invites you to admire the craftsmanship, so that the eventual failure reads as tragedy rather than mishap. Below are ten that get the process right, arranged chronologically so you can watch the genre’s grammar being written and then rewritten. All spoiler-free; I describe how these films work without giving away how they end.

Thief: Michael Mann's Debut and the Birth of a Style

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 11:00:00 +0000

The first images of Thief are rain on asphalt, neon smeared across wet streets, and a professional going quietly to work in the dark while a synthesiser pulses underneath like a machine’s heartbeat. Michael Mann’s 1981 debut opens with a burglary shot as pure craft and pure atmosphere, and if you have seen any later Mann film you feel a jolt of recognition, because the entire style arrives fully formed in the first reel. The rain-glazed city, the taciturn expert defined by his work, the electronic score doing the emotional lifting, the fetish for professional competence — it’s all here, already perfect, in a first feature by a director who had done nothing but television before.

The Killing: Kubrick's Racetrack Robbery in Reverse

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Stanley Kubrick was twenty-seven when he made The Killing, his third feature and his first that anyone remembers, and he made it by doing something the studios found faintly perverse: he took a perfectly linear crime novel and smashed its timeline into overlapping fragments. A robbery at a racetrack is committed by five or six men, each assigned one small task, and Kubrick refuses to show the day straight. He follows one man up to a moment, backs the clock up, follows another to the same moment from a different angle, backs up again, threading a dry, authoritative newsreel narrator through the whole thing to keep us oriented. The result is a heist film assembled like a jigsaw, and it invented a grammar that crime cinema is still using.