“Controversially, the cinema has always made criminals look cool,” said film critic Peter Bradshaw.
The big screen loves bad guys and, to modify Blake’s description of Milton, has often been of the devil’s party, while knowing it perfectly well. Yet crime and transgression are the stuff of drama and real life, too. Howard Hawks’s Scarface in 1932 gave us Paul Muni’s criminal sociopath Tony Camonte, brilliantly reinvented by Brian De Palma in 1983 with Al Pacino in the lead role.
The gangster genre showed how criminal networks operated inside their own fiercely moral codes and stood in direct opposition to courtroom dramas such as Twelve Angry Men, with its formal endorsement of the letter of the law. The noir genre of the 1940s and 1950s conversely found criminality to reside not in dynastic cultures or parodic societal norms but in individual acts of cynicism, obsession and desperation.
These are the 25 best crime films ever made according to the critics of the Guardian and Observer.
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Stars: James Stewart, Kim Novak
, Barbara Bel Geddes
Director: Terrence Malik
Stars: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek
, Warren Oates
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Stars: Toshirô Mifune, Machiko Kyô
, Masayuki Mori
Director: Mike Hodges
Stars: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry
, Britt Ekland
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Stars: John Travolta, Uma Thurman
, Samuel L. Jackson
Director: Michael Haneke
Stars: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche
, Maurice Bénichou
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta
, Joe Pesci
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale
, Allen Garfield
Director: Arthur Penn
Stars: Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway
, Michael J. Pollard
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray
, Vince Edwards
Director: William Friedkin
Stars: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider
, Fernando Rey
Director: Claude Chabrol
Stars: Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Bonnaire
, Jacqueline Bisset
Director: John Boorman
Stars: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson
, Keenan Wynn
Director: John Woo
Stars: Yun-Fat Chow, Tony Chiu Wai Leung
, Teresa Mo
Director: John Mackenzie
Stars: Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren
, Dave King
Director: Jacques Audiard
Stars: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup
, Adel Bencherif
Director: Brian De Palma
Stars: Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer
, Steven Bauer
Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Stars: Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney
, John Turturro
Director: Tay Garnett
Stars: Lana Turner, John Garfield
, Cecil Kellaway
Director: Marcel Carné
Stars: Jean Gabin, Jacqueline Laurent
, Arletty
The Guardian (founded in 1821) is a British national daily newspaper, and the Observer (founded in 1791) is its Sunday sibling. They are amongst the most influential papers in the world. The Guardian and its journalists have won numerous journalism awards, especially in the last decades.
Source: The Guardian
Last checked on: 16 January 2016
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