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Category: gangsters
‘Le Doulos’ – the French criminal code on Criterion Channel
Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as the smiling underworld informer in Jean-Pierre Melville’s cool, often cruel classic French noir.
‘Exiled’ – Johnnie To’s gangster odyssey on Amazon Prime
A simple hot becomes a buddy crime odyssey in Johnnie To’s elegant genre exercise reuniting the stars of his gangster classic ‘The Mission.’
‘Key Largo’ with Bogie and Bacall on HBO Max
Film noir hits the tropics in John Huston’s 1948 thriller set in the midst of a Florida Hurricane. Edward G. Robinson, Lionel Barrymore, and Claire Trevor costar.
Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Departed’ on HBO Max
Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Jack Nicholson star in Scorsese’s 2006 return to American urban crime cinema, which became the biggest hit of his career and earned him his first Academy Award for Best Director.
Martin Scorsese’s ‘Mean Streets’ on HBO Max
“You don’t pay for your sins in church. You pay for them on the street. All the rest is bullshit.” Mean Streets (1973) is not Martin Scorsese’s first film, but it is the film in which he came into his own. Passionate, energetic, stylistically inventive and personally driven, it is the first mature, full blooded “Martin […]
Paul Muni is ‘Scarface’ in the original gangster masterpiece on Criterion Channel
The original Scarface (1932), loosely but boldly based on the notorious life and legend of Al Capone, didn’t invent the modern American gangster film. It blew it up. Films like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar had whetted the American moviegoing appetite for crime movies that reveled in vicarious thrills before delivering a sentence of […]
Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Godfather’ trilogy on Peacock
“It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestseller remains the great American epic of the immigrant dream turned family business. Al Pacino stars as Michael Corleone, the clean-cut white sheep and patriotic soldier boy son of New York Godfather Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando in an Oscar–winning performance), and this […]
‘Midnight Run’ with Robert De Niro on Netflix
The midnight run of Martin Brest’s action comedy Midnight Run (1988) refers to what is supposed to be an easy job for skip tracer and bounty hunter Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro). He’s hired to capture Jack “Duke” Mardukas (Charles Grodin), a mild-mannered accountant who stole $15 million from the mob and then skipped out […]
Viggo Mortensen makes ‘Eastern Promises’ on Peacock
David Cronenberg directs this dive into the shadowy, dangerous world of organized crime and hidden identities.