The Best Crime Movies, Definitively Ranked
The internet likes to joke about “cultural resets,” but Pulp Fiction absolutely was. Quentin Tarantino’s second feature after Reservoir Dogs kickstarted Miramax’s ‘90s boom, made Tarantino the coolest director in town, and—with its asynchronously intertwined stories of criminality—cemented a style of filmmaking that’s been imitated to death but never bested. Featuring a career-reigniting performance from John Travolta and an instant-superstar turn by Samuel L. Jackson, plus Bruce Willis at his best and Uma Thurman as an iconic black-bobbed femme fatale. Unshackled freneticism at its finest.
1. The Godfather (1972)
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 magnum opus The Godfather gave us mobsters by way of Shakespeare, mixing brutality with an almost historical opulence. It’s an epic tale of the intricate familial webs at the heart of organized crime, where New World capitalism clashes with old-fashioned ideals of piety and reverence for elders. It’s those juxtapositions—traditional values and intense violence, the old guard of the mob and the burgeoning drug trade—that make The Godfather not only the best crime film in history but (some would argue) the greatest film ever made. Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone is, of course, a career-canonizing performance, but Al Pacino, James Caan, and Diane Keaton are no less instrumental to the movie’s majesty.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.
