555 Best Crime Movies to Watch (Page 35)

Read also:

511. Berlin, 2023

Berlin has everything it needs to be a big hit, from its connections to global sensation Money Heist; to the polished qualities of a Netflix production and the easy, pulpy thrills of a heist led by a cast of attractive people. But early on there's a sense that this spin-off/prequel is just spinning its wheels, stoking the obligatory sexual tension between crew members and getting its characters out of sticky situations far too easily. Berlin is familiar for sure, which means it can still be entertaining in bursts, with well-shot, well-edited heist sequences jolting each episode awake. But it's difficult to find any sort of emotional foothold here, as the title character's actions become even harder to understand.

Genre: Action & Adventure, Crime, Drama

Actor: Begoña Vargas, Joel Sánchez, Julio Peña, Michelle Jenner, Pedro Alonso, Samantha Siqueiros, Tristán Ulloa

Rating: TV-MA

Read also:

512. Jigen Daisuke, 2023

Though it borrows from some of the oldest genre tropes—stoic but kind-hearted hero finding a heart in a community that needs his help—Jigen Daisuke still manages to carve out a visual identity that has one foot rooted in its Lupin III manga origins, and another in noir fiction. The world of the film is beautifully lit and feels bustling with activity, as are the frenetic action scenes that turn gleefully silly with the sheer amount of gunfire being sprayed everywhere. That said, the movie can't handle the number of plates it tries to spin, as side characters fail to develop more meaningfully and its more exciting parts are diluted by long stretches of drama that aren't as engaging as the film thinks they are. This feels like a sampler for the kinds of stories the title character could be involved in in the future, but little else.

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller

Actor: Akihiko Sai, Eugene Nomura, Honami Sato, Kazuki Namioka, Kotoka Maki, Masatoshi Nagase, Mitsuko Kusabue, Rina Sakuragi, Takashi Sasano, Tetsuji Tamayama, Toru Baba, Yasukaze Motomiya, Yoji Tanaka, Yôko Maki, Yuuki Tsujimoto

Director: Hajime Hashimoto

Rating: PG-13

Read also:

513. Bosco, 2024

	
If there's one thing that Bosco does that's really worth admiring, it's that it works around its lower budget much for effectively than many other films its size. It would be easy to make a prison drama—set mostly between bare walls and corridors—look cheap, but this one clearly puts in the effort to communicate how its protagonist views his claustrophobic surroundings, instead of just aiming for bland realism. That said, the story Bosco tells unfortunately doesn't display the same tightness and elegance. The film tries to articulate itself in a more poetic way but it just ends up being too clean, too measured versus the reality of prison life. And whichever supporting characters pop up are far too underdeveloped to complete the world being presented to us.Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Actor: Aubrey Joseph, Brandon Rogers, D.C. Young Fly, Darell M. Davie, Jim O'Heir, John Lewis, Nikki Blonsky, Theo Rossi, Thomas Jane, Tory Lanez, Tyrese Gibson, Vivica A. Fox
Director: Nicholas Manuel Pino

Read also:

514. Saindhav, 2024

	
There have been plenty of excellent films that tackle plenty of themes all at once, but Saindhav feels like a bunch of unrelated ideas strung together as an excuse for cool action set pieces. We’re first presented with the idea that violent video games are being used to recruit children for terrorist groups, but in response to this is a pretty violent protagonist that does over-the-top killings complete with explosions. His justification is that he’s doing it for money for his sick daughter, whose treatment is exorbitantly expensive. Both of these ideas should be discussed, and the cast tries to make the best of it, but Saindhav just combines these ideas to justify the glorified violence they’re supposedly critiquing.Genre: Action, Crime
Actor: Andrea Jeremiah, Arya, Baby Sara, Getup Srinu, Jayaprakash, Jisshu Sengupta, Mukesh Rishi, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Ramajogayya Sastry, Ravi Varma, Ruhani Sharma, Sailesh Kolanu, Shraddha Srinath, Venkatesh
Director: Sailesh Kolanu

Read also:

515. P.I. Meena, 2023

It definitely has all the hallmarks of a mystery series—intertwining investigations, corruption at the police level and higher, a dark past that vaguely reflects the central cast—but there's something about P.I. Meena that keeps it from being more than just a collection of genre markers. It neither feels urgent nor specific enough to separate itself from so many similar shows, and it often jumbles up the stories it tries to tell, leading to a fluctuating tone and hurried pacing. Tanya Maniktala makes for a charming lead, but she can't help but be overwhelmed by the show's attempts to hit the familiar beats we expect to see.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery

Actor: Jisshu Sengupta, Parambrata Chatterjee, Samir Soni, Tanya Maniktala, Vinay Pathak, Zarina Wahab

Director: Debaloy Bhattacharya

Read also:

516. Los Farad, 2023

The idea of a fitness instructor suddenly discovering the thrill of selling military armaments is promising in its absurdity, so it's unfortunate that Los Farad doesn't maintain this offbeat sense of humor for too long. It moves relatively quickly into tense criminal activity, but the series isn't able to really capture the magnetic pull that this world of luxury has on protagonist Oskar. Without enough table-setting, the crime family he finds himself becoming a part of can't help but seem ordinary, and the last-minute solutions he finds weaken the urgency of the situations he's in, as cinematic as they appear on screen.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Actor: Adam Jezierski, Amparo Piñero, Fernando Tejero, Igal Naor, Miguel Herran, Nora Navas, Omar Ayuso, Pedro Casablanc, Susana Abaitua

Read also:

517. Lumberjack the Monster, 2023

	
Horror novels scare readers through the power of their imaginations, but sometimes, adapting these words straight on screen limits the fear factor. That’s what happened with Lumberjack the Monster. While the film crescendos nicely into the intense graphic violence director Takashi Miike is known for, the introduction is a bit shaky, alternating between the cops and protagonist Akira Ninomiya without a neat balance, and having to reveal key points of the mystery only through dialogue. The film does still retain some of novelist Mayusuke Kurai’s contemplations about the consequences of clinical psychopaths placed in critical roles, but Lumberjack the Monster feels a tad too uneven.Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Actor: Ariei Umefune, Chigusa Yasuzawa, Hinami Mori, Katsuya Kobayashi, Kazuya Kamenashi, Keisuke Horibe, Kentaro Furuyama, Kiyohiko Shibukawa, Masatoshi Kihara, Masayuki Deai, Minosuke, Nanao, Reon Yuzuki, Riho Yoshioka, Ryushin Tei, Shidô Nakamura, Shota Sometani, Yasushi Kimura
Director: Takashi Miike
Rating: R

Read also:

518. Choona, 2023

As far as heist stories go, Choona gets points for placing so much importance on the act of getting its team together. The first two episodes watched for this review don't advance forward in plot as much as they pivot from one point of view to another around the same moments in time. Unfortunately, because the series is so particular about its own structure, it loses sight of the reasons why we should be emotionally invested in the heist in the first place. There is a world of gang violence sketched out in these early episodes, but little sense of what's actually at stake. And with the show's over-reliance on voiceover narration, Choona sucks the tension out of its plot, as this seemingly omniscient voice constantly keeps us at a distance.

Genre: Comedy, Crime, Drama

Actor: Aashim Gulati, Arshad Warsi, Atul Srivastava, Jimmy Shergill, Namit Das, Vikram Kochhar

Director: Pushpendra Nath Misra

Rating: TV-MA

Read also:

519. What Jennifer Did, 2024

	
This is your bare minimum, bog-standard Netflix true crime documentary covering the infamous Jennifer Pan case. The film focuses on Pan's interrogation tapes, with detectives walking us through their thought process at the time, providing evidence and chilling head nods in reaction to her statements. The value of the film is its micro dissection of the tapes, examining it minute by minute, even line by line, which is an interesting way to learn about the case for the first time. But it feels so banally straightforward without adding anything new or being more informative, that it feels like it was just made to dig up old bones and make a bloated made-for-Netflix docu.Genre: Crime, Documentary
Actor: Alan Cooke, Bill Courtice, Deborah Gladding, Fernando Baldassini, Samantha Chang
Director:  Jenny Popplewell
Rating: R

Read also:

520. To Catch a Killer, 2023

To Catch a Killer feels like a limited series shrunken down to fit a movie’s runtime: its many ideas, though potentially compelling on their own, are so underserved by the breezy treatment here that they lose all value. The film wants to hit every hot button — misogyny in the police force, demagoguery on TV news channels, high-level corruption, white supremacy, and the mental health crisis — but its frantic box-ticking makes it feel like a speed-run of topical issues rather than anything genuinely reflective.

The characters feel similarly underdeveloped, not least star Shailene Woodley’s, a Clarice Starling wannabe who winds up delivering emotional counseling to the film’s bafflingly motivated serial killer in just one of many implausible scenes. Add to that the cringe-inducing dialogue, which is crammed to bursting point with clunky metaphors, and you can call off the manhunt — the script is the real killer here.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Adam LeBlanc, Alain Chanoine, Alex Gravenstein, Arthur Holden, Ben Mendelsohn, Benz Antoine, Bobby Brown, Chip Chuipka, Christian Jadah, Christian Paul, Christine Rodriguez, Daniel Brochu, Darcy Laurie, Dawn Lambing, Dusan Dukic, Erniel Baez, Frank Schorpion, Heidi Foss, Jason Cavalier, Joan Hart, Jovan Adepo, Karine Dion, Kelly Lee, Kevin Woodhouse, Laura Mitchell, Lesley Pahl, Leyda Aleyli, Lilou Roy-Lanouette, Luc Morissette, Marcello Bezina, Mark Antony Krupa, Mark Camacho, Mark Day, Mark Trafford, Martyne Musau, Matt Langton, Maurizio Terrazzano, Michael Cram, Michael Dozier, Nabil Khatib, Nick Walker, Nir Guzinski, Patrick Abellard, Patrick Émmanuel Abellard, Patrick Labbé, Paul Ash, Ralph Ineson, Richard Zeman, Rosemary Dunsmore, Ryan Stick, Sean Tucker, Shailene Woodley, Ted Pluviose, Teneisha Collins

Director: Damián Szifron

Read also:

521. Once Upon a Crime, 2023

Fairytale parodies reimagine these classic tales to reexamine or question its related themes. Once Upon a Crime attempts to do this by imagining Little Red Riding Hood as a detective investigating the murder of a hairdresser in Cinderella’s ball. The campy glamor of the costumes and sets, as well as the incongruence of Little Red’s detective mindset, makes the film watchable. However, the film takes strange twists that stray too far from the original stories. And while the cut locks make an intriguing metaphor, the resulting ending betrays any sense of justice for the characters, most especially the abused Cinderella.

Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Crime, Fantasy

Actor: Atsuhiro Inukai, Jiro Sato, Kanna Hashimoto, Masaki Kaji, Midoriko Kimura, Miki Maya, Mirei Kiritani, Mizuki Yamamoto, Natsuna Watanabe, Takanori Iwata, Tomoharu Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi Muro, Yuko Araki, Yumi Wakatsuki, 室毅

Director: Yuichi Fukuda

Rating: PG

Read also:

522. Lift, 2024

Sometimes, after a demanding work week, you want to watch a low-stakes, enjoyable movie with just enough plot to enjoy. Heist comedy Lift tries to be that film, with Kevin Hart as a smooth criminal who steals art in order to keep art from undeserving owners and improve the artist’s revenue from their work. It’s an interesting twist to the Robin Hood stereotype, one that could have hinted at concerns of screen artists last year when its release date was originally scheduled for. That being said, the film throws this idea away when Kevin Hart and his team are now forced to participate in a risky heist due to the Interpol. The events that play out amount to a fairly generic caper, but there are far better heist films to spend your weekend watching, with far better plots and stunts.

Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime

Actor: Amit Dhut, Andrew Wilson, Billy Magnussen, Burn Gorman, Caroline Loncq, David Proud, Eman Kazemi, Erol Ismail, Gary Fannin, Gerard Monaco, Gordon Alexander, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jacob Batalon, Jean Reno, Jess Liaudin, Kevin Hart, Kim Yun-jee, Michael Absalom, Oli Green, Paul Anderson, Ross Anderson, Roy McCrerey, Russ Bain, Sam Worthington, Stefano Skalkotos, Úrsula Corberó, Vincent D'Onofrio, Viveik Kalra

Director: F. Gary Gray

Rating: PG-13

Read also:

523. Colors of Evil: Red, 2024

It starts out easy and compelling enough, in the middle of a crime scene with a naked dead girl on the shore. But easy and compelling this refuses to be. The film seems to be a slow, painful look at the process of capturing a perpetrator, a detective’s effort to profile a killer. But it threw a lot more at the wall hoping a lot more would stick. The nonlinear storytelling spices up the action, but it just feels like the base story needed all the help it could get. If you do stick with the movie, you’ll see some gory details, some twists, and an unnecessarily complex story.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Andrzej Konopka, Andrzej Zieliński, Jakub Gierszał, Jan Wieteska, Justyna Schneider, Maja Ostaszewska, Paweł Jusiński, Przemysław Bluszcz, Wojciech Zieliński, Zbigniew Stryj, Zofia Jastrzębska

Director: Adrian Panek

Read also:

524. Blood Coast, 2023

When France is portrayed on the silver screen, we’re more used to seeing the nation’s capital, Paris. Netflix instead takes us to the coastline of Marseilles in crime thriller series Blood Coast. As the Marseilles police team, led by police officer Lyès Benamar, hunts down the people behind the drugs, Interpol agent Alice Vadal gets transferred from Paris to the coastal case, possibly for revenge for her father. It’s a familiar plot, and the crime thriller goes through the motions in a slow, but predictable fashion, alternating between the police team and the organized syndicate behind the foreign drugs flooding the coast. The resulting show feels a tad boring, though it’s thankfully limited to only six episodes.

Genre: Action & Adventure, Crime

Actor: Idir Azougli, Jeanne Goursaud, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Olivier Barthélémy, Tewfik Jallab

Director: Ivan Fegyveres, Olivier Marchal

Rating: TV-MA

Read also:

525. iNumber Number: Jozi Gold, 2023

While investigating a gold heist in Johannesburg, Chili (S'dumo Mtshali) is jaded after an undercover operation fails spectacularly. With one chance left, he must choose between following the law and protecting the wealth of higher-ups or going against it and helping a heist crew dole out the riches to those in need. Wealth redistribution is at the heart of the film, with greed on all sides thwarting any prospects of prosperity for the city. The action-crime-thriller examines economic inequality via the lead cops trying to effect change, all while leaning into a warm visual style that shifts cameras to mirror the tensions. It's a nice touch to the average Robin Hood and "for the people" narrative, but the CGI choices and generic action scenes can get distracting at times.

Genre: Action, Crime, Thriller

Actor: Brenda Ngxoli, Deon Lotz, Presley Chweneyagae, S'Dumo Mtshali

Director: Donovan Marsh

Read also:

1 … 31 32 33 34 35 36 37