555 Best Crime Movies to Watch (Page 36)

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, 2024

You don't need to have watched the first Code 8 (released in 2019) to enjoy Part II, which speaks to how this sequel has improved as a piece of sci-fi entertainment—but also hasn't done anything particularly interesting with its characters or themes. At the end of the day this really isn't all that different from so many other attempts at making a "gritty" superhero property, ending up as yet another crime drama that lacks personality for its characters or imagination in the way that its thrills are executed. It certainly has its heart in the right place, gesturing towards corruption in the police force, but even these insights feel half-developed and way too easy by the end.

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Science Fiction, Thriller

Actor: Aaron Abrams, Akiel Julien, Albert Lapi, Alex Mallari Jr., Altair Vincent, Darrin Maharaj, Hazel Gorin, J.D. Nicholsen, Jane Moffat, Jean Yoon, Jessica Allen, Kari Matchett, Mikayla SwamiNathan, Moe Jeudy-Lamour, Natalie Liconti, Nneka Elliott, Noorin Gulamgaus, Robbie Amell, Sammy Azero, Sarena Parmar, Sirena Gulamgaus, Starr Domingue, Stephen Amell, Yatharth Bhatt

Director: Jeff Chan

Rating: R

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, 2022

You can tell that Blaze director Del Kathryn Barton is an award-winning visual artist first and foremost. The images that she puts together in this film are frequently stunning—making use of the camera in fascinating, freeing ways, and with lots of practical and computer-generated/animated effects that paint her young protagonist Blaze's world in glitter and feathers and lush colors. The imaginary dragon, which acts as a shorthand to symbolize Blaze's complex psychological response to her trauma, is a wonderfully tactile life-size puppet that lead actress Julia Savage responds to in an entirely convincing way.

But you can also tell that this is Barton's debut feature. Ultimately her visuals don't do enough to shake off or give meaning to the graphic scene of rape and murder that occurs at the beginning of the film. And the way she structures the movie threatens to make it feel like a series of music videos or video art pieces. Despite its originality and the level of commitment displayed by both Savage and Simon Baker, Blaze has difficulty communicating a coherent message about trauma—the film strung together by heavy-handed scenes that spell out various ideas and lead to the most obvious conclusions.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Bernie Van Tiel, Heather Mitchell, John Waters, Josh Lawson, Julia Savage, Kristy Wordsworth, Morgan Davies, Neal Horton, Rebecca Massey, Remy Hii, Simon Baker, Stephen James King, Will McDonald, Yael Stone

Director: Del Kathryn Barton

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, 2023

Between Overhaul's frequently nonsensical blend of truck racing and vehicular heists, and its focus on found families, the comparisons to the Fast & Furious series are undeniable. This also means that this Brazilian blockbuster is also much less engaging than it thinks it is; the stakes don't feel particularly urgent, and the near indifference of the rest of the world to all this criminal activity means these characters may as well be fantasy heroes. It does, however, have more significantly more color to it than its Hollywood role model, thanks to the gorgeous vistas of Brazil and the unique physical attributes of the big rigs the main characters drive. All things considered, it's pretty novel to have these high-speed chases through more cumbersome vehicles—less flashiness, more brute power.

Genre: Action, Crime, Drama, Thriller

Actor: Evandro Mesquita, Flávio Pardal, Fumassa Alves, Gillray Coutinho, Jaderson Fialho, Leandro Tadeu Gonçalves, Milhem Cortaz, Orã Figueiredo, Paulo Vilhena, Raphael Logam, Sheron Menezes, Thiago Martins, Vitória Valentin

Director: Tomás Portella

Rating: R

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, 2024

This documentary could be commended for taking the time to set the stage of McNair’s importance to his football team and his bond with the interviewees. But the extended game footage really feels like a way to pad the runtime to make the full hour. Elsewhere, the work really captures the shock of it all, with interrogations that feel especially unsettling because the documentary is so bare and we spend all this time with the suspects. But as good as it handles the true crime portions, and though career tributes hammer home the final point that McNair's legacy is not his death, this did not need to be 58 minutes long, and it showed.

Genre: Crime, Documentary

Actor: Al Michaels, Brad Hopkins, Brian Williams, Dan Dierdorf, Eddie George, Jeff Fisher, Kurt Warner, Robert Gaddy, Sahel Kazemi, Steve McNair, Vincent Hill

Director: Rodney Lucas, Taylor Alexander Ward

Rating: PG-13

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, 2024

As documentaries go, They Called Him Mostly Harmless is pretty standard, if not forgettable, fare. There isn’t a lot of information regarding the case it focuses on, so it relies heavily on interviews with related persons and “internet sleuths” who have taken it upon themselves to solve the mystery of this hiker’s identity. It moves slowly, bogged even further down by unnecessary backstories that do nothing to get us closer to cracking the case. To be sure, it’s impressive that the missing man in question was able to scrub all evidence of his existence in this digital age, but the documentary fails to build on that intrigue and instead gives us something that sputters till the end.

Genre: Crime, Documentary, Mystery

Director: Patricia E. Gillespie

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Shot from the movie

, 2022

The opening titles of this French procedural drama explicitly tell us that the crime it chronicles will go unsolved, confessing that it’s about one of the approximately 160 murder cases that police don’t crack each year. An ambitious and intriguing opener — suggesting that, in the absence of a clean resolution, the film will nonetheless offer us something equally compelling, as Zodiac does. 

In following the investigation of the brutal murder of 21-year-old Clara (Lula Cotton-Frapier) — for which the police interrogate various of her exes, all misogynistic potential murderers in their own ways — the film seeks to explore the society-wide “problem between men and women” that has given the police its surplus of suspects. Alas, it’s much more interested in the psychological impact cold cases have on policemen like frustrated captain Yohan (Bastien Bouillon). There’s something deeply ironic about making a movie about the systemic dehumanization of women just to center male perspectives, especially when their only insight into the epidemic of toxic masculinity is Yohan’s clunky “We can’t find the murderer because all men killed Clara.” The film’s treatment of the victim herself — incurious and downright gratuitous in the depiction of her murder — cements it as a shallow, un-self-aware, and failed attempt to reckon with a subject that deserved its full focus.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Anouk Grinberg, Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners, Camille Rutherford, Charline Paul, David Murgia, Johann Dionnet, Jules Porier, Julien Frison, Lula Cotton-Frapier, Marc Bodnar, Matthieu Rozé, Mouna Soualem, Nicolas Jouhet, Paul Jeanson, Pauline Serieys, Pierre Lottin, Théo Cholbi, Thibaut Évrard

Director: Dominik Moll

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, 2023

The Machine wants us to assume many unlikely things, with Bert Kreischer’s global fame being the most improbable. It also wants to be both high stakes as we follow Bert and his father (Mark Hamill) being chased by the mafia and comedic as they make lighthearted jokes along the way. But it never really achieves that balance. Though it looks sleek and high-budgeted, its contents are lopsided and messy, not once hitting the mark on its many targets. Moreover, it's based on a premise so thin, that it loses all credibility midway through the film. After that, it simply becomes a parody of itself. To be sure, there are some noteworthy moments in between, like when Kreischer and Hamill share genuine father-and-son moments, but for the most part, it’s just too overbearing to warrant anyone’s attention.

Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime

Actor: Aleksandar Srećković 'Kubura', Amelie Child-Villiers, Bert Kreischer, Brian Caspe, Dobrila Stojnic, Đorđe Simić, Iva Babić, Jess Gabor, Jimmy Tatro, Mark Hamill, Marko Nedeljković, Martyn Ford, Mercedes De La Cruz, Milena Predić, Miodrag Dragičević, Nikola Đuričko, Oleg Taktarov, Rita Bernard-Shaw, Robert Maaser, Set Sjöstrand, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Tea Wagner, Vladimir Gvojić

Director: Peter Atencio

Rating: R

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Shot from the movie

, 2024

A screwball comedy following two crass female cops sounds, well, nice. But without a compelling mystery, believable chemistry, and funny jokes, Nice Girls fails to live up to its name. The crime that drives the movie’s plot feels flimsy and Disney-esque, a formula of a mystery you’ve seen a hundred times before. The chemistry between Leo and Melanie seems nonexistent. Yes, they’re capable actors who do especially well in their action scenes, but together, they fail to create a memorable spark. And then there are the jokes, which I want to believe are lost in translation instead of just plain unfunny. They feel dated in their observations but current because of the context (they’re often racial or political), but they never seem to land. None of the other parts of the film seem to. It’s a great idea—not since Spy have I seen such a valiant attempt at a female crime-busting duo—but it ultimately fails to deliver.

Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime

Actor: Alice Taglioni, Antoine Duléry, Baptiste Lecaplain, Benjamin Baroche, Franz Lang, Jess Liaudin, Katrina Durden, Lucien Jean-Baptiste, Noémie Lvovsky, Stefi Celma

Director: Noémie Saglio

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, 2024

Murder mysteries don’t have to be full of twists to be worthwhile, but if you’re going the predictable route, you might as well make it an exciting one. Killer Heat, despite its name, feels cold and dragging. Gordon-Levitt’s Bali shoots for mysterious and debonair, like the detectives of noir past, but instead, he feels more like a parody of those characters. He never seems to ground Bali into something real, no matter how many flashbacks we get of his tragic family life. Madden similarly feels more like a trope than anything, and it’s beyond frustrating to watch him waste the opportunity to play identical twins. Where other actors seemed to have a blast at this (see: Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or even Lindsay Lohan in Parent Trap), Madden is just plain indistinguishable. Woodley is the film’s sole believable character, but her affecting performance isn’t enough to save the film.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Romance

Actor: Abbey Lee, Argyris Gaganis, Babou Ceesay, Clare Holman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Manos Gavras, Richard Madden, Shailene Woodley

Director: Philippe Lacôte

Rating: R

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Shot from the movie

, 2023

All the little twists in the case of Mirna Salihin's murder are intriguing enough to speculate over, so Ice Cold is definitely a true-crime case worth revisiting. The problem is in how the documentary indulges sensationalist arguments and pure speculation with the same level of urgency as it does with expert counsel. A large part of the film has to do with how this trial started to become such a fixture in Indonesian public life, but it feels as if the movie would rather provoke even more baseless conspiracies through its gossipy tone than provide smarter analysis. There's an appeal to how simple this case is relative to other true-crime stories, but this shouldn't be an excuse to haphazardly throw opposing perspectives at each other for the sake of drama.

Genre: Crime, Documentary

Actor: Edi Darmawan Salihin, Jessica Wongso, Marcella Zalianty, Mirna Salihin, Otto Hasibuan

Director: Rob Sixsmith

Rating: PG-13

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