Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Look at online photos from the real incident at Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, and photos of the real robber John Wojtowicz - in the movie, Sonny Wortzik, played by Al Pacino - and you'll be impressed by the likenesses, but exactly why these events led to such a painstakingly recreated film treatment by Sidney Lumet is lost in time: hailed for its portrayal of desperate 1970s New York, the film in fact revels in two other things - the comic chaos of the bungled robbery turned fourteen-hour hostage situation, and the fact Wojtowicz apparently wanted the stolen money to fund a lover's gender-affirming surgery - and, though well acted, is ultimately as chaotic and unrewarding as the robbery - a dull little mess - itself.

★★★☆☆

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Majboor ('Convulsed') (1974)

Ravi has a mother, sister, young brother, and a love interest we get to know, first, watching their jolly good times at home and at the beach; time is also spent establishing the kidnap and murder case Ravi is involved in as a witness; he then develops and is diagnosed with a brain tumor; dying, he concocts a plan to falsely confess to a kidnap-murder and claim the reward money for his family; then comes an operation - miraculously - that cures him; and it is only after all this convoluted set-up - a perfunctory first hour and a half (perfunctory despite brightly coloured Bollywood music-and-dance set-pieces) - that the mystery thriller can start: poor helpless and alone ("majboor"), Ravi's only way out of the death penalty is to go on the run and find the real murderer.

★★★☆☆

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Serpico (1973)

Sidney Lumet's biographical film, based on the book by Peter Maas, is the always interesting story of Frank Serpico and eleven years of his career as an undercover policeman, a period in which he took a stand against police corruption - against both the grass eaters and the meat eaters -  and he is an impressive man, thanks to Pacino's great performance, but the film never manages to convey the sense of danger he no doubt faced.

★★★★☆

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Murder By Numbers (2002)

Hitchcock's Rope, based on a play, was a chamber thriller focused with icy precision on its chilling pair of Leopold-and-Loeb intellectual killers, whereas Barbet Schroeder's Murder By Numbers might be its dopey cousin 'Fray': it starts strong, in a Hitchcockian world that extends out the window to the horizon - more Rear Window than Rope - but descends into mess as its two killers (Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt) turn on each other, with the film asking us to care about too many extraneous things - the cop's sex life, her traumatic past, one killer's love interest, and even a monkey - until the murdering pair, in the end plodding here and there in plastic body suits and swim goggles, look less icy and more and more like the bungling burglars from Home Alone.

★★★☆☆

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El Angel (2018)

"Serial killer" seems the wrong word for the murderous criminal portrayed here - is it possible to distinguish between serial killers and murderous criminals? - but extra confusingly, this murderous criminal is Rob Puch, a real-life babyfaced killer from Argentina who in the 60s, working as a brazen career thief, killed eleven people, but look him up later - because this striking and well-acted movie will garner your interest in this peculiar character - and discover someone quite different to this eccentric, possibly sociopathic babyface here - staring out from newsppaper photos and Wikipedia pages is a sneering rapist and abuser (did the movie neglect to metnion that?) and it becomes hard to reconcile fact with this, what, fiction?

★★★★☆

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River Wild (2023)

There's not much connecting this thriller to the 1990's The River Wild starring Meryl Streep except the title and the fact that whitewater rafting and a psychopath feature, but beyond these things, this is a grim crime story, charmless and full of low budget nasty realism, not high adventure, that makes it feel more like a re-enactment on that 48 Hour tv true crime doco, the sort you might snap off when it gets too bleak.

★★☆☆☆

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Citizen X (1995)

You have to tolerate an Irish actor (Stephen Rea) and an English one (Imelda Staunton) and a Canadian one (Donald Sutherland) and a Swedish/French one (Max von Sydow) doing Russian accents and with straight faces spouting lines that make Soviet Union bureaucrats investigating serial murders sound like petulant preschoolers more concerned about 'saving Soviet Union face' than apprehending the killer of fifty-two victims, but this grim true crime story builds to something satisfactory over time, about Andrei Chikatilo's crimes and the advent of criminal profiling in the Soviet Union.

★★★☆☆

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The Night of the Twelfth (2022)

It isn't very remarkable at the outset and could be an episode of any grey and dour television police procedural - a young woman dies horribly, and police look for the killer amongst her male friends - but The Night of the Twelfth starts with a placecard that connects the story to true crimes in France and has said something loudly by the end, rather than settling for the usual murder mystery denouement.

★★★★☆

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The Mask of Dimitros (1944)

What many say is Eric Ambler's best book is adapted faithfully here to the big screen with Peter Lorre in the lead role as the detective writer Leyden who becomes obsessed with chronicling the life of a murder victim washed up on a beach in Istanbul - Dimitrios Makropoulos, whom Leyden discovers, as he journeys across Europe and Asia talking with the dead man's victims, was a swindler, a spy, assassin, forger, drug dealer,  blackmailer, grifter, thief, and, in the book, even a human trafficker!

★★★★☆

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Classe Tous Risque (1960)

A criminal (Lino Ventura) on the run with his wife and two young boys in tow enacts a plan with a friend to steal some money and escape to a quiet family life in Paris, but things go horribly wrong and when the man calls upon his old mobster trenchcoat fraternity for help, he discovers their loyalties have shifted.

★★★★☆

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In The Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)

Patriot Games also pitted an IRA terrorist against a hero who makes the mistake of killing the terrorist's brother, but this movie transports the story to an unlikely setting, a tiny coastal village of Ireland where it can be hard for viewers to believe that the two parties - Liam Neeson's brother-killing hero Finbar Murphy and Kerry Condon as the terrorist and sister of the man killed -  don't immediately find each other and have it out; the unbelievable delay is to allow the movie to build to a melodramatic - and a little out-of-place in a small Irish village - John Woo finale where the town suddenly has the population density amd proportions of a major city.

★★★☆☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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The Teacher's Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) (2023)

I love movies about school - school is such a perfect hotbed of issues - and this German film is a ripper with Leonie Benesch perfect as the fresh-faced and idealistic teacher who sees all her hard work creating a harmonious classroom environment undone when speculation runs rife through the school campus that one of their own is a thief.

★★★★☆

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南方车站的聚会 (Nanfang chezhan de juhui) (The Wild Goose Lake (2019)

This crime drama is a touch overloaded with cinematic flourishes — there is a police hunt in a zoo at night, a scene in a funhouse full of mirrors, luminescent night-bootscooting, disconcerting moments as the camera swings between twins, and loads of noirish shadow-play — but with the style and slinkiness of In The Mood For Love, sharing that classic's bold colour palette and muted sexy tone but applied to a gritty modern-day crime story, it is an utterly capivating thriller about man-on-the-run Zedong Zhou, a small-time crim caught up in big-time crime, and the prostitute who may be helping him...or might she in fact be after the reward for bringing him in?

★★★★☆

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عنکبوت مقدس ('Holy Spider') (2022)

This unflinching look at the serial murders of Saeed Hanaei, an Iranian family man who (at least after he was caught) claimed his murders of sixteen prostitutes were religiously motivated (but, let's face it, war trauma, mummy boyness, male entitlement, and psychopathy came first, right?) is extremely hard to watch but utterly compelling given its basis in truth, given its electric performance from Zahra Amin Ebrahimi as the deep undercover journalist who dared bring Saeed Hanaei down, and given its jaw-dropping final scenes in which director Ali Abbasi reveals just how far Iran's corrupt masculinity will go to perpetuate itself.

★★★★☆

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Coup de Chance (2023)

Woody Allen's so prolific, all his new movies just seem like his old movies again, or blends of them, or gender-reversed versions, or simply retold (wasn't Blue Jasmine just Allen trying again, more successfully as it turns out, to tell again the underwhelming Melinda and Melinda) - he's done this one before, too, you find yourself thinking, and so it is with his fiftieth movie, a charming comedy suspense and kind of Irrational Man repeat or Scoop revisitation that plays with the themes of chaos and chance again, but the one big difference here is this is a good one, because that's something Allen doesn't always do - this is sharp, extremely (but subtly) funny, and beautiful to look at in terms of the costume, scenery, and actors.

★★★★☆

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Un Flic (Eng: 'A Cop') (aka Dirty Money) (1972)

All those Mission Impossible movies owe a lot to Jean-Pierre Melville's last French crime "flic" that features a centrepiece stunt distinctly Ethan Hunt in style involving a train and a helicopter...oh, and a cigar robe, a white pencil, and a horseshoe magnet (far too much detail: couldn't he have just gone into the bathroom and reappeared changed?) but unlike the Mission: Impossible movies, which plotwise are pretty straightforward, you'll need to watch Un Flic ("A cop") twice to confirm what might not be clear the first time through: that Alan Delon is a police commissioner, that apart from being committed by the same criminal gang, a drug robbery is a second crime unrelated to the first, and a second watch will help you to distinguish between far too many grey-faced trenchcoats and blonde bombshells, all of them (the bombshells AND the trenchcoats) mesmerized, transfixed by Delon.

★★★☆☆

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Cast A Dark Shadow (1955)

Well, you pretty much have to watch this 1955 thriller play adaptation - the play is called Murder Mistaken - not just for a well-delivered surprise towards the end but also for the jaw-dropping endscenes in which one particular female character stands up to a killer in a terrifying shouting match that I think is unprecedented in its melodrama - the only similar scene I can think of is Sigourney Weaver's Helen Hudson inviting a crazed serial killer to put up his dukes in that rooftop scene in Copycat. 

★★★☆☆

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Mystic River (2003)

Director Clint Eastwood's Best Picture Oscar-nominated Mystic River is simply a Boston-set police procedural, really, which makes all the solemnity, all the anguish of the story - all the blue-grey bleakness - and the fact an investigation that takes a matter of days to resolve is couched in twenty-five years of trauma context, a bit much - certainly once the movie ends and you know who killed Katie Markum, the daughter of ex-convict Jimmy Markum (a Best Actor Oscar-winning performance from Sean Penn) the question will have crossed your mind why so much trouble was taken to tell what is essentially a coincidence-heavy episode of Law and Order.

★★★☆☆

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Reptile (2023)

They went to a lot of trouble to make this thriller atmospheric, muting colours and asking an ensemble of fine actors to speak and move at snail's pace, but they forgot to include anything or anyone that viewers can care much about, so there's not a whole lot of interest in the case of a real estate agent's murdered wife or in the question of whether Benicio Del Toro's worldweary cop can solve the crime.

★★★☆☆

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