Posts Tagged ‘ crime ’

The best of the best, here are presented the ten best movies about crime which are based on true stories.  They are listed in alphabetical order and each is generally a quite good movie, but what makes them especially interesting, and in some cases, very, very terrifying, is that this is not complete fiction; in fact, most of what is being portrayed really did happen…

1.  Blow 2001 – Directed by Ted Demme

Starring Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Franka Potente, Paul Reubens, Jordi Mollà, and Ray Liotta, this Ted Demme directed picture tells us the story of George Jung (Depp) who goes from being the son of a lower-middle class plumber (Liotta) to drug dealer, to drug trafficker, to basically cocaine king of the United States, to inmate, to parolee trying to get back into his daughter’s life, and finally to permanent inmate.  The movie is heart-wrenching and the kind of movie men will in which men watching will tear up at the end because George finally realizes that the advice his father gave him long ago, when his father’s business was in trouble, was the truth, and George has realized it too late to do anything about it.  It is as tragic as it is brilliant with fantastic acting, a great cast and the never-changing excellence in direction of Demme.

Director Jonas Åkerlund‘s 2002 Spun has the pace and editing style of the drug which is the central theme of the movie: methamphetamine.   For example, while most movies have something like 600 cuts in them, Spun contains a record of more than 5,000 cuts.  It stars Jason Schwartzman as Ross, a naive meth addict with a car; Mickey Rourke as The Cook, who manufactures the meth in very dangerous and hazardous circumstances, including motel rooms and rents weird porn while wearing his cowboy hat and visibly shoulder-holstered gun; Brittany Murphy as Nikki, a stripper who is The Cook’s girlfriend; John Leguizamo as Spider Mike, the dealer who buys what The Cook makes and then sells it from his disgusting house; Patrick Fugit as Frisbee, a spacey meth user who buys from Spider Mike and is often found lurking around his house; Mena Suvari as Cookie, Spider Mike’s live-in girlfriend and meth addict; Peter Stormare as The Mullet Cop, one of the two undercover police officers who use meth and make drug busts; and Alexis Arquette as the Mustache Cop, The Mullet Cop’s partner.

The story begins as simply as the title, A Simple Plan, would imply: two brothers, Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and Jacob Mitchell (Billy Bob Thornton), along with Jacob’s best friend Lou Chambers (Brent Briscoe) find a crashed plane in the woods and inside a large sum of money in cash.  Lou and Jacob are both of less-than-stellar intelligence and Hank is trapped in what he perceives as a boring life, working a blue collar job at a rural feed store as a clerk, hoping one day that the owner will die and give it to him.

With their premiere film writer/director team Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine gives us a pulse-pounding adrenaline-fueled action thriller starring Jason Statham and Amy Smart that starts with a rush and doesn’t stop that rush until the credits roll in Crank.

Statham plays Chev Chelios, a hitman for a local organized crime gang, who awakens to find that he has been poisoned and the only way for him to live long enough to exact his revenge upon the people who poisoned him is to keep his adrenaline at high levels by ways including fighting, cocaine, sex, injections of epinephrine, energy drinks, high-speed police chases, and more.  Basically, if he slows down, he’ll die and he doesn’t want to do that until he can kill Verona (Jose Pablo Cantillo) the man who poisoned him.

The movie is action packed and so filled with intensity that the viewer finds themselves feeling some of the same adrenal effects Chelios is trying to achieve.  It is a fantastic film from a team with zero Hollywood experience, but who are now building upon the success of their first film.  Statham is perfect in his performance as Chelios and Amy Smart performs as his slightly ditzy, slow-witted, pot-smoking girlfriend magnificently.  If it isn’t already clear where I’m going with this: see this movie.

Jodie Foster brings a woman living in New York City as a radio personality named Erica Bain with a deeply loved fiance who is brutally attacked in Central Park and almost destroyed as a result of it emotionally in this 2007 Neil Jordan movie.