Most crime films are about career criminals — bank robbers, professional hitmen, and the like — but those characters aren’t relatable to regular audiences. The most relatable crime stories are about ordinary people. Breaking Bad, hailed as the greatest TV series ever made, sees a milquetoast chemistry teacher becoming a meth cook.
The Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning masterpiece Fargo is one of the greatest examples of a crime movie about ordinary people. William H. Macy plays a mild-mannered car salesman who plots the kidnapping of his wife to squeeze some ransom money out of his father-in-law and finds himself in way over his head.
10 Fargo (1996)
Jerry Lundegaard’s predicament is understandable. He’s in a tough financial spot and his wife’s wealthy father won’t willingly give them money, so he hires a couple of goons to kidnap his wife in order to charge his father-in-law ransom money that will save him from fiscal ruin. The plan seems simple enough, but it quickly goes off the rails when the goons have to murder a couple of witnesses and the cops start putting the pieces together.
Marge Gunderson, the detective working the case (a career-best performance by Frances McDormand), is just as ordinary as Jerry. She’s not a gun-toting Dirty Harry type — she’s just a police officer doing her job efficiently and by the book, and she’s more interested in her husband’s art contest than the double homicide she’s solving.
9 Uncut Gems (2019)
Adam Sandler gave a dramatic performance to rival the revelatory turn he gave in Punch-Drunk Love in the role of jewelry dealer Howard Ratner in the Safdie brothers’ crime thriller Uncut Gems.
Howard knows how to rip people off on a gem deal, but finds himself completely unprepared to contend with the professional goons hired by his brother-in-law.
8 Jackie Brown (1997)
Quentin Tarantino’s only adaptation of previous source material — Jackie Brown, based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch — is also his most underrated movie. The constraints of adapting a novel tamed Tarantino’s style and resulted in his most mature film.
Pam Grier stars as a flight attendant who plays a ruthless gun runner and the cops against each other and comes out on top with the loot from the heist. The bad guys’ biggest mistake was underestimating Jackie.
7 True Romance (1993)
Tony Scott wore the influence of Terrence Malick’s Badlands as a badge of honor in telling his own story of a couple going on a crime spree. Drawn from an early script by Quentin Tarantino, True Romance is essentially Badlands with a comic book geek and a one-time escort.
Alabama is hired to keep Clarence company but ends up falling for him. He confronts her pimp and steals some coke from him, then they head to L.A., pursued by the mob, to sell it.
6 Death Wish (1974)
The quintessential vigilante thriller, Michael Winner’s Death Wish stars Charles Bronson as an architect named Paul Kersey who seeks revenge when his wife is murdered and his daughter is sexually assaulted in a home invasion.
Kersey is one of Bronson’s career-defining roles. His characterization was changed in the Bruce Willis-starring remake, but the whole point of this movie is that he’s just a normal guy; he’s an amateur counterpoint to hypercompetent action heroes like John Wick and Bryan Mills.
5 Double Indemnity (1944)
Directed by Billy Wilder, Double Indemnity is one of the greatest film noirs ever made. It revolves around insurance salesman Walter Neff as he plots to murder one of his clients.
Double Indemnity stars Fred MacMurray as Neff and Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson, one of film noir’s quintessential femme fatales. Plus, there’s a supporting turn by Edward G. Robinson, the basis for Chief Wiggum’s voice.
4 Bottle Rocket (1996)
Although it bombed at the box office, Wes Anderson’s directorial debut Bottle Rocket created enough buzz around Hollywood — including being named as one of the greatest movies of the decade by Martin Scorsese — that it launched Anderson’s career.
Long before Anderson’s distinctively quirky visual style was defined, Bottle Rocket established his penchant for creating memorable, human characters and placing them in stories with equal parts whimsy and melancholy. Luke Wilson stars as recently released mental patient Anthony and his real-life brother Owen Wilson co-stars as Dignan, his best friend who’s suddenly hellbent on committing a crime spree.
3 Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Loosely based on a true story, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon stars Al Pacino as Sonny Wortzik, who finds himself in way over his head when he robs a bank to pay for his lover’s gender confirmation surgery.
The movie is anchored by Pacino’s impeccable on-screen chemistry with John Cazale. The two came up together on the New York theater scene and co-starred in a bunch of movies before Cazale’s untimely passing.
2 Bande À Part (1964)
Jean-Luc Godard’s acclaimed French New Wave masterwork Bande à part tells the story of some crime movie buffs who plot a heist and find that the reality of a life of crime is much more complicated than the escapist fantasy on the big screen.
The movie is famous for its spontaneous dance number, which heavily influenced the Jack Rabbit Slim’s scene in Pulp Fiction, but on the whole, it’s one of Godard’s finest films.
1 No Country For Old Men (2007)
Another Coen brothers movie, No Country for Old Men stars Josh Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a hunter and Vietnam War veteran who stumbles across the blood-drenched scene of a drug deal gone wrong and takes a briefcase full of cash.
He expects to get away with the money pretty easily but ends up having to go on the run as he’s relentlessly pursued by a cold-blooded hitman.
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