The 286 Project

R Xmas is hands down the most underrated crime film of the early 2000s. Directed by Abel Ferrara, Drea de Matteo stars as the wife of a drug dealer who must come up with ransom money after her husband is kidnapped over Christmas. Ice-T is excellent as the villain. A must watch.

Tokyo Drifter (1966) is one of the most stylish crime films ever made.

3. A Colt Is My Passport (1967) This is one of the greatest Japanese crime films ever made. Joe Shishido once again plays a professional hitman, this time betrayed by his employers after successfully completing a contract. The film has the doomed fatalism of film noir and the stylistic flair of French New Wave cinema, but its strongest influence comes from westerns. The score sounds like Morricone. Shishido plays his hitman like a modern gunslinger. There’s even a scene where his partner pulls out a guitar and sings a ballad while they hide out from their enemies, a clear homage to Rio Bravo. And it all culminates in a final showdown across a desolate coastal landfill that feels like something out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It’s a classic of Asian crime cinema, and it’s now being remade by The Raid director Gareth Evans, with the story relocated to 1970s America. (3/6)

4. Branded to Kill (1967) This is like if David Lynch made a gangster flick. Direct by Seijun Suzuki, who was one of the greatest and most prolific directors of 1960s yakuza cinema. He spent years churning out low-budget crime films for Nikkatsu, a studio known for fast, stylish genre pictures aimed at younger audiences. By the mid-1960s, Suzuki’s films had become increasingly stylized, playful, and sometimes outright absurd. With Branded to Kill, he pushed those instincts as far as they could go and created what is now widely regarded as a surrealist masterpiece. Joe Shishido plays Goro Hanada, Japan’s No. 3 ranked killer, whose position in the underworld collapses after a butterfly lands on his rifle at a crucial moment, causing him to miss his target. The film falls into a strange, dreamlike state filled with rain, butterflies, dead birds, and a beautiful woman who may or may not be death incarnate. Reality becomes increasingly unstable as Hanada is hunted through a brutalist urban hellscape. As the film progresses, it starts to feel less like a conventional yakuza film and more like a psychotic fever dream. The film was considered so unconventional that Suzuki was fired by Nikkatsu after its release, and he would not direct another feature for over a decade. It was later rediscovered, however, and became a cult classic. (2/6)

John Woo on which order to watch his movies: "Well, I would like them to start with one of my Hong Kong movies called A Better Tomorrow. That was my first auteur movie. I think it was the first time I really could do whatever I wanted. All the shooting with two guns and all the action, the slow motion, all start from that movie. Then, after A Better Tomorrow, The Killer, Hard Boiled, and Bullet in the Head… Also, they can watch Face/Off. That’s also one of my favorite movies." collider.com/john-woo-silent…

In Thief, James Caan was trained by real professional thieves to crack safes. In the film’s opening scene, he used real tools owned by professional thieves to break into a real safe worth thousands of dollars. Caan explains: "They had a big Richmond lock and safe there, you know? And the guys were there, and they gave me a magnetic drill which weighed close to 200 pounds. And they go, "Jimmy, break it..." "What?" "Go ahead, go into the safe" "You got to be kidding me?" Now, the way they used to make them, they'd take four inches of cold-rolled steel, and then they'd put copper behind it. And then behind that would be cement for fire. When you put the drill in, you always had to feel this pressure, right? So you could feel it was cold-rolled steel.... Now, the purpose of the copper was to bind the drill exactly for that reason, because once you came through there and you hit that copper - it would just wrap all around your drill, and it was over. So you had to be exact - and when you hit the copper, you got to come off the pressure, you know? And I busted into this thing, and I opened it up. And then when I looked - and I was not prepared - there were these two doors inside with these little round locks. I go..."Oh".....But they're filming... So, I just looked up, and I grabbed this hammer and took this little chisel and boom! I knock both locks out...I felt like I just graduated Harvard or something. You know, it was great - that was one of my proudest moments. I called my mother, and she said, "that's my boy". ...I got pretty good at opening safes. It's a wonderful thing to be good at - because my sister - she had one of these floor safes in this house that I bought. And she couldn't open it, you know? - I went to work, and I got the thing open. It was great. So I learned some good stuff in case things go bad." James Caan’s quote comes from the bonus features on the Thief Blu-ray,

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing is one of the great classic heist films of the 1950s. It belongs alongside John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and Jules Dassin’s Rififi. Directed when Kubrick was just 27, the film follows Sterling Hayden’s Johnny Clay as he organises an $2 million racetrack robbery. Like those earlier classics, it focuses on the meticulous planning and execution of the heist, and the tragic flaws of the characters that ultimately cause everything to fall apart. Adapted from Lionel White’s crime novel Clean Break, the film features dialogue by the legendary Jim Thompson, one of the most important American hardboiled crime novelists of the twentieth century. Thompson was known for bringing a disturbing psychological dimension to pulp fiction, taking readers inside the minds of the criminal underclass - murderers, corrupt policemen and desperate men descending into violence. His novels were later adapted into crime classics such as Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, while his writing was also a major influence on the crime films of the Coen brothers. Ethan Coen once described Barton Fink as a Jim Thompson story. Kubrick greatly admired Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me, particularly its convincing portrayal of a criminally disturbed mind, a theme Kubrick would later explore in films like A Clockwork Orange. Thompson was brought in to write the bitter, cynical dialogue that gives The Killing much of its rough texture; particularly in the poisonous exchanges between George Peatty and his wife, Sherry. The Killing was very much a product of its time, drawing on the semi-documentary style of postwar crime films such as Anthony Mann’s T-Men and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, which used voiceover narration to give their stories the authenticity of police reports and newsreels. In The Killing, Kubrick uses this established technique in a particularly inventive way. The film repeatedly moves backwards in time, following different characters through overlapping events, while an impassive, newsreel-style narrator announces the precise timing of their movements like clockwork. This helps the audience follow the fragmented chronology, gradually revealing how the different parts of Johnny Clay’s elaborate robbery fit together. The Killing would go on to influence generations of crime filmmakers. Its famous ending inspired the similarly ironic conclusion of Henri Verneuil’s Any Number Can Win, starring Jean Gabin and Alain Delon, which I also highly recommend. Quentin Tarantino also openly acknowledged the film, and the original novel, as a major inspiration for Reservoir Dogs. If you’re a fan of heist movies, or crime cinema in general, The Killing is essential viewing.