An all time classic 60s movie glamourising the real life story of the Barrow gang who terrorised the American South in the early 30s. 'Reclaiming the American gangster movie, after it had been stolen by the Nouvelle Vague, Penn's film was so successful (and so imitated) that it inevitably met with some grudging devaluation. But it's still great, half comic fairytale, half brutal fact, it reflects the essential ambiguity of its heroes by treading a no man's land suspended between reality and fant find out more...

A dedicated cop (Chow Yun-Fat) infiltrates a murderous gang of jewel thieves and is badly injured in a bungled heist, leaving him at the mercy of his "colleagues" as they get ever closer to discovering the truth. The ending of the film provided the inspiration for Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. find out more...

Director Antonia Bird has triumphed where so many have failed since "The Long Good Friday", with a British crime thriller that actually works. Robert Carlyle (Trainspotting, The Full Monty) is Ray, a politically correct armed robber who's gathered together a bunch of his fellow East End "faces" to pull off an ambitious raid on a London warehouse. Amongst his partners-in-crime are the old-fashioned gangster (Winstone), the alarming but amusing psycho (Davis) and the cocky young apprentice (Albarn find out more...

Lucky grows up in a South African township in the post-apartheid era and is caught between the desire to go university and the lure of easy money from violent crime.
A decade on an we see him as a struggling taxi-driver before his transformation into a businessman who uses violence to reclaim inner-city Joburg tenement blocks from the drug-dealers and hookers who inhabit them and from the rich white slum landlords who own them. Thus the ambitious gangster realises an aim of the revolution find out more...

Irish Sicilian Henry Hill always wanted to be a gangster and from running errands as a small boy, he graduates to becoming a trusted member of the "family". A stunning, violent and essential portrait of the Mafia's intimate details. An award winning film, superbly crafted by Scorsese. find out more...

A crackingly realised biog of a man who relentlessly dodged death with a cocky ambivalence that frankly defies credulity. 'Mesrine' is stylishly shot, smoothly directed and perfectly, charmingly, sociopathically performed by Cassell. A tight, pacey thriller considerably enhanced by the fact that it's based in, well…fact. This first film takes us from his brutal initiation as a soldier during the horrors of Algeria's fight for liberation to the end of the 1960s via France and French Canada. find out more...

The last few years of Mesrine's life sees him starting to enjoy the fruits of his thievery but this is now a man tortured by his infamy; increasingly, egotistically consumed by his own invincibility. Mesrine part 2 is an odd film in the sense that it feels like half an hour of story dragged out to a feature length running time; Cassel still makes a crackingly charming psychopath mind find out more...

Prepare to be corrupted! The long awaited, but mercifully uncut release of Tarantino's masterpiece means you can now rewind all the nasty bits in the privacy of your own home. A superbly scripted, stunningly stylish study of loyalty and double-dealings amongst underworld gangsters in sharp suits.

find out more...

Hyper-violence abounds in this squib-friendly, low budget Yakuza flick. This time the men in shades and black suits are led by 'Chance', a down-on-his-luck, fresh-out-of-jail mafia underling who is firmly in the Yakuza's pocket, doing jobs for his bosses to order. One big job stands between him and his freedom and he puts together a team up to the task: 'Peking Duck', a long term associate; 'Right', a caustic droog and 'Tequila', a good-lookin' psycho-boy. But Chance is about to assert his role find out more...