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...

'City of Life and Death', like the earlier 'City of War; the John Rabe Story', is an account of the Rape of Nanjing; the terrible crimes committed by the Japanese army during the sacking of the Chinese city and the desperate efforts to protect those, mainly Chinese, sheltering in the protected German zone. This version concentrates less on the atrocities and heroic whites and more on the growing sensitivity and terrible guilt of a Japanese sergeant.
An important and artfully made film. find out more...

Larry Fishburne plays New York mobster Bumpy Johnson, kingpin of the numbers racket in 1930's Harlem. But a turf war erupts when psycho gangster Dutch Schultz tries to muscle in on the game, leaving Bumpy with no choice but to enlist the notorious Lucky Luciano's help to save his own life and prevent an inevitable bloodbath. Moody mob drama. find out more...

Willis and Walken try to out-macho each other and prove, once and for all, who has the fullest trousers in this mobster style, 90's re-make of "A Fistful of Dollars" (which was in turn inspired by the Kurosawa epic Yojimbo). Atmospheric with plenty of machine-gun fire, but ultimately uninspired. find out more...

The definitive gangster-epic; violent? Yes, but never mindless. The Jewish Mafia's coming of age on the Lower East Side in 1923, their rise to wealth during Prohibition, and their fall in 1933, provide the background to a story of friendship and betrayal, love and death. Leone's masterful cinematography evokes both the harshness of the vice-ridden decades before and after Prohibition, but also the philosophy behind it. Splendid performances by De Niro and Woods and a stupendous score by Ennio Mo find out more...

Set in the Sino-Japanese war, Yasuzo Masumura's black-and-white anti-war film tells of an army nurse who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. This can't be recommended to the squeamish, but neither can its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus, be easily shaken off. Comparable with Altman's MASH, it suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme, how to preserve one's humanity in impossible circumstances, but its ethics are con find out more...

It's 1930s Manchuria and various gangsters are fighting it out for possession of a legendary treasure map. As our three main characters lurch toward their destinies, trains are robbed, assassinations avoided (or not), raids take place, gun battles erupt, fingers get cut off, bodies drop etc. find out more...