10 Best Perfectly Directed Crime Movies, Ranked

Alright, great crime movies. There are a ton of them. Going through them all means rounding up the usual suspects, and there are actually so many phenomenal crime movies to uncover during this process that The Usual Suspects itself might get snubbed. It potentially can, when one is talking about crime movies with great direction. There, the direction is competent for sure, but it’s the screenplay that does most of the heavy lifting.

With the following classic crime films, some for sure have phenomenal screenplays, but all are selected and outlined below because they contain particularly impressive direction. These are well-assembled, intricately planned, and wholly satisfying movies, all brought together with an authoritative voice (or two) pulling various strings to craft an overall masterpiece. To keep things interesting, there’s a restriction of one movie per director, or team of directors, given a couple of these were directed by a duo.

10 ‘West Side Story’ (1961)

Directed by Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise

There are two West Side Story movies that have great direction: both the 1961 version, which was directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, and the 2021 version, which was helmed by Steven Spielberg. Consider the latter receiving an honorable mention here, because the earlier version feels bolder, more colorful, and comparatively ahead of its time compared to the great – but perhaps less revolutionary – directing found in Spielberg’s version.

Translating West Side Story perfectly from stage to screen, this 1961 film retains a level of theatricality, but also manages to feel more dynamic, exciting, and raw compared to seeing the events of the story play out on a stage. It’s vibrant while also feeling dark, and just looks and feels unlike any other movie musical out there, both compared to those released around the same time and more modern efforts from the decades that followed.

9 ‘The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’ (1989)

Directed by Peter Greenaway

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is more than just a crime movie, being a quintessential sicko film and also a piece of arthouse cinema specifically about revenge. That’s a well-worn theme, but this film unpacks it in a strange, striking, and undoubtedly disturbing way. Once seen, it’s the kind of thing that’s not easily forgotten by any means, regardless of whether you actually liked the damn thing.

Beyond being impactful and unique, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover also succeeds because it blends horror, grotesque images, cruelty, and beauty, all within the one film. Peter Greenaway has come close to doing similar things in some of his other better-known films, but this one stands as easily his best overall, having a certain intoxicating and intriguing quality that only comes around every so often, even when you’re talking about a highly-skilled filmmaker.

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8 ‘Uncut Gems’ (2019)

Directed by Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

At this stage, it seems like only a miracle would be able to reunite the Safdie Brothers as collaborators, which makes it bittersweet to look upon Uncut Gems as likely their final effort as a directorial duo. At least if this is a final statement, it represents going out with a bang, because the immense potential they showed in an earlier film like Heaven Can Wait blossomed in Good Time, and then exploded in quality two years later with Uncut Gems.

A chaotic film with top-notch performances from professional and amateur actors alike, Uncut Gems is deservedly considered one of the best of the best films distributed by A24. It’s an incredible, nauseating, intense, and sometimes funny thrill ride of a movie, and the fact that it sustains such energy across a 2+ hour runtime – all the while actually slowly building to a phenomenal finale – is undoubtedly a sign of great direction.

7 ‘High and Low’ (1963)

Directed by Akira Kurosawa

While High and Low wasn’t the first perfectly directed Akira Kurosawa movie, it was arguably the legendary director’s first film set in contemporary times to have flawless direction. It shows he was just as great at helming crime/thriller movies as he was at samurai films, given High and Low follows the consequences of an extortion plot gone wrong, shifting into a detailed and engrossing police procedural in its second half.

Watching High and Low is a way to see a director firing on all cylinders. Just about every shot is meticulously set up, all the actors seem sure of the parts they need to play, and the already engaging screenplay is brought to life further by all the other technical aspects of the film. It’s genuinely hard to fault this one from a technical perspective, and it’s still quite dazzling to watch, 60+ years on from its original release.

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6 ‘Scarface’ (1983)

Directed by Brian De Palma

For directing a big movie, and retaining a level of control over an over-the-top Al Pacino, a passionate Oliver Stone, and an untethered Giorgio Moroder, Brian De Palma deserves the utmost credit for directing Scarface. This film is a rise-and-fall story on a grand scale; an excessive movie all about excess, with a big runtime, huge set pieces, and unchecked bombast in just about every frame.

All this makes Scarface the perfect gangster movie for the 1980s, which is looked back on as a somewhat heightened and extravagant decade, even if that’s something of a stereotype. Scarface helped define that sense of what the 1980s now “is,” and/or reflected aspects of the time well. Lots of people came together to make it such a uniquely memorable classic, but De Palma was the one overseeing them all, and it stands as one of his very best efforts as a filmmaker.

5 ‘Heat’ (1995)

Directed by Michael Mann

Heat isn’t quite as excessive as Scarface, but Al Pacino is also in this one and proves similarly bombastic. Additionally, the runtimes are the same length in both respective movies, and Heat aims to emphasize grandness in a slightly different way. It’s not quite as bold, explosive, or heightened, but it is undeniably huge in scope, with various characters all intersecting and changing each other’s lives in drastic ways.

All the while, Heat is also a phenomenal heist movie, and boasts one of the best-directed action scenes not just of the 1990s, but arguably of all time. And Michael Mann can be thanked for a huge part of Heat’s success as, to this date, it’s probably his best film overall, and certainly stands tall as one of the most expertly directed crime movies of its decade.

4 ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

More than just a crime movie, A Clockwork Orange is also a phenomenal piece of science fiction, not to mention an exceptionally dark, gritty, grounded, and harrowingly believable one. It’s a dystopia without much by way of flashiness, spectacle, or truly futuristic imagery. Instead, the world depicted is slightly more rundown than the real one, and criminal gangs run rampant to a greater extent than they do – or did – in the real world.

Combining sci-fi with thematic content concerning crime, justice, and rehabilitation, A Clockwork Orange asks difficult moral questions while looking uniquely off, sometimes surreal, and often nightmarish. It was one of many movies Stanley Kubrick directed that could be called perfect, and a significant title in demonstrating that there was pretty much nothing the great filmmaker was incapable of handling genre-wise.

3 ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984)

Directed by Sergio Leone

Given its runtime is either just under four hours or a little over, depending on the version watched, it’s safe to call Once Upon a Time in America one of the biggest and most jaw-dropping of all gangster epics. It was, regrettably, the final film Sergio Leone ever directed, but he saved arguably the best for last… or, at the very least, this is just as great as his best Westerns (impressive, considering he directed both The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West).

Boasting an astounding cast led by Robert De Niro, Once Upon a Time in America spans decades, covers difficult subject matter, looks and sounds beautiful, and deconstructs the American gangster movie in a ruthlessly efficient way. Owing to its content and runtime, it’s not the easiest film to just sit down and casually watch, but there are hugely rewarding things contained within, and it’s hard to deny how phenomenal Leone’s direction is.

2 ‘Goodfellas’ (1990)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

There are numerous Martin Scorsese crime movies that are perfectly directed, or at least very close to it, but none crackle, simmer, and explode quite as efficiently and consistently as Goodfellas. Whether you want to classify this as a crime movie, a somewhat grounded biopic, or even a dark comedy, it’s a staggering success, bursting with style and creativity across its nearly 2.5-hour-long runtime.

Goodfellas aims to be flashy and entertaining, but also authentic to how life really is for low-ranking members of the mafia. It’s not exactly romantic or idealistic, but it is often exciting and unpredictable, with a unique tone that proves perfectly balanced. Also, the fact that Scorsese directed so many great actors here to give career-best performances has to be worth additional credit.

1 ‘The Godfather Part II’ (1974)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

In some ways, The Godfather Part II exceeds its predecessor, The Godfather, in quality, perhaps noticeably when it comes to direction. Francis Ford Coppola showed immaculate control over that first movie, but The Godfather Part II feels even more confident, ambitious, and admirable, given how it both advances the story begun in the first movie while also flashing back to the past, explaining how Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone came to build the family empire.

It shouldn’t be controversial to call The Godfather Part II one of the greatest films of all time, regardless of genre. It’s also the debatable gold standard for how epic gangster movies should be put together, with everything working in harmony to create something magnificent… and there are so many moving parts in this huge movie that it boggles the mind how it all managed to come together so well (right now, over you).

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