Directed by Jules Dassin • 1947 • United States
Starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Charles Bickford

As hard-hitting as its title, BRUTE FORCE was the first of Jules Dassin’s forays into the crime genre, a prison melodrama that takes a critical look at American society as well. Burt Lancaster ...

Directed by George Armitage • 1990 • United States
Starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward

Based on the novel by crack crime writer Charles Willeford and produced by Jonathan Demme, this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper features a totally unhinged performance from Alec Baldw...

Criterion Collection Edition #834

Directed by Joel Coen • 1984 • United States
Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya

Joel and Ethan Coen’s career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleaz...

Directed by Fritz Lang • 1943 • United States
Starring Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee

The combination of Bertolt Brecht’s eloquent script (the legendary playwright’s only Hollywood credit), director Fritz Lang’s potent moral themes, and noirish cinematography by the great James Wong How...

Directed by Larry Clark • 2001 • United States, France
Starring Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Rachel Miner

Ever-controversial director Larry Clark (KIDS) returns to the world of aimless youth with this provocative and unflinching true-crime shocker. Inspired by the murder of Bobby Kent, BULLY cen...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1949 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog w...

Directed by Cy Endfield • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins

Blacklisted from Hollywood, American director Cy Endfield found a fresh start in Britain, where he brought a pronounced anticapitalist punch to this exciting crime drama set in the trucking industr...

Directed by John Bailey • 1994 • United States
Starring Ed Harris, Madeleine Stowe, Benicio Del Toro

In this tantalizing and stylish neonoir, Kyle Bodine (Ed Harris) is a homicide detective, the best in the business. But even a cop as brilliant as Kyle can be led astray by love. What starts as a...

Directed by Edward Dmytryk • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne

The first film director Edward Dmytryk made in England after being blacklisted from Hollywood is a wittily inventive blend of black comedy and suspense in which the investigation by a Scotland Ya...

Directed by Alan Rudolph • 1985 • United States
Starring Kris Kristofferson, Keith Carradine, Lori Singer

In a down-and-out corner of Rain City—a mysterious, moody metropolis that seems to exist partly in the future, partly in the past—a collection of social cast-offs are drawn together by fate,...

Directed by Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson

Mystery and menace are afoot at the 1889 Paris Exposition in this tense thriller from the studio that made atmospheric period dramas its specialty, Gainsborough Pictures...

Directed by Seijun Suzuki • 1967 • Japan
Starring Joe Shishido, Koji Nanbara, Isao Tamagawa

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. BRANDED TO KILL tells the ecstatica...