Crime doesn’t pay, but it does help with the bills from time to time. This is the general foundation on which Emily the Criminal is built, which serves to establish this as one of the most unexpectedly fascinating films of the past year. Written and directed by John Patton Ford in his directorial debut, the…

The 1930s were so overwhelmingly filled with gangster films, that on the odd occasion that one came along that dared to look at the popular genre from a different perspective, it would immediately stand out. The Little Giant is perhaps not a film that most are entirely familiar with, but once it reaches the orbit…

The story of Mark Brandon Read, who was better known by the name “Chopper” Read, is one of the most notorious in Australian history. Not only was he a bloodthirsty criminal who took the lives of anyone who would dare cross him (often doing it with a grin on his ghastly face), he was also…

When John Cassavetes stepped behind a camera, pure magic was born. There are few filmmakers that I admired for the sheer gall and dedication to their craft more than him, especially since he produced some of the greatest films of their respective eras. I don’t want to become too invested in explaining why Cassavetes was…

There are two ways to view House of Gucci, the biographical drama directed by Ridley Scott, who depicts the circumstances leading up to the murder of Maurizio Gucci, heir to arguably the most prestigious fashion brand in history. The first is to look at it as a darkly comical voyage into the past, one where…

When Jean Renoir set out to make The Rules of the Game, his fascinating account of the two radically different sides of a high-society rendezvous, one has to wonder whether he knew he was inadvertently setting the standard for an entire sub-genre of media that has remained omnipotent to the present day. One of the…

At this point in his career, Steven Soderbergh has managed to work in nearly every conceivable genre available to him, jumping from domestic dramas to darkly comical satires to harrowing psychological horrors, and managing to accomplish great work under each of them. However, some of his best films fall under the crime genre, and whether…

If there was ever a lesson to be learned from crime films made during the Golden Age of Hollywood, it was that crime doesn’t pay. It was incredibly rare to find a film focused on a criminal that ends with them getting away with the crime, or at least not facing some consequences as a…

Gangster films are a polarizing form of artistic expression – for some, they’re predictable forms of entertainment that don’t offer much outside of the bare minimum, while for others, they’re the epitome of enjoyment, fascinating glimpses into the machinations of the criminal mind. In the years before film noir was at its peak, there was…

“We didn’t solve anything – we just picked up the pieces” Perception is an important part of understanding a film, which has never been clearer than in those that blur the boundaries not only between genres, but between entire conceptual frameworks. Basil Dearden’s Sapphire is one that can be seen in two ways – the…