Getting wide release this weekend is Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, also known as the movie that seems like it should be directed by Guy Ritchie but isn't. It is, however, based on an infamous 1971 vault heist which has gained recent noteriety not so much for the unsolved crime — although it was one of the biggest bank jobs in British history at the time — but the circumstances of its aftermath: what seemed to be an incredibly newsworthy story was hardly written about in the days following thanks to a "D notice" that served to gag the press. Speculation as to why this would be the case has raged for thirty-five years, and now, Donaldson's film (informed by a newly popular conspiracy theory involving a royal sex scandal) attempts to answer the question definitively, if fictionally. Nothing makes for an exciting movie like crime, and nothing makes a crime movie have that little extra edge than the slightest elements of truth. True crime movies have been a fixture of the silver screen almost since their inception; there's so many to choose from that we don't even begin to pretend this list is definitive. It's just a few of our favorites, each for a different reason. Line them all up on a cold night, watch them in a row, and thank your lucky stars this never happened to you...
THE PHENIX CITY STORY (1955)
A little-seen and underrated noir thriller from the genre's waning days, Phil Karlson's The Phenix City Story eschews the highly stylized approach of many of its contemporaries and goes for an understated, gritty style that allows it to function almost like a documentary. The story is built around the then-infamous case of Phenix City, Alabama, which at the time was so thoroughly controlled by mobsters (who became fat from prostitution and gambling fed by nearby military bases) that they operated with near-complete impunity. When Alabama's attorney general was assassinated there, it became the first city since the Civil War to have martial law declared without the occurence of a natural disaster. Raw, exciting, and remarkably violent for its time, The Phenix City Story is a forgotten classic of its time.
BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967)
Sometimes, what makes a true crime masterpiece so powerful isn't its proximity to the truth, but its distance from it. Arthur Penn's brilliant crime drama, which made a handful of careers and set the tone for the highly personal studio filmmaking of the 1970s, was based on the real story of outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, but only insofar as it gave him pegs on which to hang his story. In real life, Bonnie and Clyde were considerably less attractive than Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, and even more morally unappealing; they were, in fact, vicious and contemptible heels, little more than brutal murderers, whose legend grew out of a nation obsessed with pulp fiction and crime as escapism. It's a testament to the magic of storytelling that they came to the big screen so completely altered.
THE KRAYS (1990)
For nearly a decade during London's Swinging Sixties, the undisputed overlords of the organized crime underworld were the brothers Ronald and Reginald Kray. Before their own penchant for bloody mayhem brought them down, they were the most feared individuals in the criminial demimonde, ruling their empire through torture and intimidation. Peter Medak's colorful, engaging biopic about the brothers is bouyed by its enjoyable evocation of London in the '60s as well as a remarkable performance as the twins by real-life brothers Gary and Martin Kemp — like the Krays, fraternal twins, but unlike them, best known to the world as the leaders of the 1980s New Romantic pop band Spandau Ballet! It's the first major role for both Kemps, and they tackle it with such gusto and skill it's surprising they never became major stars, though both stuck with the acting game.
DAHMER (2002)
Serial killers are a staple food of horror and thriller directors, and in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a spate of low-budget psychological chillers all based on the real-life exploits of actual mass murderers. Most of them were little more than slightly pretentious splatter flicks, but Dahmer — written and directed by David Jacobson — stood out as the class of the bunch. Resting on a smart script, a genuinely stark and chilling mood, and a fantastic lead performance by Jeremy Renner as the infamous Milwaukee cannibal, Dahmer is a compulsively watchable and truly terrifying movie. Its power comes not from gore or mayhem, but from the simplicity of its vision and the way in which it involves us emotionally with Dahmer while all the time creeping us ever closer to a full revelation of the depths of his madness.
CRAZY LOVE (2007)
One of the most bizarre true-crime documentaries ever made, this astonishing film from last year relies for its watchability on the fact that it's a story so unbelievable, it could only be true. It traces the improbable relationship of influential New York attorney Burt Pugach, who carried on an affair with a lovely young woman named Linda Riss. In 1959, Riss broke off the affair with the married Pugach, after which, enraged and terrified that she would start seeing someone else, he hired thugs to throw lye in her face, blinding and permanently scarring her. This hideous act would be the end of many true-crime movies, but here, it's only the beginning: sentenced to fourteen years in prison, Pugach went on to write Riss constantly while he served his time — and eventually, when he was released, the two were married!