A powerful chamber piece with a shocking climax. Claustrophobic tension mounts as they plot revenge, watched anxiously by their wives. Two cult Christophers – Walken and Penn – play brothers of a recently murdered mafioso in Abel Ferrara’s intense study of a 1930s New York mob family in mourning around the coffin. With ironic results.Ĭhristopher Walken and Chris Penn in The Funeral. A cop in deep cover with a major crime syndicate begs for reassignment, but his police chief prefers to keep him in play as a pawn.

Park Hoon-jung followed his script credit for I Saw the Devil by writing and directing this terrific South Korean variation on Infernal Affairs. Scarface (1983)īrian De Palma pumps up the rise and fall of a lowlife Cuban immigrant into an operatic Bildungsroman brimming with Hawaiian shirts, chainsaw massacres, enough cocaine to rot the septa of the entire population of Miami, and Al Pacino burbling in a garbled accent. One of the pre-Hays Code Warner Bros pics that set the tone for gangsters to come.

Whether mashing a grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face or making his nightmarish final entrance, James Cagney scorches the screen in his astonishingly modern breakthrough performance as Tom Powers, working his way up through Chicago’s bootlegging fraternity. James Cagney and Edward Woods in The Public Enemy. Kim Jee-woon followed A Tale of Two Sisters with this stylised neo-noir starring Lee Byung-hun, exhibiting Alain Delon levels of inscrutable male beauty as a high-ranking enforcer for the Korean mob who is asked to spy on his boss’s mistress, precipitating a series of decisions that ends in a bloodbath.

If the opening eight-minute cocktail of cocaine, noodles and carnage makes most Hollywood action movies look arthritic, the climax will make your head explode. Takashi Miike turns what might have been a routine yakuza yarn into a dazzling (and sometimes revolting) burst of film-making adrenaline, the first of a trilogy. Robert De Niro wears natty threads Joe Pesci crushes someone’s head in a vice Sharon Stone and James Woods steal the show. Martin Scorsese seems almost to be parodying himself in this portrait of a Las Vegas bookie running a mob casino, but it’s a wild ride with non-stop needle drops.

American mafia pictures