A disappointing movie isn’t necessarily a bad movie, but the two usually have the same commute. This year has had some huge hits, great surprises, maybe even a few future classics, and its share of duds. To be fair, not every bad movie is a disappointment. Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man got terrible reviews, and Zach Snyder’s The Last Photograph was savaged at Toronto, but these dismal notices weren’t surprising. Similarly, the Desert Warrior was a historic flop and likely disappointed its cast, crew, and financiers, but the lack of anticipation around it was part of the problem.

Thus, this list charts the movies that got hopes up and let them plummet. They were assessed on an axis of quality and buzz. As we enter Oscar season and a new slew of disappointing Oscar bait is ushered forth, here’s the chance to look back on the films that had the juice and spilled it.

10. Supergirl

There’s no way around it. Despite all the goodwill James Gunn cultivated for the DCU, Supergirl couldn’t carry the momentum. It’s the summer’s definitive loser, a box-office flop that didn’t land with critics. To boot, it was criticized for its special effects, a death knell for a tentpole superhero movie where a principal character is entirely CGI. Part of Supergirl’s shame certainly rests with the expectations audiences had coming into cinemas.

Last year’s Superman was a hit, and Milly Alcock’s cameo as Supergirl teed up this film nicely. The premise of Supergirl as the jaded, traumatized flipside to David Corenswet’s earnest Superman was also intriguing. Supergirl was supposed to show what happens when a Kryptonian is raised in a cruel environment rather than on a farm with a loving family. Alas, none of that flew.

Supergirl’s problem became evident from the trailer’s bland action, heavy CGI, and rote use of pop song covers. It looked and felt like any other bland superhero movie. One might be tempted to blame the manosphere trolls who hated on Alcock and the general concept of women. Alcock actually received the film’s best notices, and by-and-large reviews found a movie that wasn’t so much bad as it was underwhelming. In the end, the film just didn’t match the character’s or Alcock’s potential.

9. Disclosure Day

There was a time when a Steven Spielberg summer release was a huge deal. Now is not that time. Disclosure Day had a lot of anticipation around it. Spielberg was again working with a script from David Koepp, who’d penned summer hits Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds. The marketing was cryptic and intriguing but promised another Spielberg alien story a la classics ET and Close Encounters from the Third Kind. After all, this was the director who’d transformed summer into blockbuster season all the way back with Jaws. Heck, even Koepp’s recent run of scripts for another Steven (Soderbergh) added to the excitement.

It turns out that Disclosure Day was also from the team that also brought us The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Which is to say Disclosure Day wasn’t the next Jaws. Not outright bad, or even bad, but somehow slight, off beat, and cloying. Disclosure Day might’ve been a fun diversion for a 1990s summer, but here the urgency and import Spielberg and Koepp injected felt sluggish, predictable, and toothless. A convent-set discussion on spirituality and truth was shallow and out of touch, as if the filmmakers wanted us all to have a conversation that became irrelevant at least a decade ago. In an era when conspiracy theories riddle the mainstream, Disclosure Day’s attempt at throwback entertainment feels naïve and doddy, not nostalgic or interesting.

8. Evil Dead Burn

Another installment might be on the way in 2028, but Evil Dead Burn might be where the franchise finally lost its remaining luster. This might be a surprise to those who joined at the reboot, but the true charm of the Evil Dead franchise was never just its gore, horror, or its humor. Rather, it was how it combined all three, but particularly how the violence and terrors meshed with a particular brand of winking, over-the-top humor.

The modern installments were smart enough to get directors who could inject humor into the ruthless scares. Both Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead reboots had charm, but Evil Dead Burn is far too generic for the franchise. It essentially swaps out all humor for vague hints of…Frenchness. It’s a competent horror film that’s painfully by-the-numbers for this particular franchise, one that ties in with lore but doesn’t seem to understand any of the charm or tone that set Evil Dead apart in the first place. A post-credit scene ties this film to Cronin’s 2023 Evil Dead Rise and flattens the franchise into just another piece of IP linked by lore, easter eggs, and creative laziness. It’s no surprise the next film is reportedly a prequel.

7. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

Star Wars movies are essentially in the business of disappointing fans and propping up other aspects of the Disney corporation. The last sequel trilogy is likely the single biggest mismanagement of IP in history, and the only recent undisputed success for the property was Andor, a series with a decidedly different tone and approach from the rest of the series. Even Disney+’s flagship success series, The Mandalorian, had grown stale in subsequent seasons. Disney clearly had a lot of hope that The Mandalorian and Grogu could turn that around and put some distance between Star Wars and the missed opportunity that has come to define the Skywalker saga. No dice. Even its $300+ million box office haul was a disappointment.

Critics and audiences had a lot to enjoy in this movie. The charm of the lead duo and the practical effects that brought to life different species and locales were particularly lauded. Still, the overarching sense was that the film just didn’t do enough. Its plot was entirely recycled. Its flow was episodic, and it was hard to say what differentiated this adventure from the piecemeal ones enjoyed on the corporation’s streamer. The Mandalorian and Grogu was supposed to set a new course for the Star Wars universe. Instead, it became a symbol of the lifeless state that the parent company’s overharvesting has left the franchise in and a reminder that a once devoted, borderline religious fanbase was teetering between done and outright hostile.

6. The Last House

No one will probably blame Wagner Moura and Gretchen Lee for getting that Netflix money, but The Last House is surprisingly disappointing even for that streamer. Covid lockdown vibes are heavy with this one, but it’s surprisingly light on dread or tension despite committing itself to scares for part of its runtime. Therein is part of The Last House’s problem: it tries to be so many things and does none of them well.

The Last House is a small-cast, largely single-location movie that’s somehow effects-heavy. It wants both tense locked-in dread a la Await Further Instructions or Vivarium and 1980s Amblin family adventure as if it almost beat The End of Oak Street to the punch. Very little of what it seeds pays off. The reveals are silly, bland, and poorly explained, leaving the film to rest on the shoulders of two leads who alternate between charismatic and despairing. Given the streamer’s recent stock downgrading, it’s hard not to see The Last House as indicative of Netflix’s problems in a modern mediascape that’s moving beyond its slop. It’s a movie made for everyone and no one that works better as background noise for doomscrolling.

The 70s is arguably the defining decade for the cop thriller. Hollywood’s relationship with the police had become considerably more complicated, and film makers responded with films that were tougher, gritter, and less interested in presenting law enforcements as an uncomplicated force for good, unlike the previous decade’s output within the genre.

This was a decade in which the cop film could be almost anything; there were hard-edged procedurals, bleak psychological dramas, political thrillers and explosive action pictures, all of them adding different strings to the ever expanding bow of the genre and sub-genres.

In this list we take a look at the 20 greatest cop films of the 1970s, while admitting that of course, it’s all subjective.

1. The Cop (1970)

Yves Boissert’s cop thriller is one of the hardest and nastiest of the decade, with a sensational performance at its centre from Michel Bouquet. It holds all the ingredients that would go on to be staples of 70s cop thrillers with its grimy and dark atmosphere, filled to the brim with dirty cops and harsh violence.

Bouquet’s Inspector Favenin returns to duty after being suspended for indiscipline and is soon investigating a murder. The killing is connected to a local crime boss, whose drug operation is protected by corrupt police officers and politicians. The case eventually becomes extremely personal for Favenin, and he’s forced to fight the criminals by stretching the law to its absolute limits.

Bouquet is the beating heart of the film in what is an astonishing display; this is a man whose morals have gone out the window as the case continues, dragging up the much-asked question: do the ends justify the means?

2. Death Occurred Last Night (1970)

Like The Cop, Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred Last Night is a grimy and unpleasant little crime film, but no less effective. Raf Vallone’s Amanzio Berzaghi arrives in Milan desperately looking for his missing 25-year-old daughter Donatella, who has learning difficulties. Detective Duca Lamberti (Frank Wolff) takes on the investigation, which leads him into the city’s brothels and criminal underworld, and when Donatella’s burned body is discovered, the case becomes a murder investigation.

As you might expect, as Lamberti tries to work out who was responsible, Berzaghi begins pursuing the killer himself. Both Vallone and Wolff are excellent, with Vallone adding much needed emotional punch to a film that is particularly bleak. Death Occurred at Night is part police procedural, part crime thriller, and even part giallo with Gianni Ferrio’s unusual score, which leaps between psychedelic rock, baroque pop, and jazz.

It’s a nasty yet atmospheric cop thriller with a couple of terrific performances at its centre, and it’s only recently become widely available to watch- and it’s well worth shelling out for.

3. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville’s monumental Le Cercle Rouge stars Alain Delon as Corey, a man released from prison with a jewellery robbery already taking shape in his mind, while escaped prisoner Vogel (Gian Maria Volonté) crosses his path after breaking free from Commissioner Mattei. The two eventually recruit Jansen (Yves Montand), an alcoholic former policeman and expert marksman, and plan an audacious robbery of a Paris jewellery shop as Andre Bourvil’s Mattei closes in.

Le Cercle Rouge takes its cues from Jules Dassin’s 1955 masterpiece Rififi, even boasting a near dialogue-free heist sequence, which is an astonishing piece of cinema. There’s no need to spend time exploring these characters’ back stories; everything you need to know about them is right in front of you on the screen. They’re forced to trust each other, adding extra tension to an already engrossing film, while the cast- especially Delon- pull you into the stress and meticulous planning of the heist.

This is Melville stripping the crime film down to its basic roots: men and the rules they live by. There’s clearly influences taken from Le Cercle Rouge that we can see in much that came after, with Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) being a good example. It’s utterly brilliant.

4. Dirty Harry (1971)

Don Siegel has directed an impressive number of great films, but there’s arguably none more iconic than Dirty Harry. Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is one of the great cop characters in cinematic history, and he went on to revive him in four separate sequels, many of which are far better than they’re given credit for.

Here, Callahan is assigned to track down Scorpio (Andy Robinson), a sadistic killer who shoots a woman from a rooftop in San Francisco, then sends the city a ransom demand threatening further killings. Callahan’s reputation for ignoring procedure infuriates his rookie partner (and everyone else in his department), but unquestionably gets results. Eastwood puts in one of his finest ever performances, creating a character that is so frequently quoted that you’ll have certainly heard one liners from this film even if you’ve never seen it.

But Siegel’s film is far more than Eastwood pointing a gun at someone and asking them if they feel lucky; it’s a tightly constructed cop thriller built around a terrifying plot, and it remains one of the best cop films ever released.

5. Shaft (1971)

Just like Harry Callahan, Richard Rountree’s John Shaft is one of the defining characters in 70s cinema. Shaft is a private detective who is hired by Harlem crime boss Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn) to find his kidnapped daughter Marisol. His investigation takes him through the competing worlds of Harlem’s organised crime, the Black Panthers, and the New York Police Department, with Lieutenant Androzzi (Charles Cioffi) keeping a close eye on him.

This is one of the most important Blaxploitation films of the era, with Roundtree utterly mesmerising in the main role. The film’s racial politics are woven into the story and become part of the film, while Isaac Hayes’s theme song becomes part of the character’s identity.

Shaft remains a terrific thriller because the character becomes the film as much as the mystery itself. Roundtree is brilliant, to the point where he was brought back for two underseen and underrated sequels (and a more recent Netflix film which doesn’t deserve this mention), and Shaft will always be one of the most important films of the 70s.

6. The French Connection (1971)

If The French Connection isn’t your favourite William Friedkin film, it’s going to be in your top five at the very least. Gene Hackman has many iconic roles in cinema, but perhaps none are as defining as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, who, along with fellow narcotics detective Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), stumbles across a possible heroin connection between a Brooklyn businessman, Sal (Tony Lo Bianco) and French drug trafficker Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). This leads to a major investigation as they attempt to establish how Charnier is getting a huge shipment of heroin into New York.

Friedkin depicts the sheer unpleasantness of its police work, as well as its characters. Popeye is far from a nice individual; indeed, at times he’s actively awful. But he knows how to get the job done, whether that be by legal means or not. Friedkin knows how to stage a car chase, and the one featured here might well be the best he- or anyone else- has put to screen, with Doyle pursuing a train above him while driving underneath it at terrifying speed.

Both Hackman and Scheider are tremendous and bounce off each other incredibly effectively, giving the film an anchor to which you are glued. This is one of the best cop thrillers ever made, and seemingly only gets better with age. Its 1975 sequel is also a far better and darker film than it’s given credit for, and continues the story in a particularly horrifying way. But Friedkin’s original is where it all began, brilliantly adapted from Robin Moore’s novel and is rightfully considered one of the greats.

7. The New Centurions (1972)

Richard Fleischer’s film is another that’s only received a wider home release recently, which is a real shame because it’s something of a forgotten gem. Stacy Keach plays Roy Fehler, who joins the LAPD while studying law, expecting the job to be a temporary education in the system before returning to his studies. But after being partnered with veteran patrolman Andy (George C. Scott), he soon gets a view of what police work actually involves.

The New Centurions is a really interesting case in that it explores the mundane grind of patrol work and how it can engulf the individuals at the centre of the story in this case. Roy slowly finds his life becoming psychologically absorbed by the job, and all the time he’s looking at Andy, whose distinction between work and his identity has long disappeared.

This is a cop thriller that suggests that police don’t learn how to do the job, but rather that the job teaches them how to see the world through the small prism of their location. Both Scott and Keach give the film a really authentic feel, and The New Centurions is one of the most interesting cop thrillers of the decade.

8. Serpico (1973)

Perhaps the peak of police corruption in terms of cinema, Sidney Lumet’s film is a masterpiece in realism, based on the true story of NYPD Frank Serpico, who became famous for exposing widespread corruption within the department in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Al Pacino takes on the role of Serpico in what is a quite brilliant performance: an eccentric, stubborn and increasingly obsessive presence, someone who simply can’t look the other way.

After joining the department, Serpico witnesses the constant bribes and corruption that go on within the department, and reports everything he sees. But he’s cast to one side, becoming increasingly isolated from his colleagues and superiors as he attempts to expose the corruption from within. He’s fighting a culture rather than a specific group or individual, and that’s what makes the story so engrossing.

This is a superb police corruption drama because it offers the idea that institutional corruption doesn’t mean that everyone involved is a horrible person, but rather the fact that most people simply want to protect themselves. Pacino’s astonishing, Lumet’s direction is masterful, and Serpico is one of the all time greats.

9. The Offence (1973)

Sean Connery is a long way from Bond in Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, a film that’s a deeply disturbing and bleak cop thriller with Connery playing Detective Sergeant Johnson, a man who has become damaged by what he’s witnessed over twenty years in the force. When the police investigate the rape of a young girl, suspicion falls on a man named Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen), and Johnson takes part in his interrogation. Baxter’s behaviour sets something off in Johnson, and this leads to a brutal assault that leaves Baxter dying.

Johnson is subsequently questioned by the Superintendent, with the film reconstructing the interrogation through a series of increasingly disturbing flashbacks. The Offence is far from an easy watch, and it impressively offers up some eerie sequences that give it an incredibly foreboding atmosphere that grabs you and won’t let you go. At times it almost feels like a horror film, and in some ways it is with its horrific subject matter.

Connery is very impressive in a role that’s far from easy to nail down. It’s arguably one of his best ever on-screen performances, at the centre of a very bleak yet powerful film, with Lumet successfully turning a police thriller into something resembling more of a psychological horror film.

10. The Laughing Policeman (1973)

Two San Francisco police officers are murdered while riding a city bus, along with several other passengers in what initially appears to be a random massacre. Detective Sergeant Jake Martin (Walther Matthau) and his partner Leo (Bruce Dern) are assigned to the case, and Martin soon discovers that one of the dead officers had been investigating an unsolved double murder, leading him to suspect that the bus killings may have been a deliberate attempt to silence someone.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition early on in The Laughing Policeman; after the frantic and horrible opening, the film then retreats into the very real business of police procedural, which works with great effectiveness. Matthau in particular is on fine form, convincing you of his intrigue and frustration at the whole thing, and the central story is approached seriously, never entertaining the idea of exploitation, which it could have easily fallen into.

This is a highly impressive yet downbeat police procedural built around Matthau’s excellent central performance, and the slow quality of real detective work. Its authenticity is to be admired, and although it’s far from flashy, it’s extremely effective.

Zach Cregger returns to our screens just a year after the impressive Weapons (2025), a film that bettered, in almost every way, the hugely frustrating Barbarian (2022), a view that only I seem to take. Barbarian’s set-up was intriguing for about half an hour or so before it succumbed to some rather dull genre tropes and lapsed completely into a final stretch of increasingly overblown silliness. Weapons was a far more interesting beast; a film that kept you hooked with its central premise and sustained an atmosphere of menace right up until its rather foolish ending.

For his latest, Cregger offers up a second reboot of Resident Evil, an adaptation of the video game that has already spawned a six film franchise and the 2021 failed attempt at kick-starting the story once more, Johannes Roberts’s Welcome to Raccoon City. To suggest we don’t need another Resident Evil film seems irrelevant. But there was plenty of reason to be optimistic for Cregger’s arrival behind the camera. He’s a self-professed fan of the games and has expressed his desire to replicate the experience of the game without directly adapting any of its stories, a move that’s certainly sensible in its effort to draw in film fans in general, not just die-hard fans of the games or film franchise.

Cregger’s film is a ninety-minute sojourn into the depths of hell, set mostly on the outskirts of Racoon City. Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a hapless courier who postpones the end of his night shift and an impending difficult conversation with his girlfriend to take one last night-time run, delivering urgent medical supplies to Raccoon City General Hospital and getting paid double in the process. Naturally, his destination takes him through snow-covered mountains, and once on his way, swearing constantly in irritation at his circumstances like some he hits a woman with his vehicle who appears to be in some bizarre form of rigour mortis yet still alive.

We all know what’s going on, and from this moment on, Resident Evil is a survival horror thriller that doesn’t stop for breath as Bryan frantically tries to make his way to the hospital. Unsurprisingly, the package he’s carrying contains the vital ingredient that will complete the antidote to this horrific virus that we soon see mutating all over the place. The woman who Bryan hits becomes several people joined together as the film goes on, and there’s plenty here for fans of the games to sink their teeth into, quite literally in some cases.

There’s an excellent pulsing score that rampages through Resident Evil, composed by Hays and Ryan Holladay, which is hugely effective and instantly puts you in the mood at the film’s opening, and is consistently effective throughout Resident Evil. Abrams is conflictingly lovable yet progressively vexing, a character who takes the idea of blatant on-screen stupidity and multiplies it by ten. Poor decisions taken by him are deliberate, and they’re initially amusing, but they get tired very quickly and even by a classic horror film’s genre tropes, Resident Evil stretches the point.

The critical response to the film has been mostly positive, and it’s already been something of a box office hit. Which is great for the franchise, and great for Cregger. And it’s hard to argue that this might well be the Resident Evil film that fans have been waiting for. But for everyone else, it’s hard to see what surprises are waiting for you here, beyond the constant jump scares and admittedly formidable gore; there are one or two sequences that are genuinely nasty, and one in a maternity ward is particularly grim.

Cregger cites the Evil Dead franchise as a major touchpoint, and you can see the influence throughout Resident Evil, in particular Evil Dead 2 (1987). Successfully creating the formula to blend horror and comedy in a film is notoriously difficult, and Sam Raimi is arguably the master. Cregger does his best, and for twenty minutes or so, such a combination seems to have found some sort of foothold. But it swiftly becomes a chore to listen to constant quips amid the madness unfolding around you. Of course, we’re not expected to believe anything that’s happening, when Bryan starts complaining about the state of his socks, it’s hard not to roll your eyes.

Some of the monsters on display are effectively gruesome, and Cregger admirably succeeds in creating one of the most video game-inspired cinematic experiences we’ve ever seen in terms of visual aesthetics. If you think of something like Andrzej Bartkowiak’s mostly dreadful Doom (2005), the final stretch of the film was quite literally a CGI video game that audiences watched, slack-jawed, as Karl Urban’s John Grimm shot at monsters from a video game first-person perspective. There are a couple of very brief moments where we get the exact same camera shot from Bryan’s point of view here, and Resident Evil could easily have done without them.

When comparing Cregger’s Resident Evil to previous video game adaptations specifically, things look a whole lot more favourable. It’s scant pickings to find such films that are worth your attention; indeed, the best of the lot remains Duncan Jones’s Warcraft (2016), a genuinely solid and entertaining film that flopped so badly on release that a planned sequel was dead before it got going. And yet we’re likely to see a third film in the Super Mario franchise in the next few years due to the huge success of the desperately dull Super Mario Galaxy Movie earlier this year. But then again, maybe such comparisons are unfair; Resident Evil, perhaps, should only be pitted against previous instalments of its own franchise, and in that respect, it’s impossible to argue that it’s not one of the best.

While Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2002 original film maintains its defenders, and one could put up a good defence that it’s a solid, stripped-back sci-fi B-movie, something that Anderson was already a dab hand at producing, having helmed 1997’s rather terrific Event Horizon. Since the 2002 Resident Evil, the films have ranged from average to dreadful. The odd one out being 2012’s Retribution, which, whilst being far from a great film, demonstrated an interesting exploration of visual style and personal identity, if you looked hard enough beneath the surface.

Cregger’s film certainly upsets the apple cart of distinct averageness that has permeated this franchise since its inception, and that’s likely more than enough to jolt it back into life. Indeed, this will surely do very well amongst fans, and inevitably lead to a sequel. Resident Evil is very well made, well acted, and it’s easy to see why people might have a blast with it. But whether that’s enough is very much down to personal opinion. It’s a frustrating experience.

For about twenty minutes, Resident Evil hints at the promise of its teaser trailer: pure terror pockmarked with moments of genuine comedy. It’s undeniable that this may well work for most. But once you realise that the horror isn’t scary and the comedy stops becoming funny, the whole thing, regrettably, becomes tiresome. Ultimately, for all its positives, Cregger’s Resident Evil is a frustrating experience.

Author Bio: Christian Keane is a film critic who explores overlooked gems, cult classics, and cinema’s hidden corners. He believes it’s great to disagree — everyone’s perspective matters — and shares his thoughts on his website and across his socials at Keane on Film, which you can find here https://linktr.ee/christiankeane7. You can also find him on Tiktok @keane.on.film and Instagram @keaneonfilm.

Does Hollywood love anything more than a world-famous franchise? It’s the gift that keeps on giving: an iconic pop-culture hit leads to a flood of continuous instalments, each one providing a demanding audience with a much-needed fix for their next adventure. From big-tier sci-fi spectacles to iconic horror boogeymen and unstoppable action heroes – if there’s a chance to squeeze several sequels out of an IP, you can bet it will happen.

Yet, for massive, long-running franchises, not every entry will be highly regarded. Quality can dip, the concept can grow oversaturated, or audiences may simply wish to spend their cash elsewhere after Jason Voorhees shows up at Camp Crystal Lake yet again. Certainly, the demand for sequels can result in a product being pumped out with as much care and enthusiasm as a factory-made sheet of ham. But what about those occasions where there was a quality movie that simply got overshadowed by the more iconic or louder entries in its franchise? It’s a common occurrence, and sometimes time itself has simply moved on from worthwhile instalments in a milestone series.

This list aims to shine a light on those oddities that have been glossed over the years, worthy follow-ups that have fallen in the forgotten or underrated categories in some of the most famous movie franchises that still run to this day…

1. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972)

One of the first explosive pop-culture franchises to take the world by storm, “Planet of the Apes” (1968) was a bona fide sci-fi classic, set in a distant future where apes have evolved and subjugated humans. It packed an iconic role from Charlton Heston, a brainy allegory on human existence and one heck of a twist ending. It was a phenomenon that begged for a sequel, spawning a franchise that continues today and arguably reached its pinnacle with director Matt Reeves’ two emotionally gripping prequel entries, “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” (2014) and “War for the Planet of the Apes” (2017). However, the several other instalments between those high points have been hit and miss, with some squandering the premise with mediocre results.

“Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” (1972), coming near the end of the original cycle, is a standout story, filled with shocking brutality for a studio production, a compelling central arc and some surprisingly brave examinations of hot-button issues. Yet, it tends to get saddled in with the majority of the franchise’s mid-tier entries.

The story is set in the (then) future of 1991. A pandemic has led humans to house apes as pets, grooming them into servants when they come of age. Roddy McDowall plays Caesar, an ape with superior intelligence, raised by Ricardo Montalban’s kind circus owner, yet their relationship is thrown into turmoil as oppressive forces lean on the ape, to the point where he cannot withstand it anymore.

Journeyman director J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) made two ‘Apes’ movies, and this is by far his strongest, not to mention the most individual of the entire series. Production made ingenious use of the (then) newly developed Century City in Los Angeles. Featuring off-kilter concrete-and-glass architecture, it perfectly captured a near-future world that felt gritty and believable, with the polished sci-fi sheen of a modern metropolis. Thompson’s visual style opted for a direct, almost documentary-like aesthetic, giving the sight of talking apes and leather-suited guards an air of reality and brutality. The result is a picture fuelled by seething anger, no doubt informed by the civil unrest and racial tensions clearly prevalent during the era. It’s a genre film that impressively broached a subject that few mainstream dramas had the courage to tackle back then.

2. Rambo III (1988)

For one of the biggest action franchises around, it is remarkable how different each Rambo film feels from the others, considering how most action-classic sequels tend to just repeat the formula for another go. Not with Sylvester Stallone’s iconic IP: “First Blood” (1982) examined the titular veteran’s PTSD via a gritty and gripping survival thriller; the sequel, “Rambo: First Blood Part II” (1985), did a 180 and sent him back into Vietnam as a one-man army in archetypal ’80s bombast; the legacy fourth entry, “Rambo” (2008), subverted the men-on-a-mission formula via horrifying action and surprisingly moving pathos; while the final entry, “Last Blood” (2019), played like ‘Taken meets Sicario’ in a beyond-grim and unnecessary footnote for the beloved character. Smack bang in the middle is “Rambo III” (1988), which is filled with high adventure and rip-roaring set pieces – however, likely due to its awkward politics, it often feels like this one never happened.

The story has Stallone’s Rambo living a simple existence in Thailand, working at a Buddhist monastery as a handyman. Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautman, his former commander, ends up taking on a mission in Afghanistan, where he is captured by Soviet forces. Our favourite war veteran is pulled into the fray once more, heading into the country to rescue his friend and, naturally, blow lots of things up.

Epic ’80s action director Russell Mulcahy (Highlander) was at the helm before leaving over creative differences. Second-unit director Peter MacDonald took over, although rumours point to Stallone being heavily involved in calling the shots, and his go-for-broke style of the era peers through: every shot is epic, every explosion sizzles, every muscle is bulging. Regardless of the now-awkward historical context of Rambo fighting alongside the Afghan Mujahideen, this movie is likely the closest the series got to outright joyous, mindless fun, with members of the crew reportedly dubbing the film ‘Rambo of Arabia’ during production.

It’s great to get Crenna in on the action for a change as well, instead of having him relegated to a control panel. His and Stallone’s mentor-and-student dynamic comes into full force and gets a chance to jump off the screen. Stallone has never been more one-note as the character, but also never more physically impressive, from his legendary intro in an underground stick-fighting match to his cave-set hunting sequence and the epic horseback finale. They don’t make them like they used to, and this third entry needs to be appreciated as such.

3. Predators (2010)

Arriving with epic bluster, John McTiernan’s “Predator” (1987) placed action superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger and a group of alpha males in the sweaty jungle and flipped the ‘men on a mission’ action trope on its head, as these soldiers met their match battling a fierce, effective and ridiculously cool alien hunter (designed in career-best work from SFX wiz Stan Winston). It was a macho classic, but since then, it’s been a bumpy ride for the franchise. The urban-set “Predator 2” (1990) was initially a disappointment, although it has since been rightfully reevaluated, followed by a muddy few entries that struggled with purpose until the series’ recent renaissance, spearheaded by filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg; the triple releases of “Prey” (2022), “Predator: Killer of Killers” (2025) and “Predator: Badlands” (2025) have reignited the series as one of the top-tier sci-fi franchises of the day.

Amongst its dire period was an attempt at reviving the IP by hiring Robert Rodriguez (Desperado) to produce a new entry, based on an earlier treatment he had written. The result, was a solid instalment that pretty much came and went without much notice.

Its plot kick-starts quite enticingly, like an old-school genre TV episode: random tough guys are airdropped into an off-kilter wilderness, with little clue as to how or why they are there, or even whether they are still on Earth. Soon, it’s revealed that they’re in the middle of an alien hunting game… and they are the sport.

From the opening, the premise grips you, with a colourful and varied cast of tense character actors. Adrien Brody is cast against type as the gravel-voiced mercenary but does surprisingly well, with strong support from Danny Trejo, Mahershala Ali and Walton Goggins (not to mention an enjoyably wild cameo from Laurence Fishburne).

The slight budget hampers the potential of the premise, though; not much is made of the alien planet, and a new species of Predator is basically just a larger, darker class and not much else. Yet, the film’s mandate is to give you a lean and fun experience where stressed macho warriors face off against intimidating beasts, and it launches a series of effective set-pieces that impress, with a likely franchise-best being the exhilarating Yakuza vs. Predator confrontation.

This one has clearly been passed over due to neither hitting the franchise’s heights nor reaching its bottom-tier lows. It sits firmly in the middle, making for a solid, enjoyable watch that needs a little more appreciation.

4. Licence to Kill (1989)

For a series as long-lasting as James Bond, with several recasts along the way, not every entry can be an absolute winner. But every actor who played the role at least has a landmark title linked to their run: Connery had “Goldfinger” (1964) and “From Russia with Love” (1963), Moore had “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), Brosnan had “GoldenEye” (1995), Craig had “Casino Royale” (2006) and “Skyfall” (2012); even Lazenby’s single-film tenure, “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (1969), is now a retrospective fan-favourite classic. So, what about Timothy Dalton’s run?

The Welsh-born actor had an all-too-brief tenure, turning in only two films before the Bond machine became caught up in an ugly legal battle that put the property on an indefinite hiatus. Neither Dalton entry is typically held up alongside the celebrated classics, although his first turn, “The Living Daylights” (1987), was packed with globe-trotting excitement, a charismatic central performance, not to mention some ridiculously effective action (who can forget Bond’s fistfight while dangling from a cargo plane? “Uncharted” certainly didn’t). His second go, however… is a bit of a black sheep. It is about as dark, gory and nihilistic as the series ever got.

Longstanding supporting character Felix Leiter (David Hedison) is brutally maimed by Robert Davi’s ruthless drug lord, Franz Sanchez. 007 goes rogue and sets out on a revenge mission, infiltrating the cartel undercover and methodically turning its members against each other, aided by a little help from Carey Lowell’s CIA pilot and Talisa Soto’s mistreated cartel girlfriend.

Dalton commands from the jump. He was an actor who wanted to explore the ruthless assassin aspect of the character, and the plot gave him the ideal platform to do it: they’ve fed his best friend to a shark and murdered his new wife – he’s understandably upset. He’s hellbent on his goal and doesn’t flinch much, even when sending henchmen through a meat grinder. On the villainous end, you don’t get much better: Davi was a go-to heavy for the era, and he doesn’t disappoint. Quietly menacing yet unpredictably fierce, he’s a fearsome and believable foil to Bond’s MI6 polish, plus he’s accompanied by an ever-young Benicio del Toro as his sadistic henchman. On the female side, Lowell and Soto are both absolutely stunning and captivating, the former the green but eager all-American sidekick/love interest, whilst the latter smoulders as the glamorous, tainted moll.

Series veteran John Glen knew how to direct a quality Bond movie by this point, and he brings forth the familiar ingredients that work while combining them with the hard-edged aesthetic of that era’s action cinema. It’s not a concoction that works for everyone, but it’s an absolutely fascinating experiment and a much better spectacle than people give it credit for.

5. Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

When the slasher film craze took cinemas by storm in the ’80s, there were no bigger names in the realm than Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees. The former, a figure literally born from nightmares themselves, grew into a one-liner-spewing, sadistic pop-culture icon, whilst the lumbering, silent zombie figure of hockey-masked Jason quickly took over the mantle from Michael Myers as the murdering brute chasing fleeing cheerleaders. Both franchises had their ups and downs, for Freddy’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street” series, Wes Craven’s classic 1984 original and the subversive reboot “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare” (1994) and the fan-favourite third entry, “Dream Warriors” (1987) remain highpoints; for Jason’s “Friday the 13th”, it was a rare case of the 1988’s original not even being a bona fide classic, although its profits kept the series chugging forward, with the fourth entry, “The Final Chapter” (1984), eventually delivering a high-quality horror milestone, and arguably the sixth, “Jason Lives” (1986), outdoing it with a sly dark-comedy tinge. Outside of those entries, both franchises are a mixed bag.

Just like with the Universal monster movies, there was hype around pitting these two icons against each other, and once New Line Cinema managed to get both characters under its roof, it dropped a teaser at the end of “Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday” (1993) that saw Freddy’s iconic clawed hand pull Jason’s mask into the depths of Hell. For the next decade, the film, ironically, remained in development hell, with bafflingly weird scripts involving everything from cults to a courtroom drama.

When the dust settled in the early 2000s, with horror kicking into high gear in popularity again, New Line managed to get its thumb out and finally pump out a face-off movie; its plot rightfully tries its best not to overcomplicate things, with a group of Elm Street teens (led by the surprisingly decent Jason Ritter and Monica Keena) uncover that their town has been hiding the legacy of Freddy Krueger, only for a resurrected Jason to make those plans go awry, with both monsters preying on the youths before, inevitably, turning on each other.

Slickly directed by Hong Kong maestro Ronny Yu (The Bride with White Hair), he gives the film a gorgeous visual style, a nice sense of suspense and decent bloodletting, but most importantly, delivers when it comes to the titular beatdown, with a midpoint mash-up in Krueger’s dreamworld before an exciting and gory final showdown at Crystal Lake. It’s also Robert Englund’s last turn playing his iconic character, and he predictably steals the show, although Ken Kirzinger as Jason (in his first and only turn as the character) makes a strong impression with a hulking tree of a performance.

Since then, remakes and rights issues have plagued both franchises, so this one should be enjoyed as a final hurrah for both characters’ original runs. It won’t win any Oscars, but it certainly did what it said on the tin for fans of both franchises… although, you would be remiss to even know it existed nowadays.

There are many who would argue that the seventies were the decade for the crime thriller. The big ones get talked about endlessly, and rightly so; The French Connection (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Taxi Driver (1976) and I could go on, of course.

But if you dig a bit deeper, for every French Connection of Godfather, there are half a dozen films from the same decade that have managed to completely slip under the radar. Even if, at the time, they had their plaudits, over the decades, they’ve been forgotten about under the weight of the behemoths that dominate ‘best of’ lists.

All of these films deserve better; some of them potentially even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as those classics. For cinephiles, they’ve often been difficult to track down, but with the rise of boutique Blu-ray labels, many of them are finally finding an audience. In this list, we take a look at ten that you may have missed.

1. The Omega Man (1971)

Probably seen more as a sci-fi thriller, Boris Sagal’s adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend is certainly the finest. And although it’s hardly underseen, it’s definitely undervalued. A biological war has wiped out almost everyone, and Charlton Heston’s Robert Nevile believes he’s the last healthy man alive in Los Angeles, spending his days cruising the streets and his nights barricaded in his apartment while a cult of light-sensitive mutants lies siege to him.

While you might be hard pressed to claim The Omega Man is a film that disappeared, it’s certainly underrated, and Sagal manages to grasp the dystopian future whilst making the film highly relatable to the paranoia of the era. Released at a time when the country was enveloped by events in Vietnam, The Omega Man struck a nerve with audiences, and although it might well be dismissed as something of a middle-of-the-road 70’s Sci-fi feature, Sagal’s film was one that paved the way for the paranoia explosion that was about to take place on our screens.

2. The Anderson Tapes (1971)

Sean Connery’s Duke Anderson walks out of prison after ten years and almost immediately starts planning his next job, a heist of an entire luxury Upper East Side apartment building. He assembles a crew (including a young Christopher Walken in his first screen role) and sets about robbing every apartment in the building over a single weekend.

The Anderson Tapes is almost eerily well timed, it’s Sidney Lumet directing Sean Connery in a heist film about surveillance right before the Watergate break in. Connery is terrific in it; it’s an underrated performance from the man who also starred in his final Bond outing, Diamonds Are Forever, in the same year. Perhaps that’s why it came and went, people simply didn’t take him seriously in anything other than Bond films at the time (although taking him seriously in Diamonds Are Forever admittedly takes some effort).

Quincy Jones’s electronic score is oddly brilliant and adds to the sense that you’re watching something wonderful yet strange, and Lumet uses his New York locations very effectively. It’s only recently had a re-release on Blu-ray, and if you haven’t seen The Anderson Tapes, now’s the time to do so.

3. 10 Rillington Place (1971)

Richard Attenborough, Judy Geeson, John Hurt, and Pat Heywood all line up in this post-war London-set thriller, based on the true story of one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers and the appalling miscarriage of justice that followed.

Attenborough gives one of the best performances of his career, playing Christie as more of a pathetic little man rather than the monster you might expect. John Hurt is also terrific, playing the easily manipulated Evans caught in a nightmare that he can’t even begin to understand. The film used the real Rillington Place location before it was demolished, a decision by director Richard Fleischer that pays dividends in terms of authenticity.

Fleischer had already been behind the camera for Compulsion (1959) as well as The Boston Strangler in 1968, but 10 Rillington Place is arguably the finest film he ever made.

4. Cisco Pike (1972)

Kris Kristofferson, Gene Hackman, Karen Black and Harry Dean Stanton all star in Bill L. Norton’s Cisco Pike, in what is an impressive lineup. Kristofferson plays the titular Pike, a washed-up musician in Los Angeles whose recording career has collapsed and, as a result, has drifted onto the edges of the drug trade. Hackman is a corrupt LAPD narcotics sergeant who shows up with a proposition for Pike; he’s confiscated a huge quantity of marijuana and wants Cisco to sell it for him over the course of a single weekend, with the sergeant taking the bulk of the proceeds.

Police corruption might not have been a new topic in the early seventies, but Norton’s film is elevated by its own authenticity, Kristofferson was actually knocking about LA as a musician at the time, and the film benefits enormously from that. Hackman takes the blueprint of Popeye Doyle from The French Connection a year before and transports it into Cisco Pike and it works excellently.

Norton brings something of the William Friedkin feel to Cisco Pike, and while Friedkin might well be the more celebrated film-maker (To Live and Die in L.A., just as an example of an L.A crime thriller), Norton’s work remains hugely underrated.

5. Fear is the Key (1972)

One of the great underappreciated seventies thrillers, Michael Tuchner’s Fear is the Key still holds up superbly today. Barry Newman is John Talbot, a man with a very particular grievance; his wife, brother and child have been killed in what looks like an accident but wasn’t, and he knows exactly who did it and why.

Based on an Alistair MacLean novel, Fear is the Key opens with a car chase that rivals anything around it at the time, The French Connection (1971), The Seven-Ups (1973) and Vanishing Point (1971), which Barry Newman had just finished. His character of Talbot might be like Vanishing Point’s Kowalski in many ways, yet Talbot is more rounded, and many would argue Fear is the Key is the deeper (and better) film.

The plot keeps pulling the rug out from under you in ways you don’t see coming, and the whole thing finishes in a thoroughly satisfying way. It’s a pulpy, revenge thriller that’s a cut above the usual fodder of the sub-genre and remains an excellent piece of work.

The 90s provided us with some of the greatest cop films ever made, from sprawling crime epics and hard-boiled mysteries to undercover thrillers and films that took a much darker look at the people behind the badge. Hollywood had the big studio thrillers, and filmmakers such as Michael Mann, Abel Ferrara, David Fincher and the Coen brothers brought very different ideas about crime, violence, and policing to the screen.

This list celebrates 20 of the decade’s best cop films, including the obvious classics alongside some less celebrated films that deserve far more recognition than they perhaps do.

1. Internal Affairs (1990)

Many critics claimed that Richard Gere played against type as corrupt police officer Dennis Peck in Mike Figgis’s Internal Affairs, but it’s actually the type of role that Gere would turn out to be rather good at. As well as being excellent here, he went on to be very good at playing slimy characters in films like Arbitrage (2012) or the surprisingly violent Unfaithful (2002).

Internal Affairs sees Gere’s Peck under investigation by Andy Garcia’s police officer Raymond, having been suspected of corruption. As Raymond digs deeper, Peck begins to turn his considerable influence against him, and the investigation becomes increasingly personal as the pair engage in a battle of manipulation.

Internal Affairs is an excellent example of a police corruption thriller, and Figgis directs with a confidence that the rest of his filmography doesn’t really hint at. This is easily his best film, but it also happens to be one of the best thrillers of the decade.

2. Miami Blues (1990)

George Armitage’s light-hearted crime thriller plays more like a comedy caper at times, with Alec Baldwin’s sociopath Fred becoming romantically involved with the young and naive Susie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a hooker who takes Fred for at his word and believes he’s giving up his criminal ways.

Unsurprisingly, Fred continues his lifestyle of stealing from thieves and, eventually, Moseley himself, enabling Fred to take to the streets with a badge and gun. The ideas established in Miami Blues mean that the tone is deliberately uneven, but it works so well that the whole thing absolutely coasts along. You’re reminded of Natural Born Killers (1994), a film that traverses genres but maintains the strength of its convictions whilst it does so, just like this does.

Baldwin and Leigh are sublime, bouncing off each other so effectively you feel like you’ve become completely entangled in their problems, and it’s a thrill to be a part of. You could hardly accuse the film of being deadly serious, but neither is it supposed to be; this is violent, funny, and wildly unpredictable, built around its two central performances. It’s impossible not to be entertained.

3. Q&A (1990)

Sidney Lumet is well-versed in crafting corrupt cop thrillers; he’s the man behind Serpico (1973) and Prince Of The City (1981). While this might not hit the heights of the former, Q&A is an intricately designed police procedural, with pretty damning conclusions to take from it.

When dirty cop Mike shoots a man and plants a gun on him, rookie assistant DA Al gets the case. Something in Mike’s ‘Q&A’ doesn’t sit right, and this launches a journey through a sewer of racism, corruption and violence. Nick Nolte is impressively despicable as Mike, and the crux of the film really has a rotten heart. It’s not an easy watch listening to some of the cops talking trash, but it is chillingly relevant today, despite being over thirty years old.

It’s a serious examination of police corruption and the complicated relationship between law enforcement and the justice system, and in the hands of Lumet, you’re hardly going to get something that’s less than excellent.

4. Blue Steel (1990)

It’s not the only time Kathryn Bigelow’s name will crop up on this list, and with good reason. Blue Steel remains something of an underseen cop thriller, with Jamie Lee Curtis taking the lead role as rookie NYPD officer Megan Turner, who’s confronted by an armed robber during her first patrol and shoots him dead. Unbeknownst to her, the robber’s gun has been taken from the scene by Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a witness to the shooting who becomes obsessed with Turner after the incident and begins his own murder spree using the stolen weapon.

Blue Steel came at a time when cop thrillers were almost exclusively male dominated (arguably that’s still the case), and Bigelow tackles some very interesting thematic issues, providing a different film from what we might have been used to. Jamie Lee Curtis is terrific, offering an authentic mixture of toughness and vulnerability while Silver is convincingly creepy as Hunt.

Bigelow’s film is an unsettling police thriller that places a female rookie police officer in a heavily male environment and examines female authority, masculinity and the problems of power and violence. It’s one of her lesser seen films, but is arguably one of her best.

5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Sure, there are those who think Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) is the superior screen incarnation of Thomas Harris’s infamous cannibal. But even if that’s the case, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs is a brilliant piece of work, and in terms of British film classification, it was the first 18 certificate film to win Best Picture at the Oscars.

Anthony Hopkins is brilliant as the chilling Hannibal Lector, but Jodie Foster is very much his equal as FBI trainee Clarice Starling, sent to interview him in the hope he’ll provide some information regarding a serial killer currently on the loose. The scenes in which the pair are talking to each other on either side of the glass are thrilling, despite their quiet nature, and the film is an exceptionally constructed crime thriller, driven far more by psychology than anything else.

The result is a work that’s both an absorbing police investigation and an incredible character study, and it’s no wonder Hopkins was invited back for two lesser sequels.

6. Homicide (1991)

David Mamet’s Homicide is one of the more underappreciated 90s cop thrillers. Baltimore detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) has spent his career investigating violent crimes and has little interest in anything outside his immediate police duties. When he’s assigned to investigate the murder of an elderly Jewish woman, however, the case leads him into Baltimore’s Jewish community and forces him to confront aspects of his own identity.

Gold’s growing fascination with the investigation leads him into a world of political extremism, and his partner Tim (an excellent William H. Macy) becomes increasingly concerned about his obsession with the case. This is a film that combines police drama and identity, and in the case of Gold, it’s an interesting exploration into why the murder has affected him so profoundly.

It’s not your conventional cop thriller, but it’s one that focuses more on the character at its centre rather than the investigation itself, and in the case of Mamet’s film, it’s all the better for it.

7. Point Break (1991)

Although trying to pick Kathryn Bigelow’s best work from her impressive filmography is a tough task, Point Break has got to be a serious consideration. It’s likely that you’ll know much of Point Break even if you’ve never seen it, with Keanu Reeves’s FBI agent Johnny Utah assigned to investigate a string of bank robberies committed by a gang of masked criminals known as the Ex-Presidents. Gary Busey, as Utah’s partner Angelo, believes the robbers are experienced surfers, leading Utah undercover into the Southern California surfing community.

We all know what happens next, with Utah becoming close to the charismatic Bodhi (Patrick Swayze), and slowly realising that the people he’s been investigating are much closer to him than he realised. Point Break is an exceptionally entertaining crime thriller because Kathryn Bigelow combines the general mechanics of an undercover investigation with exhilarating scenes of jaw dropping extreme sports.

This is stylish and thrilling film making, and it’s no surprise that the film is so widely loved today; it’s an absolute beauty.

8. One False Move (1992)

Carl Franklin’s One False Move is a film that creeps up on underrated thrillers of the 90s. The story involves three criminals: Ray (Billy Bob Thornton), Pluto (Michael Beach) and Fantasia (Cynda Williams), who flee Los Angeles after a violent drug deal goes wrong, and head towards Star City in Arkansas. Their arrival puts the local sheriff Dale (Bill Paxton) on high alert, and he begins coordinating with Los Angeles detectives to track them down.

One False Move is particularly interesting in the way it slowly breaks down the barrier between lawman and criminal, while Franklin ensures that it remains grounded in reality with its depiction of ordinary characters and environments, meaning that when the inevitable violence arrives, it carries real weight.

Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton are particularly good, with Thornton also co-writing the screenplay with Franklin that gives us an atmospheric thriller that becomes a more complicated offering when it tackles violence and desperation with characters that we’ve spent time getting to know.

9. Deep Cover (1992)

Lawrence Fishburne gives us one of his greatest roles here as Russel Stevens, a cop who goes deep undercover, attempting to eventually take down L.A’s biggest drug dealer, David Jason (a wonderful Jeff Goldblum). Values and integrity are topics that go with undercover thrillers like bread and butter, but Deep Cover packs them into a Venn diagram that’s impossible to read; such are the blurred lines.

The film is also steeped in a neon noir sheen, shot mostly at night (falling in line with the hours that Stevens is forced to keep), meaning that when the neon hits, it draws you even further into the shadowy underbelly of L.A. This is an exploration of undercover work that details just how difficult things can get when you find yourself so deep, to the point where you barely recognise yourself anymore. Fishburne is astonishing, dragging you into the depths that he begins to find himself in, counting the psychological cost of his work.

Bill Duke’s film is one of the best undercover cop films ever released, and for some bizarre reason only became widely available in the last few years. It’s a gem.

10. Basic Instinct (1992)

After at least a decade of straight-to-VHS erotic thrillers gathering dust in bargain bins or on the top shelves of videostores, Paul Verhoeven proved to us that this sort of thing was box office- you simply had to nail the ingredients. In the case of Basic Instinct, the key ingredient was Joe Eszterhas’s script, which he wrote in just 13 days and sold it for $3 million dollars, an incredible amount of money for what one could argue is simply trash.

But of course Basic Instinct is such brilliantly written trash it’s impossible to dismiss it (although many still do). Michael Douglas is suitably excellent as San Francisco homicide detective Nick Curran, investigating the murder of a former rock star who has been stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick during sex. Suspicion quickly falls on his girlfriend, crime novelist Catherne Tramell- with Sharon Stone having an absolute blast as perhaps the ultimate femme fatale in cinema.

We all know the rest, but Basic Instinct is so eminently watchable and entertaining, built around an exceptionally manipulative character and an engaging murder mystery plot. Stone’s display is one of the defining performances of the decade, and she reprised it for the much maligned yet wildly underrated Basic Instinct 2 in 2006.

Some outfits tell you exactly what they are out the gate. Case in point is uber-cool film distributor Neon. Their first release was Colossal, a kaiju monster movie/alcoholism drama. There’s A24, IFC, and even focus features, but no film company can really match Neon’s output in the last ten years. It’s distributed the last seven consecutive Cannes Palme d’Or winners. It’s garnered two best picture Oscar winners and 11 total wins from 39 nominations.

The Neon slate is a mix of timely, globe-spanning work from exciting auteurs often telling heart-breaking stories. It has a habit of identifying exciting talent and getting their first project in front of eyes. The company also has a track record of bringing auteurs out of the arthouse and getting their films on big screens in (relatively) big markets. It offers visceral, broad-appeal horror with one hand and nuanced, insightful arty fare with the other. And on occasion, it mashes these two sides together with amazing returns.

Earlier this year, the company took on new investors, possibly signaling a change in its model. As Neon gets set to find its way through another Cannes festival and push through another Oscar season two years after Anora won big, now’s as good a time as any to notch their best offerings.

The 30 best Neon films ranked:

30. The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Joachim Trier’s fifth film, and the final entry in his Oslo trilogy, is an apt distillation of Neon’s brand. An empathetic study of an at-times unlikable but relatable character, The Worst Person in the World resonated widely. Triet had been a respected director and festival mainstay, but he concluded his trilogy with a deeply-felt film that earned him an Oscar nod for screenplay and launched star Renate Reinsve into Hollywood.

Reinsve plays Julie, a medical student whose romantic dalliances and uncertainty over her future as she turns 30 propel her into situations both awkward and insightful. Subtle and quiet like his previous work, The Worst Person in the World took Trier’s trademark melancholy and infused it with deeper insight and the pangs of joy that Julie senses even if she’s too conflicted to immediately realize. Trier’s next film, Sentimental Value, was also handled by Neon, but it’s The Worst Person in the World that best conveys the unique sensibilities and delicate tone that’s made Trier an internationally celebrated auteur.

29. Honeyland (2019)

Perhaps no film is a better display of Neon’s prowess as a distributor than Honeyland. A molasses-slow documentary about a beekeeper in North Macedonia, Honeyland is arthouse cinema with a capital A. Movies like this are a hard sell for cineplexes, yet Neon turned it into a critical hit that landed with audiences and became a double Oscar nominee. In fact, it became the first film to be nominated for best documentary and international film, a tactic multiple films would attempt in the years that followed.

Honeyland is the story of Hatidže Muratova, a beekeeper in a rural village without electricity and running water. She cares for her infirm mother and sells the honey she cultivates from her wild beekeeping. Of particular note is her care and expertise to her trade. But as other people move into the village and take up beekeeping, the stresses of modern capitalism contrast with her considered, sustainable approach. Honeyland generated conversation for its themes of conservationism and sustainability, but the filmmakers largely let their subject speak for herself. It’s a gentle, lush documentary with a keen sense of place that takes the patience of its subject and splashes it on the big screen festooned by lovely imagery of the Macedonian countryside.

28. Colossal (2016)

Neon’s first film is a wild one, and it captures so much of what makes the distributor special. A crafty auteur working in genre teams up with a Hollywood A-lister for a film that’s even stranger and more nuanced than its premise suggests. Director Nacho Vigalonda set out to make a serious Kaiju film with practical effects on a low budget, and he largely succeeds by making a monster movie rife with monsters of all sizes and stripes.

Anne Hathaway is Gloria, an unemployed writer who just can’t get her shit together. Kicked out by boyfriend Tom (Dan Stevens), she moves back home where she spends her days commiserating with childhood friend-turned-bar owner Oscar (Jason Sudeikis, playing a sort of anti-Ted Lasso), but every night a huge monster manifests in Seoul and wreaks destruction. The connections force all involved to reckon with their flaws and failures. While Vigalonda’s film gets somewhat heady and perhaps too bogged-down to totally stick the landing, Colossal is a rare breed – a Kaiju dramedy that’s as well made as it is weird.

27. Bait (2019)

With Bait, Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin reinvigorated the British social realist drama by embracing the technology of the past. Filmed in black and white with a vintage hand-cranked camera on 16mm film with dubbed dialogue, Bait looks, sounds, and feels like a relic from the past even as it explores themes of precarity, gentrification, income inequality, and cultural erosion.

Martin Ward is an old-school fisherman who’s seen his hometown transform from a traditional fishing village to a tourist haven. As more childhood homes become vacation getaways for rich out-of-towners, Martin’s resentment bubbles over, and it’s this escalating tension that propels the film’s plot. Ultimately, Bait is most effective as a mood piece defined by its sense of place. Bait is set in one village, but Jenkin’s storytelling crisscrosses time, place, class, and caste. True to the Neon spirit, it’s a strange film, small in scope but wide in reach, that found audiences far from its Cornish shores.

26. Border (2018)

Director Ali Abbasi made a name for himself with unlikely monster movies, each feature taking on a bigger, different type of dangerous creature. While 2016’s Shelley was a respectable debut, it was the stripped-down fantasy film Border that propelled him wider. Border is based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, the novelist best known for adaptations of his horror novels Let the Right One In and Handling the Dead, who co-wrote the script with Abbasi and Isabella Eklöf. Like those works, Border combines the horrors all too real with the fantastical to make something strange, often off-putting, and unique.

Border is essentially the story of customs agent Tina, whose true nature and that of the story’s world unfurl slowly. She’s good at her job but often isolated and lonely. Her father is largely unresponsive, she’s shunned by wider society, and even when the mysteries of her society open to more fantastical plot points, the grittiness of real life is ingrained in the wonder. Border plays like a modern fairy tale drained of any of the comforts of the Brothers Grimm, let alone Disney. While Hollywood went through a similar phase (Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Snow White and the Huntsman) with laughable results, Abbasi and co. go dark without losing themselves in the hollow, melodramatic devices a la Zach Snyder. In a time when movie premises overpromise weirdness and fall back into formula, Border is a truly strange beast.

25. Memoria (2021)

Slow, languishing, and mysterious, Memoria is one of Neon’s strangest releases and served as a sort of test lab. Using a formula it would recreate to wider success with Wim Wenders’ Japan-set Perfect Days, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film saw an esteemed auteur working in a foreign country for a meditative, wandering story anchored by a respected thespian, whose spiritual journey is momentarily glanced by the film crew.

In Memoria’s case, it’s Tilda Swinton in Colombia who embarks on a journey to identify a mysterious sound that haunts her. Anyone familiar with Weerasethakul’s filmography won’t be disappointed at the glacial pacing, naturalist tableaus, and gentle, genre-tinged searching that pervades the Thai auteur’s work. Memoria had an experimental ‘never-ending’ release in the US (for one viewer at a time) that encapsulated the film’s appeal: it’s a singular experience that bathes us in sound. Many arthouse darlings lose a step when they work in a different country and language, but Weerasethakul doesn’t miss a beat as he switches to English and Spanish. Swinton’s unfocused attempts to track down the sound lead to a hypnotic, spiritual journey, and Weerasethakul telegraphs the wonder and melancholy of that journey onto the audience. For those that stick with it, Memoria will linger in the ears and brain for ages. This might be the arthouse, but Memoria is not ambiguous.

24. Vox Lux (2018)

The Brutalist asserted Brady Corbet as an auteur on the international stage, but his earlier films are no less daring and ambitious. A24 had the distinction of releasing that festival hit-turned-Oscar winner – by far Brady’s most successful work to date – and IFC handled his debut The Childhood of a Leader, but Neon had the distinction of handling what might be his strangest offering and a distinctly American modern epic.

As the only Corbet film to take place in the modern era, Vox Lux is unsettling and focused in a unique way. Narrated by Willem Dafoe and recycling its cast in roles as it introduces new faces, Vox Lux touches on topics including school shootings, celebrity, mass terrorism, and cultural shifts as it charts several losses of innocence. A story for and about the new century, Vox Lux looms large and zeroes in on the mess of the modern world with narrative daring and adventurous choices that would serve Brady more controversially (worse, some would say) in his follow-up. But here, everything feels real and raw, even as Brady presents everything as a warped sort of fairy tale in which signs, symbols, and faces lose their meanings only to be resurrected in newer, sometimes scarier ways.

23. Night of the Kings (2020)

Another foreign film that Neon shepherded into a minor international hit during what turned out to be one of its banner years, Night of the Kings is exactly the kind of film Neon was made to distribute. A sort of riff on 1001 Nights, Night of Kings is set in a notorious Cote d’Ivoire prison where a new arrival is thrust into the local politics and must regale the prison population with stories until morning lest he be killed.

Night of the Kings memorably smatters fantasy with realism, as the lore and legends of the stories within the story hide a larger brutality at play. But writer/director Philippe Lacôte deftly balances and leverages this tension to create a tale that feels as roving and mythical as the one its central character constantly embellishes and re-embellishes in desperate attempts to stay alive. There are parts of Night of the Kings that will feel familiar to anyone who’s seen prison films or a story about nested stories, but there are also new sights and senses to behold. Like the storytelling at its centre, Lacôte’s film is meant to entrance, and when it succeeds, it’s an intriguing journey.

22. Infinity Pool (2023)

Infinity Pool is an obtuse, transgressive film that speaks to themes of accountability, privilege, and globalization without ever actually shouting out its themes. Brandon Cronenberg’s third outing was largely greeted with approval from critics and audiences, even if its icy glare and point-blank satire left most feeling a bit cold. The mastery and craft on display are hard to deny, but it’s the film’s remote stance and unironic irreverence that really terrify. It also boasts some of modern cinema’s most unnerving masks.

Infinity Pool is a story about people on holiday, specifically the archetypes of a frustrated novelist and his rich wife. Befriended by a group of vacationers led by Mia Goth’s posh housewife, Alexander Skaarsgard’s protagonist is ingratiated into a group of debauched, hedonistic pleasure that tipples over into something more sinister. Framed like a modern retelling of Dante’s Inferno by way of J.G. Ballard, Infinity Pool is a murky-eyed stare into the abyss brought to life through spiraling bursts of color and twisted flesh. As befits the Cronenberg name, there is plenty of new flesh on display, but also beauty, terror, humor, and even glimpses of truth amongst the debauchery.

21. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

One of the 2019 Cannes festival’s biggest hits to be picked up by Neon (more on the other one later), Céline Sciamma’s somber, understated chamber piece is sad, sumptuous, and unfailingly patient. After a brief prologue introducing the titular painting, Sciamma’s film travels to 18th-century Brittany where painter Marianne has been tasked to paint a portrait of young aristocrat Héloïse who’s soon to be married.

A true artist, Marianne initially hides her reason for being there, befriending Héloïse and immersing herself in the remote community to better capture her subject’s essence. They grow close, but the two women’s budding relationship is haunted by family secrets and the eeriness of their shared locale. Sciamma gets expertly calibrated performances from Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire expands to be about more than just the subject of the painter or the two women at the film’s heart. As it explores the island community and the servants undergirding Héloïse’s charmed existence, it also becomes a movie about the choices women had at this time and how those choices reverberate through a life and further.

Since the turn of the century, we’ve been treated to a whole range of cop thrillers that have ranged from Oscar winning brilliance to absolute trash of the lowest order. Building on nearly a century of police cinema, filmmakers have used the genre to explore changing attitudes towards authority, surveillance, and, perhaps most predictably, the blurred line between justice and corruption.

Picking ten of the best is anything but easy, and there are some excellent films that didn’t make the cut: Miami Vice (2006), End of Watch (2012), Hyena (2014) and Les Misérables (2019), to name but a few. So far in this decade, we’ve had some decent cop thrillers like Rogue City (2020), The Night of the 12th (2022), and this year’s Crime 101, but none from the 2020s have made the final cut. Everyone will have their own thoughts, of course, but here’s the ten that have made this list.

1. Training Day (2001)

Antoine Fuqua has been in the headlines this year for the Michael Jackson biopic, the box office smash that was Michael. Unfortunately, the film has so many problems that it’s hard to accept the fact that the man behind the camera was the same one who had started the century with Training Day.

Still the high bar that cop films have set ever since, Training Day features two exceptional performances at its centre: Denzel Washington as Detective Alonzo Harris and Ethan Hawke as rookie Officer Jake Hoyt. On his first day with the LAPD narcotics division, Hoyt is partnered with the veteran narcotics detective Harris, and what begins as an opportunity to learn from an experienced officer quickly descends into a nightmare as Jake discovers that Alonzo’s methods extend far beyond bending the rules, forcing him to confront the corruption and brutality at the heart of Alonzo’s operation.

Fuqua’s film is perhaps the defining cop film of the 21st century; it takes the familiar rookie and veteran partnership that’s so well worn in cinema and does something completely different with it. At the heart of it is Washington’s incredible display as Alonzo, a turn that rightfully won him a Best Actor Oscar. He dominates every scene without ever becoming a caricature, and Hawke is right up to the task opposite him. It’s astonishing.

2. Narc (2002)

Joe Carnahan’s tight, efficient, and terrific thriller never seems to get the credit it deserves. It had a tough task in being released just a year after Training Day, and perhaps that’s why it feels like it was somewhat dismissed. But Narc is rather excellent, starring Jason Patric as disgraced Detroit narcotics detective Nick Tellis, who’s brought back to investigate the murder of fellow officer Michael. He’s partnered with Michael’s former colleague Henry Oak (Ray Liotta), an increasingly obsessive detective whose behaviour makes Tellis question just about everything that’s happened.

Narc can be a brutal and testing thriller, while the fragmented structure effectively begins to stitch everything together in a way that’s constantly engrossing and always gripping. Both Patric and Liotta are terrific; their characters have baggage that gives the whole thing an extra sense of urgency and danger, ensuring that Narc is a deeply uncomfortable film that tackles themes of violence, guilt and loyalty in a way that so many others of the genre fail to do.

Narc is an uncompromising thriller that is far better than people gave it credit for and deserves its place on this list.

3. Dark Blue (2002)

Kurt Russell plays veteran LAPD detective Eldon Perry in Ron Shelton’s exceptional drama, partnered with ambitious young detective Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) to investigate the murders of two undercover police officers. As the investigation progresses, Keough begins to realise that Perry’s methods are part of a deeply corrupt culture within the LAPD, forcing him to choose between his career and doing what is right.

It might sound like you’ve heard it all before, and again, Dark Blue suffered somewhat from coming hot on the heels of Training Day. But this is an often vicious and politically charged thriller that uses the backdrop of the 1992 Los Angeles riots to examine police corruption and institutional racism, with Shelton creating a city on the verge of exploding before our very eyes. The atmosphere is relentless and almost unbearably tense, and both Russell and Speedman are excellent, drawing you into the murky underworld of corruption and forcing you to stay there.

Dark Blue is also written by David Ayer, in a genre that he is synonymous with. He went on to direct End of Watch (2012), another excellent cop thriller that was very unlucky not to make this list.

4. Infernal Affairs (2002)

Andrew Lau & Alan Mak’s superb cop thriller is one of those rare beasts- an international film that spawned an English-language remake that’s half decent. Martin Scorsese was keen to stress that The Departed (2006) was his own interpretation of Infernal Affairs, and not simply a direct copy. Lau and Mak’s film is far leaner at a mere 100 odd minutes and takes the familiar undercover-cop premise and turns it into a brilliantly constructed psychological duel.

Hong Kong’s police and Triads have been engaging in a long running battle of infiltration, with both sides having planted moles within the opposing organisation. Chan Wing-yan (Tony Leung) is a police officer who has spent years inside the Triads, while Lau Kin-ming (Andy Lau) is a Triad operative who has risen through the ranks of the Hong Kong Police Force while secretly reporting to crime boss Hon Sam (Eric Tsang). When both organisations discover that they have a mole in their midst, Chan and Lau find themselves racing to identify one another before their identities are exposed.

Leung and Lau are astonishing, bringing real humanity to the tale and making this far more than your average undercover romp. There’s an enormous amount pumped into the story, all of which is given time and space to evolve within a layered film that explores identity, loyalty and psychological pressure, and it avoids the trap of simply becoming a simple shoot ‘em up. This is an impeccably paced cop thriller that remains one of the greatest of the 21st century.

5. Minority Report (2002)

Steven Spielberg’s masterful Sci-fi cop thriller feels like it’s been somewhat overshadowed by the evolution of technology itself. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, the film follows Tom Cruise’s Chief John Anderton, who runs the PreCrime division of the Washington police department. PreCrime uses three psychic beings to predict murders before they happen, and things take a troubling turn when Anderton himself is identified as the future murderer of a man he’s never met, and he’s forced to go on the run.

Minority Report is one of Spielberg’s films that successfully combines big-budget science fiction with an intelligent and engrossing detective thriller, with Cruise on top form alongside Colin Farrell as the ambitious federal investigator tasked with tracking Anderton down. The film’s world building is astonishing, creating a Washington that feels recognisable yet alien, and the attention to detail grabs you and pulls you into a world that you want to be a part of.

Minority Report raises some interesting questions about free will as well as tackling themes of philosophy that are equally intriguing, and this is far more than just another Spielberg science fiction piece. It’s one of the best films he’s ever made, and it’s one of the most interesting cop thrillers ever put to screen.

When it comes to cultural footprint, Ridley Scott’s filmography is up there with, and maybe even surpasses, the likes of Spielberg, Scorsese, Lucas, and Coppola. Blade Runner set the palette and vibe for a certain dystopia. Alien created a classic monster but is also chockful with classic set pieces. Both Gladiator and Thelma & Louise so permeated the zeitgeist that they were quoted and parodied on end.

But Scott isn’t as lauded as his contemporaries. Part of it might be his journeyman director approach. He’s a genre chameleon amongst a discourse that loves their auteurs to be thematically consistent. He’s also prolific, sometimes dropping two films in a single year, and his assembly line approach to film production gives his detractors fresh ammo every time a film underwhelms. Still, one never knows with Scott. His flops, Blade Runner being the ultimate example, become classics while his successful rebounds from flopland, Black Rain for instance, remain ridiculous.

In the spirit of Blade Runner, this list looks at the underappreciated entries in Scott’s filmography. Here are 10 films that might one day be iconic classics or simply reevaluated in a kinder light.

10. Matchstick Men (2003)

Scott’s early 2000s Nic Cage-starrer plays like a sort of time capsule of an era when breezy adventure comedies still made a splash in cinemas. Matchstick Men splits the difference between Oceans 11 and Cage’s own National Treasure franchise for a movie that’s divisive, silly as so many con movies are, and fun.

Cage was still in his blockbuster era headlining tentpoles. The latter part of the decade would see him taking job after job to pay back taxes, but here he’s firing on all of the neurotic but defiant charm he accrued as an Oscar winner turned action star. He plays a conman with OCD whose life is turned upside down when he’s tracked down by the daughter he didn’t know he had. Both director and star are having fun in their comfort zones, repeating beats they’d wielded to greater effect on other projects. Cage’s OCD con has a whiff of the soulfulness from his master turn in Leaving Las Vegas, and Scott keeps the tension humming with patience and flow that his later works sometimes lack.

9. Legend (1985)

Full disclosure: this spot almost when to 2023’s Napoleon, a film savaged by the discourse and not helped by Scott’s dismissals of historical inaccuracies but fortified by strong battle sequences and more fun than its detractors admit. Still, here’s as good a place as any to spotlight another Scott flop that’s now undergoing an appraisal. Legend hasn’t gone full Blade Runner by transitioning from dud to iconic, but it’s certainly endeared itself to a generation raised on fantasy and craving practical effects.

This is also a chance to give dearly departed Tim Curry his flowers. As the Lord of Darkness, he added to a stable of eventually-iconic performances (many of them with heavy makeup or prosthetics) that’s devious and delicious. A 2002 director’s cut – another Scott trademark – has also helped the film achieve something of cult status. But while this was initially a flop that served as a hiccup to Tom Cruise’s career and didn’t do much for Mia Sara’s, the film’s craft elements (especially the makeup and effects) were feted. On release, Legend was thought to have killed the appetite for big budget fantasy movies. Decades later, even Scott doesn’t make them like this anymore.

8. Body of Lies (2008)

In the early 2000s, Leonardo DiCaprio was still trying to shed his pretty boy image by going on a working tour of esteemed directors. It’s no surprise that a Scott film was part of that mission, alongside working with Spielberg and Scorcese. By folding himself into the Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe collaboration that was a couple films deep by this point, DiCaprio nailed one of his first beleaguered outsider roles with an intensity his critics didn’t think he had.

Body of Lies is very much a film of its time, and that time is the post-9/11 War on Terror. DiCaprio is the field agent on the ground in the Middle East taking orders from Crowe’s handler comfortably back in the American suburbs. Hollywood struggled to portray this era in ways that appealed to audiences or critics, but Scott got farther than most by focusing on the increasingly diffuse nature of the so-called dirty or forever wars and by not dressing up the murky moral landscape in which it was all unfolding. When so many movies were scrambling to find something insightful to say about the moment, Body of Lies sidestepped that pretension and righteousness by juxtaposing DiCaprio’s conflicted field agent with Crowe, brash and arrogant, calling the shots dressed in a bathrobe and standing in his garden.

7. Alien: Covenant (2017)

The Alien franchise has been treading water more or less since James Cameron delivered its showstopping sequel. Ridley Scott returned with 2012’s Prometheus, a film that underwhelmed narratively but performed well enough to greenlight this sequel. Covenant ditched the coyness of the Prometheus lore for something that was more familiar, and it’s arguably the best of the post-Aliens sequels or prequels because it’s so strange.

Alien sequels now come with a sort of checklist: dripping acid, a chase through a dark corridor, a haircut or outfit that calls back to Ripley. Covenant isn’t beyond those, but it finds a different antagonist to explore. Michael Fassbender’s android David was introduced in Prometheus but here he gets fleshed out to strange edges. He experiments with what it is to feel human. He encounters another version of himself. Covenant almost feels more interested in David’s story, so much so that when another spaceship trudges into the narrative with Katherine Waterston as the Ripley stand-in, the film practically falls into rote motions. Not the best Alien movie by any stretch, but a welcome episode in the universe.

6. The Duellists (1977)

Some director’s debut with a money job. Others tell you more or less who they are on the first go. Ridley Scott’s debut The Duellists adapts a Joseph Conrad short story set during the Napoleonic Wars, but it’s focus is on a smaller-scale conflict that outlasts the conflict which sparks it. It captures many of the themes Scott’s later work would focus on with an attention to the sumptuous details of its period setting

Harvey Keitel is a Bonapartist. Keith Carradine is a royalist. These two men keep encountering each other over 20 years, engaging in a series of duels that reflect the tumult of the times. Scott would follow this up with Alien two years later then a run of flops including Blade Runner, and in the slew of prolific work and surprise classics, it’s easy to forget how accomplished The Duellists, now overshadowed by Scott’s filmography, was. At Cannes that year, the jury unanimously awarded Scott the prize for best debut film (the Camera d’Or would be created the year after), and it competed in the main competition. Scott’s stories these days are rarely as expansive, but The Duellists is a reminder that he’s long been adept at capturing the breadth of history, using smaller stories as a way into epic ones.

The roots of the cop thriller (and its numerous subgenres) can be traced back to the early days of cinema, with Fritz Lang’s M (1931) standing as one of the earliest and most influential examples. Its gripping pursuit of a child murderer and detailed police investigation established many of the elements that would become fundamental to the genre, and throughout the 20th century we were treated to decades of ever-evolving takes on the central cop theme.

By the 80s, there was plenty of foundations in place, and the previous decade had seen some of the all-time greats released; Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), Philip D’Antoni’s The Seven-Ups (1973), and Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) all hit our screens and set down a marker for everything that was to follow. The 80s matched its preceding decade with gusto, and in this list, we look back at 10 of the very best the decade had to offer.

1. Cruising (1980)

Still one of Al Pacino’s finest performances to date (despite the fact he still doesn’t particularly like talking about it), in William Friedkin’s Cruising, he plays young NYPD officer Steve Burns, who is sent undercover to infiltrate the underground S&M and leather scene after a serial killer begins murdering gay men in New York.

Friedkin takes the grimy feel of New York that he nailed so brilliantly in The French Connection and transposes it to Cruising, albeit while covering a very different part of the city and themes. Pacino is superb as a cop gradually losing his sense of certainty and, in part, his identity as he becomes completely embroiled and obsessed with both the case and the scene he becomes a part of.

Notorious on release and only relatively recently available, Cruising is one of Friedkin’s most brilliant works, and the infamous missing 40 minutes were partially reconstructed in James Franco and Travis Mathews’ excellent meta-film blending documentary Interior. Leather Bar. (2013), which is also well worth a watch if you can track it down.

2. Prince of the City (1981)

While Prince of the City isn’t Sidney Lumet’s best film, its sprawling narrative and epic scope laid a marker for police-corruption thrillers to come. Treat Williams plays narcotics detective Daniel Ciello, who’s approached by federal prosecutors investigating corruption within the NYPD. Ciello agrees to cooperate, but only on the condition that he doesn’t have to betray fellow officers, but as the investigation goes deeper, he finds his own history in corruption makes things increasingly difficult for him.

It’s clear Prince of the City isn’t merely a world of good and bad; it blurs the lines and explores bureaucracy and procedure, and it was a huge influence on the superb television series The Shield (2002-2008). Lumet’s film was based on the true story of NYPD detective Robert Leuci, and Williams’ performance brilliantly explores the hysteria that comes with such a situation. We go through the journey with Ciello, as Lumet takes us through a deeply immersive portrait of a police department and the systems within systems that exist.

At times it rightly feels suffocating, and although it doesn’t quite have the heft of Serpico, Prince of the City remains a hugely important document within the cop thriller genre.

3. Nighthawks (1981)

Sylvester Stallone, Billy Dee Williams and Rutger Hauer all-star in Bruce Malmuth’s somewhat underappreciated cop thriller, with Stallone and Williams playing New York detectives who are transferred to an elite anti-terrorist unit after an international terrorist (Hauer) arrives in the city.

Nighthawks is a brilliantly atmospheric piece of early-80s urban thriller filmmaking and would make an excellent double bill with Night of the Juggler, which was released a year before. Both Stallone and Williams make the whole thing feel authentic, and this never feels like two huge stars playing cops; it simply engulfs you in the story as it races along to its superb conclusion.

Nighthawks is a much darker and more distinctive cop thriller than its rather slight reputation suggests, elevated by Stallone’s impressively restrained performance and Rutger Hauer’s unforgettable villain.

4. Witness (1985)

Peter Weir’s filmography is impressive to say the least, yet he perhaps doesn’t get the credit he deserves. Witness is at least universally acclaimed, and for good reason. Harrison Ford gives one of his all-time great performances as Philadelphia detective John Book, who’s assigned to protect Amish boy Samuel Lapp, who has witnessed the murder of an undercover police officer. When Book realises the corruption reaches into his wn department, he is forced to hide with Samuel and the boy’s mother Rachel (Kelly McGillis) within their isolated Amish community.

Witness works so well because it takes a familiar murder investigation and places it in an environment completely removed from the world of conventional police movies. Ford’s performance is sensational, but he’s not on his own in that respect; Kelly McGillis is terrific as Rachel, while Lukas Haas is excellent as the young boy.

Weir combines police thriller, murder mystery, romance and throws in some very effective cultural drama to boot, resulting in one of the best films he’s ever made.

5. To Live and Die in L.A (1985)

William Friedkin had already delivered an astonishing car chase in 1971’s The French Connection, but in To Live and Die in L. A he took things one step further. The film stars William Petersen as Secret Service agent Richard Chance, who becomes obsessed with bringing down ruthless counterfeiter Eric ’Rick’ Masters, played with insane brilliance by Willem Dafoe. When Masters kills Chance’s partner, Chance goes on the rampage, taking matters into his own hands and, with fellow agent Vukovich (John Pankow), goes undercover into Los Angeles’ criminal underworld.

It’s one of the most stylish yet ferocious cop thrillers of the 1980s, and Dafoe and Peterson bring a real intensity to the central obsession. Los Angeles looks incredible, and the soundtrack is constantly pumping, giving To Live and Die in L. A a relentless and exhausting feel, in the best way possible.

During one chase sequence, Friedkin throws the cars into oncoming traffic on the freeway, with the cars travelling at terrifying speed and constantly changing direction. It’s reckless, it’s incredible, and it sums up the entire film rather well.