It’s tighter, less eager-to-please and tenser than Ritchie’s movies, at once sleek and oddly mournful in a way that’s pleasingly reminiscent of 70s crime classics. Connolly’s novel, it stars Daniel Craig (practically auditioning for Bond here) as an unnamed drug dealer who believes himself to be above the violence of the criminal world, but swiftly finds himself dragged into it (with a cast also including future stars like Tom Hardy, Ben Whishaw, Sally Hawkins and Sienna Miller). But “Layer Cake” proved to be something more sophisticated than that altogether. It would have been easy, given his long history as Guy Ritchie’s producer, for Matthew Vaughn’s directorial debut to be yet another of the countless post-“ Lock Stock” films that littered British cinema in the late 90s and early 00s. See our picks below, and let us know your favorites, and what you think we’ve forgotten, in the comments. It was a tough task to narrow it down just to 50, but the final list is a strong one, showing the variety and breadth that the genre is capable of. With Wright entering the genre with such flair, and making one of the best crime films in years, we thought it was a good time to have a proper look at the recent history of the genre, and have picked out (as we’ve done with action, sci-fi, foreign language and others) the 50 best of the 21st century so far. gangster movies of the 1930s to the Tarantino knock-offs of the 1990s and 2000s. “All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said, and the crime film has been one of cinema’s most enduringly popular genres since the silent era, from the Warner Bros. The absolutely tremendous car-chase-musical ( read our review) is funny, sure, but that’s not its primary aim: in a big departure from Wright, it has more in common with classic 70s crime cinema than with, “ Hot Fuzz” (for example) using the director’s formal gifts in service of a surprisingly hard-boiled heist movie. If you go and see “ Baby Driver” this weekend expecting another gag-heavy comedy in the vein of Edgar Wright’s earlier films, you’ll likely be in a shock.
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