Crime – Movie Valhalla

ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984)

A nearly four-hour period gangster movie that represented the culmination of director Sergio Leone’s career. It is also a super weird movie.

An early independent film about a “born loser” woman who “doesn’t know why she exists.” So that’s fun.

The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece of a modern noir set against the snowbound niceness of the Upper Midwest in winter.

Maybe the first great heist movie, for me it still works just as well today as it did 70 years ago.

A well-pitched exercise in peak blaxploitation style more than an actual movie, with an all-timer of a soundtrack.

This “comedy of murders” starring Charlie Chaplin as a serial killer was a scandalous flop in the US but has since been re-evaluated.

The raucous Cockney crime pic that introduced Guy Ritchie and Jason Statham to the world.

Even if you have not watched it over and over, the people who made the movies you have, have.

I really enjoyed this dream-like film noir about a doomed man’s wanderings through Belfast.

This romance/crime/comedy/drama/other remains, a quarter century later, my definitive personal image of Hong Kong.