Crime
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
(2009)
William M. Finkelstein (screenplay)
3 wins & 9 nominations.
After Katrina, police sergeant Terence McDonagh rescues a prisoner, hurts his back in the process and earns a promotion to lieutenant plus an addiction to cocaine and painkillers. Six months later, a family is murdered over drugs; Terence runs the investigation. His drug-using prostitute girlfriend, his alcoholic father's dog, run-ins with two old women and a well-connected john, gambling losses, a nervous young witness, and thefts of police property put Terence's job and then his life in danger. He starts seeing things. He wants a big score to get out from under mounting debts, so he joins forces with drug dealers. The murders remain unsolved. A bad lieutenant gets worse.
Bangkok Dangerous
(2008)
Jason Richman (screenplay), Oxide Chun Pang, Danny Pang
1 nomination.
Joe is a professional hit man who picks someone off the street to do his errands, and after he is finished kills that person. His next assignment takes him to Bangkok, and as usual, he finds a street-wise guy named Kong to help him. After Kong has a close call and learns who Joe is, Kong asks him to train him and he does. Joe also meets a local girl who is deaf and spends time with her. However, Joe has a hard time keeping his other life from her. It also appears that the person who hired Joe, breaks his rule of complete anonymity and tries to find him.
Bangkok Dangerous
(2000)
Danny Pang, Oxide Chun Pang
3 wins & 4 nominations.
The story is of a deaf-mute hitman and his partner who are based in Bangkok. He is friends with his partner's girlfriend who is a stripper at a local club. They go about their assassination...
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
(2007)
Kelly Masterson
17 wins & 25 nominations.
Needing extra cash, two brothers conspire to pull off the perfect, victimless crime. No guns, no violence, no problem. But when an accomplice ignores the rules and crosses the line, his actions trigger a series of events in which no one is left unscathed.
Black Mass
(2015)
Mark Mallouk (screenplay), Jez Butterworth (screenplay), Dick Lehr (based on the book by), Gerard O'Neill (based on the book by)
5 wins & 20 nominations.
Based on a true story of James "Whitey" Bulger, an Irish Mob godfather and FBI informant who had a "secret trading" deal with his brother, William "Billy" Bulger, a state senator and a Boston public figure, and John Connolly, an FBI agent. They planned to take down the Italian mob and mafia in Boston, which went awry and things turned massively violent. When the credence for each other began fading out, drug dealing, murders, and extortion started to rise, and forced the FBI's Boston office to confirm that Whitey Bulger was one of the most notorious criminals in US history and also one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List criminals.
Blitz
(2011)
Nathan Parker (screenplay), Ken Bruen (novel)
N/A
Detective Sergeant Tom Brant who is dispatched to take down a serial killer hell bent on killing off the police force one by one. "The Blitz" manages to slip through the grasp of Tom every time, and with the precious lives of his colleagues diminishing one by one, Tom is led to the question: if we can't protect our own, then what good are we?
Blue Velvet
(1986)
David Lynch (screenplay)
Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 18 wins & 16 nominations.
The discovery of a severed human ear found in a field leads a young man on an investigation related to a beautiful, mysterious nightclub singer and a group of psychopathic criminals who have kidnapped her child.
Bowling for Columbine
(2002)
Michael Moore
Won 1 Oscar. Another 35 wins & 10 nominations.
The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America's culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership. Furthermore, he seeks to investigate and confront the powerful elite political and corporate interests fanning this culture for their own unscrupulous gain.
Brick
(2005)
Rian Johnson
11 wins & 22 nominations.
The lonely teenager Brendan finds his former girlfriend Emily dead in the entrance of a tunnel of sewage and recalls her phone call two days ago, when she said to him that she was in trouble. Brendan, who still loved Emily, met bad elements of his high-school trying to contact her, and when he succeeded, she told him that she was OK. He hides her body in the tunnel and decides to investigate the meaning and connection of four words, including "brick" and "pin", that Emily told him to find who killed her. Using the support of his nerd friend Brain, he successively meets the small time drug dealers Kara, Dode, Brad Bramish, Laura and Tugger, to reach the teenager powerful drug dealer The Pin. Slowly, Brendan unravels the motives why Emily was killed and plots a revenge.
Brighton Rock
(2010)
Rowan Joffe, Graham Greene (novel)
1 win & 8 nominations.
An adaptation of Graham Greene's classic novel about a small-town hood who marries a waitress who witnessed him murdering a rival thug in order to keep her quiet. As his gang begins to doubt his abilities, the man becomes more desperate and violent.
Brooklyn Rules
(2007)
Terence Winter
N/A
Michael 'Mike' Turner is handsome, bright, a resourceful law student and perfect gentleman. Mike were perfect hadn't he been born in late 20th century Brooklyn, a New York borough dominated by the mob, in his case Carmine Mancuso, who luckily chooses to protect bright Mike, even against mob ruffian Gino, and his two inseparable buddies. Cocky Carmine Mancuso actually chooses to join the bloody business, sparing only his youth friends. Third mate Bobby Canzoneri, whose equally dumb parents hosted the gang as kids, naively aims no higher then tenure in the US Post. Yet Bobby ends up dead when a mob war erupts.
Brooklyn's Finest
(2009)
Michael C. Martin
1 win & 10 nominations.
In Brooklyn, amid drug deals, violence, casual racism, poverty, housing projects, and corrupt cops, we follow three officers: Tango, African-American, working undercover, believing he's earned a promotion to a desk job but told he has to set up the bust of an ex-con who saved his life; Sal, who'll commit murder to get cash; and, Eddie, the precinct's oldest beat cop, a week to go before retirement, assigned to mentor an earnest rookie. Can this end well for any of the three?
Brother
(2000)
Takeshi Kitano
1 win & 1 nomination.
A Japanese Yakuza gangster is exiled to the United States. Takeshi settles in Los Angeles where his younger, half brother lives and finds that although the turf is new, the rules are still the same as they try to take over the local drug trade.
Bullitt
(1968)
Alan Trustman (screenplay), Harry Kleiner (screenplay), Robert L. Fish (novel)
Won 1 Oscar. Another 6 wins & 9 nominations.
High profile San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt is asked personally by ambitious Walter Chalmers, who is in town to hold a US Senate subcommittee hearing on organized crime, to guard Johnny Ross, a Chicago based mobster who is about to turn evidence against the organization at the hearing. Chalmers wants Ross' safety at all cost, or else Bullitt will pay the consequences. Bullitt and his team of Sergeant Delgetti and Detective Carl Stanton have Ross in protective custody for 48 hours over the weekend until Ross provides his testimony that upcoming Monday. Bullitt's immediate superior, Captain Samuel Bennet, gives Bullitt full authority to lead the case, no questions asked for any move Bullitt makes. When an incident occurs early during their watch, Bullitt is certain that Ross and/or Chalmers are not telling them the full story to protect Ross properly. Without telling Bennet or an incensed Chalmers, Bullitt clandestinely moves Ross while he tries to find out who is after Ross, and why Ross has seemingly made it so easy for "them" to find him. As Bullitt enlists the help of his live-in artist girlfriend Cathy over the weekend and as she sees for the first time with what he deals every day, she wonders if he is indeed the man with whom she should be.
Burke and Hare
(2010)
Piers Ashworth, Nick Moorcroft
1 nomination
Based on the true story of the famous murderers, this movie follows the hapless exploits of William Burke (Simon Pegg) and William Hare (Andy Serkis) as they fall into the highly-profitable business of providing cadavers for the medical fraternity in 19th-century Edinburgh, Scotland, then the center of medical learning. The one thing they were short of was bodies.
Bus 174
(2002)
Bráulio Mantovani, José Padilha
12 wins & 6 nominations.
Documentary depicts what happened in Rio de Janeiro on June 12th 2000, when bus 174 was taken by an armed young man, threatening to shoot all the passengers. Transmitted live on all Brazilian TV networks, this shocking and tragic-ending event became one of violence's most shocking portraits, and one of the scariest examples of police incompetence and abuse in recent years.
Cape Fear
(1991)
John D. MacDonald (novel), James R. Webb (earlier screenplay), Wesley Strick (screenplay)
Nominated for 2 Oscars. Another 4 wins & 14 nominations.
Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte)is a small-town corporate attorney/"Leave It to Beaver" type family-man. Max Cady (Robert De Niro) is a tattooed, cigar-smoking, bible-quoting, rapist. What do they have in common? Fourteen years, ago Sam was a public defender assigned to Max Cady's rape trial, and he made a serious error: he hid a document from his illiterate client that could have gotten him acquitted. Now, the cagey, bibliophile Cady has been released, and he intends to teach Sam Bowden and his family a thing or two about loss.
Capote
(2005)
Dan Futterman (screenplay), Gerald Clarke (book)
Won 1 Oscar. Another 57 wins & 80 nominations.
In 1959, Truman Capote, a popular writer for The New Yorker, learns about the horrific and senseless murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas. Inspired by the story material, Capote and his partner, Harper Lee, travel to the town to research for an article. However, as Capote digs deeper into the story, he is inspired to expand the project into what would be his greatest work, In Cold Blood. To that end, he arranges extensive interviews with the prisoners, especially with Perry Smith, a quiet and articulate man with a troubled history. As he works on his book, Capote feels some compassion for Perry which in part prompts him to help the prisoners to some degree. However, that feeling deeply conflicts with his need for closure for his book which only an execution can provide. That conflict and the mixed motives for both interviewer and subject make for a troubling experience that would produce an literary account that would redefine modern non-fiction.
Casino
(1995)
Nicholas Pileggi (book), Nicholas Pileggi (screenplay), Martin Scorsese (screenplay)
Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 3 wins & 9 nominations.
This Martin Scorsese film depicts the Janus-like quality of Las Vegas--it has a glittering, glamorous face, as well as a brutal, cruel one. Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro, mobsters who move to Las Vegas to make their mark, live and work in this paradoxical world. Seen through their eyes, each as a foil to the other, the details of mob involvement in the casinos of the 1970's and '80's are revealed. Ace is the smooth operator of the Tangiers casino, while Nicky is his boyhood friend and tough strongman, robbing and shaking down the locals. However, they each have a tragic flaw--Ace falls in love with a hustler, Ginger, and Nicky falls into an ever-deepening spiral of drugs and violence.
Casino Jack
(2010)
Norman Snider
Nominated for 1 Golden Globe. Another 1 win & 1 nomination.
A hot shot Washington DC lobbyist and his protégé go down hard as their schemes to peddle influence lead to corruption and murder.