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The Great American Crime Film

A run through the seductions and wreckage of American crime — mob epics that span a whole life beside capers that unravel over a weekend, all told with the same eye for how ordinary greed curdles into violence.

Certified canon and mostly crowd favorites; none of it is difficult except in that the violence bites, though save The Irishman's three-and-a-half-hour elegy for when you've got the patience for the comedown.

• GoodFellas (1990)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Fargo (1996)
• Donnie Brasco (1997)
• The Irishman (2019)
• The Sting (1973) — The forgotten Best Picture winner on your list — a Depression-era grift built around the same pleasure GoodFellas takes in watching pros work a scheme, only here the con is the revenge and it unravels beautifully.
• Miller's Crossing (1990) — If Fargo's Coen fingerprints are what you loved, this is the under-seen one to finally pull down — their Prohibition gangster picture, all Irish-mob double-crosses and hard-drinking loyalty told with that same cold, exact eye for how ordinary greed curdles into violence.
• Blow (2001) — The overlooked rise-and-fall that rhymes hardest with GoodFellas — a working-class kid who swears he'll never be broke, climbs the cocaine trade to the top, and pays for it in exactly the comedown these films know so well.
• Out of Sight (1998) — The slick Elmore Leonard caper you never got to — a courteous career bank robber and the marshal chasing him, all crackle and cool, the seductive-side-of-crime register these films live in.