5. ‘The Matrix’ 1999
Michael Mann’s sprawling three-hour crime drama is a who’s who of once-great actors giving their dignity a victory lap, including Robert De Niro, Val Kilmer and Al Pacino (perhaps the last of his films in which he teetered on the edge of overacting without actually tumbling into self-parody). De Niro heads a crew of professional thieves and bank robbers pitted against Pacino’s LAPD lieutenant. It’s at once a thrilling action film (with a showstopper of a shootout scene) and a richly acted drama. If Gotham City were real, it would look something like this.
9. ‘John Wick’ (2014)
What do you do when Russian mobsters break into your home, steal your vintage 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1 and kill your puppy? You kill them. You kill everyone. That’s the catalyst that draws recently widowed ex-hitman John Wick (Keanu Reeves) back into a high-concept criminal underworld and sends him on an unhinged quest for retribution for his dead puppy. It’s low on dialogue but high on style, and every kill comes with a headshot. The sequel released earlier this year is every bit as awesome, and even John Wickier than the first.
8. ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)
“Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France ... ” So begins Quentin Tarantino’s brutal revenge fantasy, in which he sends a fictional squad of Jewish-American soldiers behind enemy lines to collect Nazi scalps. In real life, the Nazis met a brutal end. But not brutal enough for Tarantino, who rewrote history to better suit his sense of moral justice. It’s filled with delectable scenes, but the best is an excruciatingly long (in a good way) sequence in a basement bar, where mounting tensions between Nazis and undercover Nazi hunters lead to one of the best standoffs this side of Sergio Leone.
Lana and Lilly Wachowski changed the game at the turn of the century with this eminently quotable dystopian sci-fi classic, where humans live in a simulated reality while they serve as batteries to sentient machines. It’s so familiar by now, and was so frequently imitated in the decade that followed, that it’s easy to forget just how hard the artful, slow-motion action sequences filmed in “bullet time” blew your mind when you first saw them on the big screen. The gravity-defying, marble-shattering lobby shootout in particular remains every bit as awesome.
4. ‘The Wild Bunch’ (1969)