In a rinky-dink pawnshop, a dealer tells it straight: “The world is an evil place … Some of us make money off of that, and others get destroyed.”
This cutting, bleakly frank declaration in a late scene from Sidney Lumet’s final film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” offers a thesis to the films for this month. In these detours into heavily male underworlds, the standard ideals of brotherhood — loyalty, strength, bravery — are probed and ultimately perverted.
These films can be extreme, but they also reflect the realities of any human drama or system that falls, all too familiarly, to corruption.
‘Election’ (2005)
Stream it on Tubi.
You might appreciate Johnnie To’s film most immediately for its stylish portrait of mob politics, flitting effortlessly between formal elegance and sleek, kinetic energy. But it’s the film’s sly, seemingly scattered construction of a larger allegory — about the violence of power and the traditions that obscure it — that elevates this under-sung entry in the genre.
In Hong Kong’s Triad mafia, a new chairman is elected every year to oversee a vast mob network. When briberies and beefs complicate the latest transition of power, a chaotic search for the dragon baton — a symbol that legitimizes the election of the new chairman — ensues.
Getting lost amid the complex web of shifting and conflicting loyalties is almost inevitable, and perhaps the point. To’s film is a brutal statement about the sham rituals and appearances of democracy, not only in a criminal underground where bruised fists and power-hungry men rule, but in an ordinary society where there’s money to be made.
‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ (2007)
Stream it on PlutoTV.
Almost every Philip Seymour Hoffman performance is arguably an all-timer, but here is a lesser-celebrated one that can go toe-to-toe with any of his others. (You might say the same about the work of the director Sidney Lumet, who capped off his monumental career with this film.)
The gradual unraveling of Hoffman’s Andy, an executive who organizes the robbery of his parents’ jewelry store, is the story of the film’s bleak brilliance. What starts as perhaps a moderately inventive crime drama — repeatedly showing the days before and after the heist from multiple perspectives — descends into a death spiral about an American family.
Andy recruits his brother, Hank (Ethan Hawke), for this supposedly foolproof robbery that goes wrong, but what their fiasco soon exposes is a portrait of ordinary malaise, buried resentments and broken masculinity. There is almost an absurdism to the brothers’ desperation, yet also a total plausibility that reveals how closely bitterness and explosive violence lurks underneath the surface for people whose lives simply don’t add up.
‘King of New York’ (1990)
Stream it on Tubi.
There are times when “King of New York” feels almost as if the director Abel Ferrara is going ballistic on a Batman movie. There is a distinctly pulpy seediness to his vision of the city, a Gotham-esque binary between the gilded upper class and, below that, a cesspool of unrepentant murder and hedonism.
After a long prison stint, the mob leader Frank White (Christopher Walken) returns as if he’s a coldblooded vampire set loose; in the dark of the night, he somberly enacts a killing campaign of every rival gang and tries to recoup blood money to fund a hospital for the poor. By turns wild, wistfully austere and totally magnetic, Walken is a gangster Robin Hood with a death wish.
For all of the film’s grimy histrionics, a tone of cynicism rings true. This depiction of what’s going on in the gutters is the result of total moral disarray across a broken system: crooked politicians, viciously unscrupulous cops, bloodthirsty gangsters and an uneven racial hierarchy across it all.
‘Animal Kingdom’ (2010)
Stream it on Tubi.
The criminal world is an ecosystem of violence but also balanced order, where the strong sit atop and the weak might only survive with their help.
So who, exactly, are the strong ones here? That question sits at the heart of David Michod’s Australian crime thriller. After his mother dies of a heroin overdose, the teenage Joshua (James Frecheville) goes to stay with his grandmother (Jacki Weaver), who serves as the matriarch to a family of bank robbers (with Joel Edgerton as the ringleader).
The film never really shows their operation, instead focusing on the fallout of a sudden killing and the simmering anxiety as the gang runs from law enforcement (led by Guy Pearce) and, eventually, one another. Shifting loyalties bring plenty of surprises, but it’s the sense of melancholic dread that marks this film about how the seemingly strong slowly come undone.
‘Pusher’ (1996)
Stream it on Philo.
You might not be able to come up with a plainer premise for a movie about the criminal underground than Nicolas Winding Refn’s debut work: Frank (played by Kim Bodnia) is a small-time drug dealer who owes a big-time dealer a pot of money, so he goes looking desperately to every other dealer and user for said money.
But that simple structure, chronicled with an absorbingly bare-bones formal grit, paints a messy economy of Copenhagen’s black market. As Frank collects from everyone who owes him money, we slowly see a chain reaction of desperation — addicts who owe hustlers who owe dealers who owe distributors — that is as clumsy as it is bloody.
The low-budget grunge, along with Bodnia’s quietly despicable Frank, sells the film, which helped launch Refn’s career and two sequels he directed. But most of all, we have the film to thank for giving Mads Mikkelsen his debut role, a memorably crude sidekick (and the star of “Pusher II”) who has the word “respect” etched into the back of his shaved head.
The post Five Free Movies to Stream Now appeared first on New York Times.
