The 20 greatest gangster movies of all time, ranked

The Coen brothers bring their crime noir sensibilities to , a retro-gangster gem that wears its love of the genre on its sleeve. The film is loaded with references, subtle and overt, to the visuals and dialogue of the books and movies that influenced the sibling filmmakers—the works of Dashiell Hammett being a prime wellspring. Beautifully lensed in the noir tradition with an offbeat perspective by Barry Sonnenfeld, the gang power play plotline is secondary to a cast of the Coens’ signature quirky characters, here in mob dress, with a murderer’s row ensemble doing some of their best screen work, including Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, and Albert Finney.

With , Barry Levinson delivers a gangster drama packaged in the trappings of a lush period romance—one nearly as carnally charged as Warren Beatty’s previous entry, Bonnie and Clyde, but with less grit and more gloss. Sparks fly between Beatty’s Hollywood mob boss/Las Vegas visionary Bugsy Siegel and Annette Bening’s mob moll/failed starlet Virginia Hill. Siegel’s bone-deep vanity is eclipsed only by his capacity for unhinged violence, while Hill’s seductive allure is only exceeded by her cunning ambition. Even with some historical liberties, it’s note perfect, down to the glorious Ennio Morricone score.

Less concerned with the glamorous trappings of the organized crime world or its dynastic bent, follows gritty anti-hero Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) through a failed scheme, and into prison, where he’s marked for murder by a rival. A cunning but desperate escape ensues, followed by his scrambling bid to rise back to, as he puts it, “the top of the world.” Cagney is at his most ferociously psychopathic as a demented, mother-dependent hood. Simmering with tension, violence and betrayal at every turn, Raoul Walsh’s film delivers a unique portrayal of a mobster as a flailing, wounded animal on the run, lashing out in every direction.

Edward G. Robinson’s Rico Bandello arrives fully formed as an ambitious, calculating and bloodthirsty sociopath eager to do whatever it takes to reach the top of his hoodlum empire in . The flip side to the genre-establishing counterpart The Public Enemy, the film is a star-making turn for Robinson, who plays Rico as a character whose ruthless immorality is his central attraction. That makes it all the more shocking when the merest glimmer of human sentimentality—Rico’s inability to exterminate his oldest friend—surprises even him, tipping the dominoes that lead to Rico’s inevitable downfall.

Sergio Leone may have made his reputation on convention-flouting Italian Westerns, but his balletic approach to cinematic ultra-violence was also ideally suited to the gangster genre, as expressed in . While his sprawling epic had a dismal showing at the box office, its uncut European edit only gains in stature with the passage of time. The film’s multilayered plot is enhanced by Leone’s stunning visual artistry, even as it looks shockingly, unblinkingly at the brutality and sexual violence of its world. Once Upon A Time is elevated greatly by both Robert De Niro’s searing performance as Noodles and Ennio Morricone’s masterful score.

The first postmodern gangster film, leans heavily into sex and violence and the intersection where they meet in their star-crossed lovers’ pathologies. A gun isn’t just a gun when it comes to Warren Beatty’s Clyde and his frustrated passion for Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie. The film’s tone intentionally see-saws between near-slapstick and bloody brutality. And its criminal anti-heroes are portrayed as effortlessly cool, stylish, erotic, and all mixed up underneath. That mix was absolute catnip to the Baby Boomers who made the film a surprise monster hit, and it’s a big reason for Bonnie And Clyde’s enduring appeal to subsequent generations of iconoclasts and authority-defiers.

Along with Little Caesar, is the pre-Code sui generis that originated and defined the gangster genre for generations to come. The film is built around James Cagney’s brutal yet charismatic Tom Powers, who transcends his hardscrabble street origins through the grab-it-all wealth and status-by-intimidation of organized crime. Even as he delves deeper into the dark side of society, Powers tries to remain faithful to his disapproving family. His self-centered ambition and familial devotion endeared him to audiences and made him an anti-hero icon overnight. But lest viewers get ideas about the fruitfulness of crime, Tom’s precipitous downfall—he dies as roughly as he lived—provide Grace-of-God moral guidance for a film that remains a powerful template for criminal rises and falls.

is the gangster drama at its most coked-up. Brian De Palma’s taste for grand guignol-style cinema blends ideally with the genre here, as he dives headlong into the bloody business of crime in a way mob films of yore could never do. His characters snort up monstrous piles of blow to keep the film thrumming at a sweaty fever pitch, and capable of exploding at any moment. As Tony Montana, Al Pacino’s gonzo performance, voracious in all of Tony’s appetites and ever on the verge of batshit craziness, matches De Palma’s intentionally provocative, over-the-top-is-not-far-enough tone note for note.

easily tops the list of Martin Scorsese’s most broadly beloved films, and were it not for The Godfathers it would also be the greatest mob movie of them all. The story of Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill begins at street level, in the filmmaker’s signature style, following a guy from the neighborhood who finds his calling among career criminals. He wallows in the seductive glamour of his new world, including the unrepentant violence epitomized by his psychopathic pal Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), before realizing that his “family’s” only real loyalty is to ruthless expedience in the protection of its profits. Henry’s paranoic fall is even more dizzying than his rise, as perfectly expressed by Scorsese’s virtuosic mastery of kinetic cinematic imagery, unyielding commitment to authenticity and brilliant pop-rock needle drops.

There are countless arguments to be made about which installment of the greatest gangster epic ever committed to film is the superior, but why split hairs? As truly phenomenal as each portion of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo’s revered Corleone family saga may be, and gain in power from each other. Pulpy and Shakespearean, intimate and operatic, Michael Corleone’s devotional fall into the corruptive pull of his family’s criminal empire—via Al Pacino’s legend-making performance—is an all-too-human and, given its immigrant origins, particularly American tragedy. The tale is writ large with universal, generational appeal, yet it’s rendered personally with a sumptuous visual sense. Somehow, the story never loses sight of the violent, avaricious thrills that made the gangster genre so enduringly popular. And even the saga’s coda, the inferior but still formidable The Godfather Part Three, offers a potent capstone to the whole bloody mythos.