Fictional horror movies scare us until we leave the theater.
True crime dramas follow us home because they happened once to someoneor so they say.
Heists, abuses of power, murders, and multiple murders.
Hollywood loves crime and all the ill-gotten bootie it brings.
They are cautionary tales with real-life consequences, and dramas too sordid for mixed company.
In the Golden Age, stories of gangland thugs came with promises of being ripped from todays papers.
Every robbery is a drama.
Each public scandal is a potential movie trailer.
Every human tragedy is a closeup.
Here are some of the best films that took their plots from schemes attempted in real life.
Zodiac (2007)
Directed byDavid Fincher,Zodiacis as exhilarating as it is frustrating.
The Zodiac Killer case, which terrorized late 1960s San Francisco, has never been closed.
Yet his identity remains an unsolved mystery.
The movie captures the feel of a terrified California, never knowing when the next victim would be chosen.
The slow narrative burn is incremental, calculated, and never plodding.
Fincher, screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and producer Bradley J. Fischer also conducted their own investigation into the murders.
The results are admirably close to the exasperating reality of crime procedures.
Some suspects get away with inconceivable crimes.
All the cop movie cliches now taken for granted were invented in this motion picture classic.
It was the first sniff to hook the movie-going public on Hollywoods war on drugs.
To experience the dangers of policework first-hand, Friedkin went on busts with the real-life Popeye Doyle during shooting.
For his next film,The Exorcist(1973), the director would go to hell and back.
Goodfellas (1990)
Goodfellas, directed byMartin Scorsese, is the gangster genres greatest riches-to-rat story.
Joe Pesci plays Tommy DeVito (real name Tommy Two Gun DeSimone), for everything but laughs.
Scorsese makes crime palpably exhilarating.
These are street-level gangsters hijacking low-level loot until something bigger comes along.
Scorsese knows how to make even the most egregious villainy fun, however fleetingly.
The audience never forgets, however, that good times never make it to the closing credits.
The horror film genre would never be the same after its intensely morbid fascination with details.
Hitchcocks seminal work was inspired by author Robert Blochs 1959 novelPsycho, but only for speculation.
The details of Geins crimes are condensed for universal fear, and only imagined as an ongoing event.
What mother could be prouder?
Ive earned everything Ive got.
Woodward didnt expect much from his assignment on the break-in at the Watergate Hotel complex.
Even if it was home to the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a burglary didnt seem like big news.
Mysterious shootings were reported.
Then the Son of Sam identified himself in boastful letters toNew York Daily Newscolumnist Jimmy Breslin.
Satanic doodles appeared encoded into the notes.
No one wanted to be caught alone in New York or its boroughs.
They barely braved Yankee Stadium to cheer the New York Yankees to the 1977 World Series.
Women with dark hair avoided the shadows of parked cars.
Men with long dark hair covered it.
Lovers Lanes were deserted.
A serial killer was hunting strangers.
Spike LeesSummer of Samdoes not follow the investigation, and has no use for the killer David Berkowitz.
Kerrigan won the silver medal at the Olympics.
Harding placed eighth.I, Tonyais an indirect celebration of the cost of athletic theft.
M (1931)
Fritz LangsMcommands many distinctions.
The German production invented serial killer movies and police procedurals.
It may also be the creepiest film ever made.
Possibly due to the expressionistic projection of a community paralyzed in fear, and its frightening felonious underworld.
It could be Peter Lorres performance.
His Hans Beckert cant help being the monster he is.
The biggest reasonMis the creepiest is the subject: a series of murdered children.
The most disturbing distinction comes from the source material.
If not specifically modeled on The Vampire of Dusseldorf, Peter Kurten, those devastating crimes did still occur.
Randy Newman was so affected byM, he composed the unsettling In Germany Before the War.
Mfills the viewer with dread, elongating each wait until the inevitable becomes unbearable.
Imagined horrors permeate the peripheral visions of the minds eye as vital scenes cut moments too soon.
Sunlight illuminates a lost balloon, freed from innocent fingers.
Interplay between shadow and light casts judgment on figures looming near Wanted posters.
The film offers no respite.
He never lost a bet.
Rothstein was also called Mr. Big, The Big Bankroll, and The Fixer.
His biggest fix was the 1919 World Series.
It rocked the nation as the Black Sox Scandal.
Baseball is the American pastime, beloved, respected, and above all, trusted.
Even left-handed Shoeless Joe Jackson (D.B.
Only Rothstein and the audience get payoffs.
Theron dissociates years of childhood and adult abuse to channel a clear path toward redemptive darkness.
She was sentenced to death and executed in 2002.
The jury acquitted Theron, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role.
Friends came to see the body, but no one reported it, and she lay there for days.
Directed by Tim Hunter from a screenplay by Neil Jimenez,Rivers Edgeunravels the confusion of the community.
The school psychiatrists couldnt.
The media questioned the soul of American youth.
He killed his own lover, and now lives with a sex doll, Ellie, hassle free.
Torn by the knowledge, Matt (Keanu Reeves) is overwhelmed by either reality.
His daily life is a nightmare already.
Because he has no emotions to show, no one believes Matt at school.
The drifting home invaders chasing small scores appear remorseless to a sociopathic degree.
The adaptation does nothing to gloss over this perception.
Director Richard Brooks attempts to capture the grim reality with absolute honesty.
Actor John Forsythe was a lookalike for real-life investigator Alvin Dewey.
Robert Blake resembles Perry Smith, and Scott Wilson could pass for Richard Hickok.
They would certainly be pulled aside in a lineup.
The murder is reenacted inside the familys house.
The result is the most fulfilling testimony of unexplainable motivation ever presented in cinemas open forum.
You are what you are in this world, Lucas believes.
Either youre somebody, or you aint nobody.
The film is filled with former somebodies, starting with Bumpys funeral.
Who is going to rat him out?
Roberts is set on taking down mob rule.
Lucas is a student of mob rules, like killing cops is bad for business.
The film also gives Gene Wilder a repressive tour de force as hostage Eugene Grizzard.
After the Barrow Gang steals his car, Eugenes false bravado leaks into something worse, his real job.
Grizzard and his fiance bond with the gang until Bonnie sees only darkness in his chosen profession.
The humor in the subtle foreshadowing adds to the shock of the endings cinema-changing overkill.
Future horror master Stephen King kept a scrapbook on the young desperados when he was a kid.
Kit is no manipulating sociopath, and Holly is not a vapid baton-twirler.
Malick does not romanticize the pair, or paint them as societys children.
They wanted kicks and cash.
Richard Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) spent a lifetime perfecting murder.
He was never a made man.
The Iceman takes mob contracts because he is an entrepreneurial serial killer accruing 100 to 350 deaths.
He keeps that life secret.
He writes a poem for his daughters 16th birthday party.
He is a versatile administer of death.
The community was traumatized, demanding answers, begging for action.
Albert DeSalvo, an inmate at a state mental hospital, confessed to the murders in 1965.
Reporters Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Coles four-partRecord Americancoverage gave the confessed serial killer a title.
Directed by Richard Fleischer,The Boston Stranglerwas loosely based on the 1966 book by Gerold Frank.
The film was released a few years after DeSalvo was convicted, and the case closed.
The expected sensationalism is unleashed in a psychological study from an inexperienced Hollywood.
Armand Assante parodied the gambling legend inThe Marrying Manin 1991.
Benjamins killer hit list spoke for itself.
He falls in love with Virginia Hill (Annette Bening) and creates cinematic history.
It is an eye-popping love story.
Sonny Wortzik is one in a string of iconic parts forAl Pacino.
It was Sonny and Salvatore Naturiles (John Cazale) first and last heist.
The robbery caused a stir in the city.
Every local TV news broadcast covered it.
Crowds gathered along Avenue P. Radio stations played requests from the trapped thieves.
The Best Original Screenplay Oscar-winner captures the thrill of the underdogs desperate chaos.
Heroes are made by delivering pizza, legends born by throwing marked bills at sweating spectators.
Violent, suspenseful, and packed with consistently unexpected humor, it is the best true crime film.
