The Best Foreign Gangster Movies, Ranked

Hollywood has produced some of the cinema’s most incredible gangster movies, dating back to the Golden Age of the art form, when actors like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart helped define the form. If those pictures had one problem, it was the restrictions imposed upon them by the Hays code, which strictly defined their content. This is why many movie-going fanatics have turned to crime and gangster films produced outside North America to see things they wouldn’t see anywhere else.

Today, the Hays Code is a thing of the past, and America’s crime fiction has only improved since then. However, the quality of foreign-language gangster films has also improved. While these films are often overlooked due to the attention given to their American counterparts, they are every bit as violent, epic, and captivating, if not more so. Here are ten of the absolute best foreign language gangster pictures ever made.

10 Léon: The Professional Gave Audiences the Best of Two Worlds

Country of Origin: France

If a fan ever wondered what a Hollywood action film would be like if it was crossed with an international arthouse movie, look no further than Luc Besson’s Léon: The Professional. Although produced in English and starring notable actors like Gary Oldman and Natalie Portman (in her first role), this French-based production combines that country’s panache for introspection with the more American sensibility of over-the-top action sequences.

At its heart, Léon: The Professional is about the surprisingly heartwarming relationship between a highly efficient but naive hitman, played by Jean Reno, and Natalie Portman’s 12-year-old girl, Mathilda, who falls under his protection after several corrupt police officers come gunning for her family. The action scenes, while less frequent than if this had been an American film, are incredible, but Natalie Portman’s remarkable performance truly steals the movie.

9 El Mariachi Proved That Anyone Can Become a Filmmaker

Country of Origin: Mexico

The film that announced Robert Rodriguez as a filmmaker worth watching was the first entry in his Mexico trilogy, El Mariachi. The movie centers around a recently escaped prisoner looking for revenge on a local drug lord and a young musician following in his father’s footsteps as a Mariachi who mistakenly gets wrapped up in the former’s vendetta thanks to their similar-looking guitar cases.

In many ways, the making of El Mariachi is even more legendary than the movie itself. Created on a budget of just $7,000 and produced with largely amateur actors, Robert Rodriguez secured the necessary funding for the film by participating in a drug trial. Once it caught fire as an independent darling and hidden gem, El Mariachi held the record for the lowest-budget movie to gross $1 million at the box office for many years. It was only topped in 2003 by Tarnation, produced for a reported budget of just $218.

8 Rififi Teaches Audiences What It’s Like to be a Gangster

Country of Origin: France

Rififi is a French crime picture in which an aging criminal tries desperately to pull off one last jewel heist with the help of several other European gangsters. One of the best movies of the 1950s (and that’s saying something), Rififi was directed by Hollywood-blacklisted director Jules Dassin, who left America in the ’40s after being outed as a former communist.

The joke ultimately ended up being on America because, in France, Jules Dassin would create some of the most celebrated crime pictures ever made, best personified by Rififi. This film was so well researched that it was banned from several European countries because the nearly half-an-hour (and silent) burglary scene was so authentic that authorities worried it would teach audiences how to rob a store legitimately (or illegitimately, depending on ones point of view).

7 Fireworks Is One of the Most Stylish Crime Thrillers Of All Time

Country of Origin: Japan

When it comes to filmmakers who have made their bread and butter in the crime genre, they don’t come much cooler than Japan’s Takeshi “Beat” Kitano. In 1997, he created his calling card with the crime film Fireworks (or Hana-bi). The film tells the story of a retired cop who borrows money from the Yakuza to help pay for his sick wife’s cancer treatments. He has problems paying the loan off, which drags him into Japan’s criminal underworld.

When Fireworks premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, it took home the Golden Lion and has been heralded as a masterpiece ever since. While the film has abundant style, it’s one of the few that combines said style with an equally large amount of substance. The film made such an impression that it wound up on the legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa’s list of favorite movies before he passed. If that’s not a vote of confidence, nothing is.

6 A Better Tomorrow Wrote the Book on the Genre

Country of Origin: China

Speaking of style, filmmaker John Woo once had so much that the films he made in his native Hong Kong landed him on America’s cinematic radar. And while Woo would wind up making a couple of excellent action flicks in the States, nothing he’s made since then can match the quality of his initial batch of films, especially not the crime caper A Better Tomorrow, which follows a former Triad member trying to reconnect with his policeman brother.

A Better Tomorrow notably established the Hong Kong Triad genre, often called the Heroic Bloodshed genre or Hong Kong Blood Opera locally. As such, writing a book about Hong Kong cinema without mentioning this film would be impossible. That would be important enough to make this film worth watching, but combine that with the potent partnership of John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat, it’s a lethal combination that’ll keep fans glued to the edge of their seats the entire way through.

5 Infernal Affairs Is More Visceral In Its Original Form

Country of Origin: China

Most people have heard of The Departed, but not everyone necessarily knows it’s based on the Hong Kong crime saga Infernal Affairs. Both films share the same plot, and while Infernal Affairs might be a bit less gritty than Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning film, it’s still a great mob movie with a frenetic Hong Kong-style action pace revolving around an undercover cop infiltrating the Chinese Triad.

More of an action movie than a cool and calculated character study like The Departed turned out to be, Infernal Affairs spawned two sequels thanks to its surprisingly emotional plot and vibrant visuals as directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak. It might not have all the accolades that its remake claims, but it’s still every bit as powerful, if not more so.

4 Gomorrah Is a Brutal But Necessary Watch

Country of Origin: Italy

Unlike many modern crime pictures, Gomorrah does not seek to glamorize the gangster lifestyle. Instead, this film digs deep into the modern-day Casalesi Italian crime family, providing a detailed look at this crime syndicate from Naples operating out of southern Italy. The film is highly notable for its structure, which expertly weaves the tale of five separate individuals whose lives have all been touched by organized crime against the background of the historical Scampia feud.

Well over two hours long, Gomorrah is so willing to condemn the relics of the past from its own genre that it can sometimes become a demoralizing and brutal film to sit through. Martin Scorsese appreciated the despair and frankness prevalent throughout the movie so much that he agreed to let the film use his name in its advertising campaign in America to drum up more interest. If another filmmaker can “outdour” Marty, they must be doing something right.

3 A Prophet Defined the Modern-Day Crime Film

Country of Origin: France

If you require a thrilling gangster picture, look no further than this French feature in which a young man finds himself recruited by the Corsican Mafia while serving a prison sentence for attacking a police officer. Tahar Rahim plays the young man whose Islamic ties complicate his desire to become part of the Corsican-French culture.

Unbelievably gritty and hyper-detailed, A Prophet provides an incredible and modern depiction of criminal life. The movie especially shines when showcasing its realistic portrayal of prison, and Tahar Rahim delivers a memorable performance that conveys a remarkable amount of emotional depth. There’s a reason why so many critics consider this film a masterpiece; if one hasn’t seen it, now’s the perfect time to do so.

2 City of God Blurs the Lines Between Fiction and Reality

Country of Origin: Brazil

City of God is a unique film, if only because it’s one of the most celebrated Brazilian films ever produced. It also happens to be one of the best crime movies ever made. While gangster movies are usually seen from the perspective of either the cop or the criminal, City of God takes several points of view, the most important of which is that of the observer and photographer known as Rocket, who documents the rise and fall of the criminal under lords throughout the Cidade de Deus favela in Brazil.

Produced with a cast of primarily local civilians living in the favela where City of God was shot, the entire film feels more like you’re watching a documentary than a fictionalized crime picture. Loosely based on actual events, the film made such an impression upon release that director Robert Altman thought it might have been the best film he had ever seen. City of God is brutal, unflinching, and impossible to look away from.

1 Breathless Is One of the Most Influential Films Ever Made

Country of Origin: France

Jean-Luc Godard’s debut film, Breathless, remains one of cinematic history’s most essential and significant films. As the poster child for what became known as the French New Wave, Breathless discarded all commonly accepted cinematic language to develop its own and, in the process, became the most influential film of the 1960s.

Breathless is simultaneously a parody and homage to American gangster films. It stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as Michel, a charismatic but small-time crook on the run from the police in Paris. Along the way, he meets Jean Seberg’s Patricia, his American girlfriend. Through its handheld camerawork, location shooting, didactic sound, and one-of-a-kind editing technique, Breathless is the type of cinematic adventure that changes how a person looks at movies.