The gangster movie is as indelible an American art form as the blues, an Andy Warhol print of Elvis Presley or the kind of football you play with your hands. We see something of ourselves, our American character, in these charming criminals: their ruthlessness in pursuing total domination in whatever domain they so choose; their love of unbreakable ethical codes and the way they don’t see murder or extortion as anathema to such ways of life; their emphasis on the centrality of family and their fierce, secretly fearful tribalism. Gangster films show us to us, while simultaneously allowing us to cluck our tongues in moral superiority when the credits roll. These are, of course, stories of immigrants—foundational to America’s conception of itself. Conversely, Italian gangster films offer audiences an opportunity to see these stories of organized crime in their original elements. —Corey Beasley
Netflix currently has nearly 100 different titles from more than a dozen different countries categorized as gangster movies available to stream. You can also check out the current Best Movies on Netflix or all our streaming guides.
Here are the 11 Best Gangster Movies on Netflix:
1. The IrishmanYear: 2019
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Jesse Plemons, Anna Paquin
Rating: R
Peggy Sheeran (Lucy Gallina) watches her father, Frank (Robert De Niro), through a door left ajar as he packs his suitcase for a work trip in this 2019 Martin Scorsese film and Netflix’s best original movie. In go trousers and shirts, each neatly tucked and folded against the luggage’s interior. In goes the snubnose revolver, the ruthless tool of Frank’s trade. He doesn’t know his daughter’s eyes are on him; she’s constitutionally quiet, and remains so throughout most of their interaction as adults. He shuts the case. She disappears behind the door. Her judgment lingers. The scene plays out one third of the way into The Irishman, named for Frank’s mob world sobriquet, and replays in its final shot, as Frank, old, decrepit and utterly, hopelessly alone, abandoned by his family and bereft of his gangster friends through the passage of time, sits on his nursing home bed. Maybe he’s waiting for Death, but most likely he’s waiting for Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin), who disowned him and has no intention of forgiving him his sins. Peggy serves as Scorsese’s moral arbiter. She’s a harsh judge: The film takes a dim view of machismo as couched in the realm of mafiosa and mugs. When Scorsese’s principal characters aren’t scheming or paying off schemes in acts of violence, they’re throwing temper tantrums, eating ice cream or in an extreme case slap-fighting in a desperately pathetic throwdown. This scene echoes similarly pitiful scenes in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel and Rashomon: brawls between wannabe roughs afraid of brawling, but forced into it by their own bravado. The Irishman spans the 1950s to the early 2000s, the years Frank worked for the Bufalino crime family, led by Russell (Joe Pesci, out of retirement and intimidating). “Working” means murdering some people, muscling others, even blowing up a car or a building when the occasion warrants. When disengaged from gangland terrorism, he’s at home reading the paper, watching the news, dragging Peggy to the local grocer to give him a beatdown for shoving her. “I only did what you should,” the poor doomed bastard says before Frank drags him out to the street and crushes his hand on the curb. The Irishman is historical nonfiction, chronicling Sheeran’s life, and through his life the lives of the Bufalinos and their associates, particularly those who died before their time (that being most of them). It’s also a portrait of childhood cast in the shadow of dispassionate brutality, and what a young girl must do to find safety in a world defined by bloodshed. —Andy Crump
2. The DepartedYear: 2006
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga
Rating: R
At times truly funny and at others brutally violent, Martin Scorsese’s ambitious gangster flick spends equal time exploring the deceitful inner workings of the Boston Special Investigation Unit and it’s pro-crime counterpart, the Frank Costello-led Irish mafia. The director’s first gangster film to be set in Boston won him his first Best Picture Award at the Oscars. Featuring an all-star cast in the likes of Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson, the gangster drama, a remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, upholds the optimum qualities of a classic Scorsese picture: style, morality and grit.—David Roark
3. Reservoir DogsYear: 1992
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Stars: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Steve Buscemi, Lawrence Tierney, Edward Bunker, Quentin Tarantino
Rating: R
Reservoir Dogs’ debut at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival launched not only the career of one Quentin Tarantino but an American indie genre unto itself characterized by extreme violence, profane dialogue, nonlinear storytelling and a curated soundtrack. Many have tried, but none of his imitators has achieved the visual and aural poetry at work in Tarantino’s oeuvre, particularly his magnum opus Pulp Fiction, upon whose release in 1994 newly minted fans went back to discover the aftermath of Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Brown, Mr. Orange, Mr. Pink and Mr. White’s botched diamond heist (but not the heist itself). This is where it all began. —Annlee Ellingson
4. The Raid: RedemptionYear: 2011
Director: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian
Rating: R
When future generations look back upon the beginning of the 21st century and seek a way to understand the claustrophobia and fear that defined so much of our popular media of the time, let them look upon The Raid and pump their fists in the spirit of existential dread. Essentially one extended action set-piece, paced with super-human precision to both incite and then maximally exploit one’s heightened dopamine levels, The Raid leaves no headspace for hesitation—once you’re in, you’re at its mercy, and the film’s only relief awaits at the top of an apartment block ruled by one of Jakarta’s scrappiest, psychopathic-iest crime bosses. The Raid is what martial arts cinema looks like in our young century: bleak, dystopian and hyper-violent. This is the talisman to ward off all thoughts of desensitized audiences, and desensitizing cinema. Only its sequel, The Raid 2: Barendal could redefine “relentless” with as much blatant disregard for the exigencies of preserving one’s flesh. —Dom Sinacola
5. The Raid 2Year: 2014
Director: Gareth Evans
Stars: Iko Uwais, Tio Pakusadewo, Arifin Putra, Oka Antara
Rating: R
Though its full title is The Raid 2: Berandal, Gareth Evans’ sequel to his 2011 beat-to-a-pulp-a-thon, The Raid: Redemption, could just as easily be called The Raid: Unfettered. While the hyper-violent martial arts maiming moments will elicit about the same number of appreciative chuckles as the first, in his new film, Evans has cast off the spatial and temporal constraints that so defined his earlier effort. The Raid: Redemption can be viewed as a single, extended action set piece. Shorn of pretty much everything else but the action, the plot unfolds in a brisk 101 minutes as an elite police unit tries to dislodge a crime lord from his 15-story, henchman-infested apartment building (and then tries to survive when the attempt goes awry). Meanwhile, The Raid 2 spans more than three years and spreads the pummeling, slashing and occasional hammer-time throughout myriad locations. (The film puts on about 50 minutes in the process.) As a result, Evans’ latest unwittingly serves as the converse of the adage, “Less is more.” More, it turns out, is indeed less—though not by much, and not to an extent that is likely to bother fans of the original. In fact, though the addition of “extras” like multiple locations, a larger cast of non-fodder characters and oh, actual dialogue, makes The Raid 2 much less unique a film than its predecessor, it still registers as a pretty vibrant entry into the Yakuza genre. —Michael Burgin
6. American Hustle
Year: 2013
Director: David O. Russell
Stars: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner
Rating: R
There’s always a risk in any “period piece” that a director’s obsession with the style and atmosphere of a different era will overwhelm the story. In those cases, a gaudy exterior is all that stands between the viewer and his or her realization that the dolled-up narrative playing out on screen is hollow at the core. In the case of American Hustle, though, director David O. Russell had more than just some styling ’70s clothes, retro tunes, and at least five incidences of amazing hair; he had Christian Bale, and Bradley Cooper, and Amy Adams, and Jennifer Lawrence—four of the most exciting actors on the planet. Those are some serious weapons, and they can account for the odd flaw or two. The screenplay, re-written by Russell from Eric Warren Singer’s draft that had been around Hollywood for years, centers on the con artist Irving Rosenfeld (Bale). He’s a shambling, mumbling grifter without a hint of self-awareness, and his only real vanity is his hair, which is parted and somehow pasted onto his bald dome, creating the world’s worst—and best—combover. Bale being Bale, he disappears into the role until you forget he’s there at all, and under his care, Rosenfeld becomes a likable swindler. (It’s also the first evidence since American Psycho that yes, Bale can do funny.) Rosenfeld’s operation goes from small to large when he meets Sydney Prosser (Adams), a woman who uses a British alter-ego as an escape from a boring life, and who, as far as I could tell, never wore a dress or blouse that even attempted to cover the middle of her chest. The pair are blissfully in love as they steal money from suckers in a hazy investment scam (again, details aren’t foremost on Russell’s to-do list), and there are only two problems. For those lovers of ‘70s cinema who miss the gritty, realist approach of directors like Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson and Robert Altman, I’m sorry to say that American Hustle isn’t your fix. Russell gives his characters all the proper adornments, and the buildings and streets generally look period-correct, but there’s a very modern gloss on this movie that gives it the slick feel of a ’70s-themed costume party rather than the original item. This is a film to be enjoyed for its eccentric performances; a hyper, engrossing dramedy of relationships. It may not benefit you to look too deep, but the truth is that Russell and his excellent cast have made the surface so appealing that it won’t even cross your mind. —Shane Ryan
7. Donnie BrascoYear: 1997
Director: Mike Newell
Stars: Al Pacino, Johnny Depp, Michael Madsen, Bruno Kirby, James Russo, Anne Heche
Rating: R
Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco innovated the gangster movie, mishmashing it with the undercover cop movie and focusing on a less-famous crime family, the Bonannos, one of the mafia’s Five Families of New York City in the 1970s. In the lead role, Johnny Depp delivers a prevailing performance, hashing out a moral dilemma as the undercover Donnie Brasco. —David Roark
8. Headshot Year: 2017
Director: Timo Tjahjanto, Kimo Stamboel
Stars: Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Sunny Pang, Very Trui Yulisman
Rating: R
Anyone familiar with the tropes of this kind of flick can pretty easily guess that Ishmael (Iko Uwais) is a veritable killing machine, a man bred to wreck any poor bastard fool enough to tangle with him. The film takes his backstory beyond the edges of obviousness, though, eventually landing somewhere in the same neighborhood as movies like Louis Leterier’s Unleashed (a.k.a. Danny the Dog), where childhood innocence is tied to adult barbarity. Headshot is surprisingly melancholic, an actioner built to break hearts as easily as Uwais breaks bones, characters paying for the crimes of their past with their lives in the present. In several instances, innocent people end up paying, too: Lee’s thugs hijack a bus on its way to Jakarta, intending on finding Ishmael. When they realize he isn’t aboard, they murder the other passengers and burn the evidence, which just adds to Ishmael’s moral onus. Odds are that you’re not tuning into Headshot for the story, of course. The good news is that the film delivers in the ass-kicking department. The better news, perhaps, is that Tjahjanto and Stamboel have outdone Gareth Evans’ The Raid 2’s bloated fusion of story and action. Headshot clocks in at only 118 minutes and spaces out narrative beats and beatings beautifully, developing the harrowing truth of Ishmael’s upbringing without either belaboring the point or denying the audience the thrill of unhinged but precisely choreographed martial arts violence. Broad swaths of the action movie canon are fist-pumping shindigs that celebrate good guys serving bad guys their just desserts. In Headshot, as in the films of Evans, the action snatches the breath out of our lungs. The end of each fight relieves us of our ratcheting anxiety. Coupling that dynamic with the emotional substance of Ishmael’s existential woe makes the film a soul-rattling, hand-wringing affair made with Tjahjanto and Stamboel’s daringly aggressive sense of craft. You’ll nearly wish that more filmmakers shot action movies the way this duo does—but your nerves probably couldn’t take it if they did.—Andy Crump
9. The Night Comes for UsYear: 2018
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Stars: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Sonny Pang
Rating: NR
While Gareth Evans confounded fans of The Raid movies by giving them a British folk horror film (but a darn good one) this year, Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us scratches that Indonesian ultra-violent action itch. Furiously. Then stabs a shard of cow femur through it. Come for the violence, The Night Comes for Us bids you—and, also, stay for the violence. Finally, leave because of the violence. If that sounds grueling, don’t worry, it is. You could say it’s part of the point, but that might be projecting good intentions on a film that seems to care little for what’s paving the highway to hell. It’s got pedal to metal and headed right down the gullet of the abyss. It’s also got the best choreographed and constructed combat sequences of the year, and plenty of them, and they actually get better as the film goes along. There’s a scene where Joe Taslim’s anti-hero protagonist takes on a team inside a van, the film using the confines to compress the bone-crushing, like an action compactor. Other scenes are expansive in their controlled chaos and cartoonish blood-letting, like Streets of Rage levels, come to all-too-vivid life: the butcher shop level, the car garage level and a really cool later level where you play as a dope alternate character and take on a deadly sub-boss duo who have specialized weapons and styles and—no, seriously, this movie is a videogame. You’ll forget you weren’t playing it, so intensely will you feel a part of its brutality and so tapped out you’ll feel once you beat the final boss, who happens to be The Raid-star Iko Uwais with a box-cutter. It’s exceptionally painful and it goes on forever. Despite a storyline that’s basically just an excuse for emotional involvement (Taslim’s character is trying to protect a cute little girl from the Triad and has a lost-brotherhood bit with Uwais’s character) and, more than that, an easy way to set up action scenes on top of action scenes, there’s something about the conclusion of The Night Comes For Us that still strikes some sort of nerve of pathos, despite being mostly unearned in any traditional dramatic sense. Take it as a testament to the raw power of the visceral: A certain breed of cinematic action—as if by laws of physics—demands a reaction. —Chad Betz
10. AvengementYear: 2019
Director: Jesse V. Johnson
Stars: Scott Adkins, Craig Fairbrass, Nick Moran
Rating: NR
The second of three films directed by Jesse V. Johnson released in 2019, Avengement is as crystalline, as empirically precise, as micro-budget VOD martial arts action can aspire. With that kind of prolificacy, a journeyman director’s bound to do something right–which would be a valid assessment, were everything Johnson’s done not so undeniably solid. Thanks goes, of course, to Johnson’s muse, Vicious Beefcake Scott Adkins, a flawlessly sculpted humanoid so squarely planted in Johnson’s sweet spot–melodramatic, archly brutal action cinema with enough wit and heart to leave a bruise–a Johnson film without him as the protagonist doesn’t quite feel fully realized. Look only to Triple Threat, Avengement’s 2019 predecessor, to yearn for what could have been, mollified by a scene in which Adkins body slams a sedan going at least 40 mph. Triple Threat boasts three writers and a cavalcade of international action cinema stars, from Iko Uwais and Tony Jaa, to Tiger Chen and Michael Jai White (still in decent shape, but so outclassed by Adkins and his peers’ athleticism he seems pretty much immobile), while in Avengement Johnson works from his own script, winnowing the plot to a series of increasingly higher stakes brawls as wronged nobody Cain (Adkins) makes his bloody way through the criminal organization (led by his brother, no less) that left him to rot in prison. As is the case with Savage Dog and The Debt Collector (both on Netflix), Avengement thrives on the preternatural chemistry between director and star, the camera remarkably calm as it captures every amazing inch of Adkins in motion, beating the living shit out of each chump he encounters, Adkins just as aware of how best to stand and pose and flex to showcase his body. Charming character actors cheer from the sidelines; the plot functions so fundamentally we hardly realize we care about these characters until we’ve reached a satisfying end at their sides. Perhaps Scott Adkins is a better dramatist than we’ve come to expect from our kinetic stars anymore. Perhaps we’ve set our expectations too low. –Dom Sinacola
11. The Debt CollectorYear: 2018
Director: Jesse V. Johnson
Stars: Scott Adkins, Tony Todd, Michael Paré, Louis Mandylor, Selina Lo, Vladimir Kulich
Rating: NR
Playing out like an escalating series of boss battles throughout L.A.’s seedier side, impossibly dependable action director Jesse V. Johnson’s The Debt Collector follows a cash-strapped Iraq-vet-turned-martial-arts-instructor, French (Johnson mainstay Scott Adkins), trying to keep his dojo afloat by making a few collection runs for a local mobster (Vladimir Kulich). As French learns about the vocation of sleazebag-on-sleazebag violence alongside perpetually clammy Sue (Louis Mandylor), a long-time loanshark enforcer more than willing to let French do all the work (i.e., beating the bejeezus out of dips who owe their boss money), Johnson compiles a surprisingly broad glimpse of a City of Angels that’s gotten used to feeling desperate, palm trees limning a world greased with intimidation and built on casual violence. As such, every encounter—in which French pummels increasingly unpummelable human edifices, whatever room they fight within just torn to pieces—could be French’s last, the moral implications of his job catching up to him with every shattered jaw or devastated collar bone. Choreographed by Luke LaFontaine, the battles within lack the grace of many of Johnson’s outings with Adkins, but that’s probably intended: Pulling from ’90s buddy action flicks and inching at a sweaty homage that lands somewhere between Tony Scott and Luc Besson, Johnson can’t help but capture Adkins in motion with an intuition, pace and sense of place that lifts The Debt Collector from VOD time-filler to yet another microbudget triumph care of one of best action auteurs we’ve got working right now. —Dom Sinacola