John Woo's first film has all the hallmarks of his later brand of violent, choreographed gunplay. A revenge actioner with Chow Yun Fat as Mark, who teams up with his imprisoned friend's brother, a cop, to defeat his previous bosses, the notorious yakuza crimelords. Action packed. find out more...

Coining the new term 'action noir' in Korea, director Kim Ji-woon follows up his extraordinary features A Quiet Family and A Tale Of Two Sisters with this blackly comic thriller. Lee Byeong-heon stars as sartorially elegant Sun-woo, a unique character with a curious lifestyle - he's not only the proprietor of a hotel bar but also the right-hand man to the powerful gang leader, Mr Kang. When Kang suspects that his beautiful young mistress Hee-soo might be messing around with another man, he enlis find out more...

With the swimming pools, drugs, girls and parties come a bunch of spoilt young brats who seem to take their cues from 'American History X' and black inner city gangster movies. They tattoo themselves, build their bodies, call their girls bitches, sell drugs, fight and use guns. Violence, drugs, language, this movie has them in bucketloads, even sex raises its head. Plotwise; headcase Jake owes lots of drug money to drug lord's son John and John kidnaps Jake's younger brother as a hostage. Kid br find out more...

1970s; Harlem hood Frank Lucas has hijacked the New York heroin business by dealing directly with the Chinese growers in SE Asia and importing large amounts of the drug inside the caskets of soldiers killed in Vietnam. However his nemesis, flamboyant, tenacious and unbribable narcotics cop Richie Roberts, is on his tail and is determined to bring him down. find out more...

When carrying out a hit, assassin Joe always makes use of the knowledge of the local population. On arriving in Bangkok he meets street-kid Kong, who becomes his primary aide. But when Kong is nearly killed, the young lad asks the killer to train him up in the deadly arts, and so, for the first time, Joe finds himself as mentor rather than murderer - an uncharacteristic act of compassion that may well cost him his life. A Hollywood remake of the superior Thai actioner, this is yet another film t find out more...

A well paced, beautifully crafted tale of a deaf and dumb hitman in the 'City Of Angels'. Well paced, though with a fairly basic plot, excellent action scenes, good cinematography and seamless editing, more reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai than John Woo, make this Hong Kong influenced offering from the 'Land Of Smiles' a superior offering. Watch it. find out more...

An all time classic 60s movie glamourising the real life story of the Barrow gang who terrorised the American South in the early 30s. 'Reclaiming the American gangster movie, after it had been stolen by the Nouvelle Vague, Penn's film was so successful (and so imitated) that it inevitably met with some grudging devaluation. But it's still great, half comic fairytale, half brutal fact, it reflects the essential ambiguity of its heroes by treading a no man's land suspended between reality and fant find out more...

So Solid Crew's Asher D plays Ricky, just released from a young offender's institution and returning home to Hackney. Though promising himself he'll go straight, Ricky hasn't bargained on his old friends and affiliations, nor indeed considered the ever growing reliance on crime within his neighbourhood. Before long he has become ensnared in an escalating cycle of violence from which there seems no escape. Ricky's adoring young brother, on the other hand, has so far avoided his idol's path, but h find out more...

Produced by Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and with unprecedented access, Cartel Land is an explosive look at the journeys of two modern-day vigilante groups and their shared enemy - the murderous Mexican drug cartels. In the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr. Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as "El Doctor", leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Meanwhile, in Arizona's Altar V find out more...

Lucky grows up in a South African township in the post-apartheid era and is caught between the desire to go university and the lure of easy money from violent crime.
A decade on an we see him as a struggling taxi-driver before his transformation into a businessman who uses violence to reclaim inner-city Joburg tenement blocks from the drug-dealers and hookers who inhabit them and from the rich white slum landlords who own them. Thus the ambitious gangster realises an aim of the revolution find out more...