10 Great Gangster Movies You Probably Haven't Seen

Image via 20th Century Fox Published Aug 19, 2026, 7:08 AM EDT Jeremy has more than 2700 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels written by Stephen King, and plans to spend the next year or two getting through the author's 82,756 short stories and 105,433 novellas. Sign in to your Collider account You don’t have to be a particularly big fan of gangster movies to have likely seen a classic gangster movie in your time spent just generally engaging with film. Like, some of the most acclaimed movies of all time fit into this genre, as the likes of The Godfather (and its first sequel), Goodfellas, and Pulp Fiction all show. So much has already been written about those movies, and it’s safe to assume so much more will continue to be written about them as well. If you're after some lesser-known movies that involve the mob and/or organized crime in some capacity, then you're in the right place. These are some of the best gangster movies you probably haven’t seen, and like with any ranking that’s about lesser-known movies, here’s a pre-emptive “congratulations” if you have actually seen some or all of the films outlined below. 10 'Borsalino' (1970) Image via Paramount Pictures While it’s tonally a bit odd, Borsalino is mostly enjoyable, especially if you're there for the star power it offers. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon were two greats of French cinema, and both seemed to thrive especially well within the crime genre (the former’s best known for Breathless, and the latter’s probably best known for Le Samouraï), so seeing them play a pair of gangsters in this is fun. It’s set during the 1930s, and both men play small-timers who aspire to be, you know, big-timers and all that, but of course, that’s easier said/planned than actually done. Borsalino gets a bit less comedic as things go along, with the life of crime feeling a bit less fun, by design, and the shift being made from an almost buddy comedy to more of a traditional gangster drama. Still, most of the ride – though bumpy – is entertaining. 9 'Crime Wave' (1953) Image via Warner Bros. In 1985, there was a movie called Crime Wave, and a movie called Crimewave. Neither is this Crime Wave, though, despite there being a decent argument to be made that both Crime Wave (1985) and Crimewave (1985) are also underrated. The 1953 Crime Wave is more of a gangster movie, though, and so here it is. At the risk of making things even more confusing, it was first screened in the U.S. in 1954, but is being counted as a 1953 movie here because it was released that year in parts of Europe. It’s a cool film noir sort of movie, made on a fairly lean budget and with an even leaner runtime, clocking in at just 73 minutes all up. There’s a guy who’s on parole and is trying to get away from the whole organized crime thing, though others from his past (including his time in jail) catch up to him, and request help in further criminal activities. It’s the sort of plot that’s been done a bunch of times before, but it’s done well here… it’s probably just underrated because there are so many comparable movies from about the same era, so it gets buried under some of them, to some extent. 8 'Youth of the Beast' (1963) Image via Nikkatsu Youth of the Beast is a Japanese gangster film, so it’s about the Yakuza, essentially, and is one of a few such movies directed by Seijun Suzuki. It’s about a man who ends up in the middle of a war between two yakuza gangs, and then a whole lot of chaos ensues, maybe being like a gangster version of Yojimbo, and then 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars was reminiscent of both, but was a Western. Youth of the Beast is also easy to recommend if you're a fan of the similarly intense and chaotic Battles Without Honor and Humanity series. Few Seijun Suzuki movies are approachable in the traditional sense, but this one isn’t too hard to get into, and it gets overshadowed a little by some of his better-known films, like Tokyo Drifter and Branded to Kill. Youth of the Beast is also easy to recommend if you're a fan of the similarly intense and chaotic Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (to be fair, they're probably a bit underrated too, in the overall scheme of things). 7 'Machine-Gun Kelly' (1958) Image via American International Pictures Roger Corman directed so many movies, and produced even more, so Machine-Gun Kelly might seem like just another Roger Corman movie… actually, to some extent, it is. You get about what you'd expect out of this one, as it’s all very B-grade and it doesn’t win many (if any) points for originality, but you do have Charles Bronson here in an early starring role. Bronson is great, as can be expected, playing the character the title refers to, and trying to make it as a gangster who’s robbing banks early on, but then switches things up by organizing a kidnapping. In classic gangster movie fashion, things don’t really go to plan in Machine-Gun Kelly, and the downfall is all the point, really. “Crime doesn’t pay” and all that, unless you're making movies, in which case, “on-screen crime does pay.” 6 'The Roaring Twenties' (1939) Image via Warner Bros. Of all the classic era gangster movies that sometimes crossed over a bit with the whole film noir period, one of the best is The Roaring Twenties… it’s not really a film noir movie, though, admittedly. It came out before the decade where film noir, as a genre, was established, but obviously after the decade referred to in the title, with the film’s story technically beginning in the 1910s, just after World War I ended. The main characters are involved in a bootlegging business, and their whole enterprise grows (and later fluctuates) in power across the whole span of the 1920s. The Roaring Twenties is reliable, as a gangster movie of its era, but somehow a little better than most of its contemporaries. Things just really click here, and the caliber of the acting (James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart starring in something is always welcome) probably helps a lot, too. 5 'The Sicilian Clan' (1969) Image via 20th Century Fox Another French movie that starred Alain Delon, The Sicilian Clan is a heist movie as well as a gangster film, so it’s the best of a couple of worlds here. Crossover between both isn't the wildest thing in the world, though, since most heist movies involve the assembling of a gang of criminals, and if they're criminals beyond just being robbers, then there they are; they're in a gangster movie. Jean Gabin also stars in The Sicilian Clan, and he was another huge leading man in France. Anyway, as far as the story goes, this one involves the planning of a diamond heist, a younger gangster trying to become romantically involved with the daughter-in-law of an older gangster, and then the police doing what they can to thwart all the criminal activity. It does a lot for a movie that’s only about two hours long, and it’s also very cool with its style and stuff (okay, Delon probably helps the cool factor a great deal, too). 4 'Atlantic City' (1980) Louis Malle was right up there among the most versatile filmmakers of all time, having made a comedic Western (Viva Maria!), a depressing coming-of-age film (Au Revoir, les Enfants), and a movie about two guys just talking while having dinner (My Dinner with Andre). So, him having directed a romantic gangster film that’s also about getting old (Atlantic City) shouldn’t be ridiculously surprising, then, all things considered. It’s also a film that gives Burt Lancaster a great late leading role, though he did also have Local Hero and Field of Dreams after this, so it wasn’t quite a curtain call. He gets to play the sort of character he sometimes played back in the 1940s (those noir kind of roles), but just older, maybe a little like what Clint Eastwood got to do as the lead in Unforgiven, which was a way for him to do a distant thematic sequel to the roles he had when he was younger. 3 'Blood In, Blood Out' (1993) Image via Buena Vista Pictures Distribution Blood In, Blood Out (AKA Bound by Honor) is a massively ambitious crime movie, since it runs for more than three hours and uses that time to span a little over a decade’s worth of time. It’s about a handful of young men who are members of a Los Angeles street gang, and it more or less just explores how their lives are changed by some significant events. That’s what all stories are, really. Hmm. It’s hard to describe this one, because even if it does feel character-focused, there remains a lot of stuff that happens narratively in Blood In, Blood Out. The main thing is that it functions as something of a gangster film (at least criminal gangs are an important part of the whole premise), and that it’s also one of the most underrated movies of its decade for sure. 2 'A Prophet' (2009) Image via UGC Distribution Calling this one underrated might be more of a stretch than was the case for all the other movies here, yet A Prophet is still making it onto this ranking because even if lots of people say it’s really good, there aren’t quite enough people saying it’s really good. It’s in the top 500 on Letterboxd, for example, but has been watched by fewer viewers than the majority of heavy-hitters (and usual suspects) in that list. Narratively, A Prophet is about a man who falls in with a criminal gang while in prison, which drastically changes the course of his six-year sentence, to say the least. A Prophet has a fairly unique setting for a gangster movie, while still very much counting as one, albeit also standing out – and being definable – as one of the best prison movies of the 21st century so far. 1 'Gangs of Wasseypur' (2012) Image via Viacom18 Motion Pictures Released in two parts, but definitely being one whole movie, Gangs of Wasseypur feels a bit like watching the whole Godfather saga sped up, and in (mostly) chronological order. There’s a crime family battling another crime family over many years and generations, with the whole endless cycle of violence and revenge being what Gangs of Wasseypur dedicates its immense runtime to exploring. It’s a lot of fun, even if it’s very bleak at times. It wants to entertain, though, leading to some moments of dark comedy, and also quite a lot by way of action, at least by gangster movie standards. Gangs of Wasseypur is also noteworthy for being immensely unpredictable, taking lots of narrative beats and characters that might admittedly seem familiar at first, but then doing weird and not-so-expected things with them. Gangs of Wasseypur Release Date June 22, 2012 Runtime 321 Minutes Director Anurag Kashyap Writers Akhilesh Jaiswal, Anurag Kashyap, Sachin K. Ladia