Crime Film - Subgenres

Subgenres

Crime films may fall under several different subgenres. These include:

• Crime comedies - A hybrid of crime and comedy films. Mafia comedies look at organized crime from a comical standpoint. Humor often comes from the incompetence of the criminals or dark comedy. Examples include Analyze This, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, In Bruges, Mafia!and Tower Heist.

• Crime thrillers - Thrillers in which crime plays a large part. Examples include Untraceable, Silence of the Lambs, Heat, Seven, Witness, Memories of Murder, and Running Scared.

• Film noir - A genre popular in the 1940s and 1950s often fall into the crime and mystery genres. Private detectives hired to solve a crime are in such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Chinatown (1974). Neo-noir refers to modern films influenced by film noir such as Sin City.

• Heist films - These films deal with a group of criminals attempting to perform a theft or robbery, as well as the possible consequences that follow. Heist films that are lighter in tone are called "Caper films". Examples include The Killing, Oceans 11, Dog Day Afternoon, and Reservoir Dogs.

• Hood films - Films dealing with African-American urban issues and culture. They do not always revolve around crime, but often criminal activity features heavily in the storyline. Examples include Menace II Society and Boyz n the Hood.

• Legal dramas - Not usually concerned with the actual crime so much as the trial in the aftermath. A typical plot would involve a lawyer trying to prove the innocence of his or her client. Examples include 12 Angry Men and A Time To Kill.

• Mob films - Films which focus on characters who are involved seriously with the Mafia. Notable mob films include: Goodfellas, The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America, Bugsy, Little Caesar, The Untouchables, The Public Enemy, and Scarface.

• Mystery films - Films which focuses on the efforts of the detective, private investigator or amateur sleuth to solve the mysterious circumstances of a crime by means of clues, investigation, and clever deduction

• Police procedural - Have remained a mainstay with He Walked By Night (1948), In the Heat of the Night (1967), Madigan (1968), and The French Connection (1971).

• Heroic bloodshed - a Hong Kong action cinema crime film genre

• Mumbai underworld - an Indian cinema crime film genre