Get the latest gossip

A Murderers’ Row of Hit Men on Film


Twelve essential movies about hired killers.

Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake starred in a series of stone-cold classic crime thrillers during World War II and just after — a period when shadows grew more jagged and anti-heroes more complex, giving birth to the rise of film noir. By creating a universe for the John Wick story — a secret cabal of hit men united by a string of special hotels and an international group known as the High Table — Stahelski has made his idea pay dividends over the course of a four-film franchise. A towering late-career masterpiece from that great chronicler of American masculinity gone rotten, Martin Scorsese, The Irishman is loosely based on a nonfiction book by Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses, and the life of Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro).

Get the Android app

Or read this on VULTURE