This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ben Affleck’s Boston crime-opus The Town. In honor of its release, we bring you 14 other movies that you should add to your watchlist if you enjoyed this iconic addition to the Irish-American crime-drama. While not all these movies are centered around Bostonians, or even take place there, they all share strong thematic and stylistic ties that can be grouped under the loose umbrella terms of “heist” or “crime movie”. Now, without further ado:
Hopping across the pond for this next entry comes Matthew Vaughn’s energetic take on the British gangster film, Layer Cake. Vaughn cut his teeth producing fellow Brit Guy Ritchie’s smash-hits Lock, Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels and Snatch, before turning over to directing his debut.
With Layer Cake, Vaughn proved himself as a worthy successor to Guy Ritchie’s hyper-kinetic, comedic, rough-and-tumble style with a slightly more polished, less tongue-in-cheek London-set action-crime movie. Daniel Craig, in his first major leading role, plays an unnamed cocaine trafficker who runs a tight ship and refrains from partaking in any of the industry’s dirty business. We find him just as he has one foot out the door ready for retirement, when suddenly he is summoned by his boss, Jimmy, who informs him he must oversee the sale of one million ecstasy tablets from a lowlife criminal—which he soon discovers had stolen the ecstasy from a gang of Serbian war criminals. He is also to search for an associate of Jimmy’s daughter, the drug-addicted Charlie, who has disappeared. As Craig’s character has no choice but to adhere, he finds himself slipping further and further into the areas of the drug business he had painstakingly worked his whole career to avoid. The movie trades in efficient storytelling, wise-cracking dialogue, brutal violence, and a star-making turn from a pre-Bond Daniel Craig.
