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:
Next on our list, Spike Lee’s grandiose take on the heist-movie. Another great pairing with The Town, this movie may be fleet-footed and lighter in tone, but it is no less hard-hitting and invigorating in execution. This is Spike at the absolute peak of his powers, masterfully orchestrating different tones and storylines into a unified, cohesive work of pop-entertainment.
Inspired by canonical bank-robbery movies like Dog Day Afternoon, but unlike that iconic film insofar that it is told mostly from the perspective of the police, who in this case is NYPD hostage negotiator, Keith Frazier, portrayed with ultra-suave bravado by Denzel Washington. The film picks up as a group of bank robbers—led by Clive Owen’s cryptic, cunning Dalton Russell—stick-up and take hostage the workers of a Manhattan bank owned by Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), a domineering, stoic man trying his best to keep hidden a shady past. Always three steps ahead of the viewer, the film manages to do the near-impossible: provide laughs, thrills, twists, and a high-stakes moral-quandary at its core, without ever giving the impression that it even broke a sweat.
