Browse Movies : 2003 : Crime

In the explosive action-thriller "S.W.A.T." starring Samuel L. Jackson and Colin Farrell, and inspired by the '70s television series, Farrell portrays Jim Street, an L.A.P.D. officer whose recent demotion to a desk job leaves him desperate for a second chance to don the elite S.W.A.T. uniform. That break comes when team commander Hondo (Samuel L. Jackson) is assigned to recruit and train five top-notch officers for a new Special Weapons and Tactics unit (S.W.A.T.).

After a fight with her coked-up boyfriend Marcus, Alex leaves a party to go home. She never gets there; instead she's raped in a desolate tunnel. Her angry boyfriend, and her buddy Pierre decide to take justice into their own hands and hunt down the rapist themselves.

Focuses on Filomena Capadscio, the matriarch of a family who is abruptly visited by tragedy. Filomena's husband and two sons are brutally murdered by the sons of Firmino Santos Guerra. Thirty years earlier, Filomena had been engaged to Santos Guerra but left him before their wedding to marry his rival Borges Capadscio. The result of this union filled Santos Guerra with rage and promise to someday exact revenge on the newly married couple. Filomena buries her husband and sons and begins to set plans to have revenge against the Santos Guerra family. She brings together her three daughters (Maria Francisca, Maria Rosa and Maria Pia) and sends them off into the backlands of Brazil to locate and hire three ruthless killers. Maria Francisca has to find the gunman known as Zi das Cobras, who has not spoken to a woman since the death of his mother. Maria Rosa looks for Chief Tensrio, a backwoods cop who is also a knife specialist, and convince him to break the laws he defends. Maria Pia goes off in search of Jesulino Cruz, also known as "The Devil's Horse," but there is a slight obstacle in her path: this killer is locked up in prison."

The film follows the story of a respected upper middle class family whose high social stature is burst following a murder. Chabrol reexamines the individual family members' lives in the time period leading up to the crime unveiling their secrets and probing their character.

Set in the LAPD in April 1992, it takes place just days before the acquittal of four white officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King and the subsequent LA riots. In this racially charged climate, the LAPD's elite Special Investigations Squad (SIS) is assigned a high-profile quadruple homicide. As they work the case, veteran detective Eldon Perry (Kurt Russell) tutors rookie Bobby Keough (Scott Speedman) in the grim realities of police intimidation and corruption. Meanwhile, Assistant Chief Holland (Ving Rhames), the only man in the department willing to stand up to the SIS, threatens to end Perry's brand of single-handed "justice" on the LA streets. While navigating through tumultuous neighborhoods of South Central LA, Perry and Keough must track down killers and face their own demons.

Hayden Christensen stars as Stephen Glass, a staff writer for the respected current events and policy magazine The New Republic and a freelance feature writer for publications such as Rolling Stone, Harper's and George. By the mid-90s, Glass' articles had turned him into one of the most sought-after young journalists in Washington, but a bizarre chain of events - chronicled in Buzz Bissinger's September, 1998 Vanity Fair article upon which "Shattered Glass" is based - suddenly stopped his career in its tracks. "Shattered Glass" is a study of a very talented - and at the same time very flawed - character. It is also a look inside our culture's noblest profession, one that protects our most precious freedoms by revealing the truth, and what happens when our trust in that profession is called into question.

Based on a true story, this is about the Irish journalist Veronica Guerin (Cate Blanchett), a reporter for the Dublin Sunday Independent, who exposed some of Dublin's most powerful crime barons and drug lords in 1996. But later that year she was gunned down by assasins hired by the same criminal drug lords she exposed.

On the afternoon of July 1, 1981, Los Angeles police responded to a distress call at 8763 Wonderland Avenue and soon discovered a grisly quadruple homicide, later compared to the gruesome slaughter at the Tate household at the hands of the Charles Manson family 10 years earlier. Ron Launius (Josh Lucas), Billy Deverell (Tim Blake Nelson), Barbara Richardson (Natasha Gregson Wagner) and Joy Miller (Janeane Garofalo) were brutally murdered, and Ron's wife Susan (Christina Applegate) was left in critical condition. The police investigation that followed - led by detectives Sam Nico (Ted Levine), Louis Cruz (Frankie G.) and Mike Peters (M.C. Gainey) - would unearth a seedy world of drugs and violence, ultimately revealing a motley crew from LA's underbelly including ex-con David Lind (Dylan McDermott), nightclub impresario Eddie Nash (Eric Bogosian), the most unlikely of American heroes - porn legend John Holmes (Val Kilmer) - Holmes' estranged wife Sharon (Lisa Kudrow) and his teenage lover Dawn Schiller (Kate Bosworth).

Based on Louis Sachar's popular children's book. It's about a young boy who is punished for a crime he didn't commit and is sent to a juvenile detention center where he is forced to dig holes under the watchful eye of a mean-spirited warden.

Uma Thurman's character, a pregnant assassin named the Bride, is shot by her boss, Bill, and her co-workers at her wedding (the wedding guests are also shot). She survives, though, waking up exceedingly angry after a five-year coma, and decides to hunt down and kill every single one of the assassins who were responsible, saving Bill for last.

Three individual employees (Paulo Costanzo, Woody Harrelson, Alicia Silverstone) of a bank in a small desert town (managed by Joshua Leonard) all make plans to rob it on the same weekend... except, none of them knows about the others. Meanwhile, a clothing store employee (Rachael Leigh Cook) has plans for revenge against a local millionaire (John Cleese).

A three-day drug adventure awaits the speed junkies in "Spun". Jason Schwartzman ("Rushmore") stars as a young speed addict who embarks on an adventure with his dealer, played by John Leguizamo, and the drug chemist, played by Mickey Rourke. Patrick Fugit ("Almost Famous") plays a fellow speed addict, while Brittany Murphy and Mena Suvari play girlfriends of the drug dealers.

Combining the physicality of international action superstar Jackie Chan with state-of-the-art special effects, Highbinders is an action comedy co-starring Claire Forlani and Julian Sands. Chan stars as Eddie, an indomitable Hong Kong cop who, after a near-fatal accident involving a mysterious medallion, is suddenly transformed into a Highbinder -- an immortal warrior with superhuman powers. Eddie enlists the help of fellow agent Nicole (Claire Forlani) to determine the secret of the medallion and face down the evil Highbinders who so desperately want it back.

Brian O'Conner (Paul Walker), stripped of his badge after the events of the first film, gets a chance to redeem himself by going undercover to infiltrate the world of Miami street racing.

This is the story of two criminals who disguise themselves as Santa Claus (Billy Bob Thornton) and his elf, traveling across the country to major malls, using the good will people have towards Santa to rob the stores blind. The plan is going great until the two baddies meet an introverted 8-year-old boy who reminds them of the true meaning of Christmas.

When a lonely guy (Steve Martin) meets a woman (Queen Latifah) on the Internet who happens to be in prison, she breaks out to be with him, and quickly proceeds to bring chaos and some much-needed change into his middle-class life...

This documentary captures what happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 12th, 2000 when Bus 174 was highjacked by an armed young man, Sandro do Nascimento, with a dozen passengers. Nascimento threatened to kill all of the passengers, but eventuallly agreed to surrender, as TV cameras were rolling and an entire nation was glued to their screens watching the event take place. Then, a police officer decided to fire at Nascimento anyway, accidentally killing one of the female passengers instead. What followed was a revolt among the city's population, enraged at police brutality. The film intertwines the story of the standoff with biographical information about Sandro do Nascimento, including his childhood as a survivor of the "Candelaria" child mass murders in the early 1990s, and the trauma of seeing his mother stabbed to death in front of him.

Women prisoners strike up a friendship with a young law student who works as a part-time prison guard. Together they discover that a corporation funds and is profitting from the plantation-like work environment they are forced to work under. In a botched attempt to organize a protest against their "slave labor", the women take over the prison - A rare glimpse of the effects of the prison industrial complex on female inmates.

When an international criminal (Mark Dacascos) kidnaps the daughter of a gang leader (DMX) and demands extremely rare "black diamonds" in exchange for her safety, it forces the gangster to align with a Taiwanese Intelligence Agent (Jet Li) to find and procure the jewels... even as they discover that the bad guy wants them so that he can build a dangerous new weapon that could jeopardize the entire world.

This movie tells two stories in three settings, going back and forth between each story as the film proceeds. One is the story of two cowboy brothers (Joseph Fiennes, David Wenham) who worked as mercenaries in Turkey around the turn of the century, and fall in love with the same woman (Anne Brochet). The other is set in contemporary New York, and is about a 90-year-old woman with a secret horde of Balkan gold and a thief (Adrian Lester), who surprisingly become friends. The third setting is the Ottoman Empire, circa 1913.