1. The Long Good Friday (1980)
The Long Good Friday is probably the film that Guy Ritchie screens for his cast and crew before he sets out to make another Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels rip-off - a true London crime flick, free of irony and led by what is still perhaps Bob Hoskins' greatest ever performance. As mobster Harold Shand, who returns from a business trip in New York to find that his crime syndicate is crumbling and somebody is killing off his men, he's dynamite. Viewed away from its ending, The Long Good Friday is gripping, memorable, and filled with great characters. It's not until the last few minutes that John Mackenzie's film marks itself out as a great one, though. After "resolving" the issues plaguing him for the sum of the story, Shand heads to the Savoy and finds that his Mafia co-partners are bailing on their proposed deal because they don't want to associate with his risky operation. Furious, Shand launches into a brilliant speech about how great and valuable England is ("The Mafia? I've sh*t 'em!") and storms out, climbing into the car where he believes his wife, played by Helen Mirren, is waiting for him. Not so. Shand looks out of the window of his own car to see her being driven away, screaming, in another vehicle. A silence pistol is then pointed on Shand from the front seat, and he realises the game is up: the IRA, who Shand believed he had won out over, have tracked him down. What follows is the best part of the film: as the jazzy soundtrack plays out, we stick on a close-up Shand's face. We watch as this man displays a whole range of emotions in rapid succession: fear, calculation, blind fury, bewilderment, amusement, and finally... acceptance of his death. Then, suddenly, we cut to black (pre-empting the ending of The Sopranos, perhaps), feeling a pretty similar range of emotions as Shand just was, in fact. The Long Good Friday is a fine movie, but the ending is dazzling: the very definition of a good movie made into a great one by its ending.
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