The discovery of a dead female staffer in a White House restroom galvanises a Washington, D. C. , homicide cop (Wesley Snipes), but the results aren't hard to predict: the crime implicates the Oval Office, the presidential bureaucracy impedes the investigation, and so on. What isn't so predictable is that the whole thing leads to an improbable climax involving secret tunnels created by Abraham Lincoln. (Snipes's character, by the way, is a Civil War buff. ) Murder at 1600 is a creaky mystery that feels a little anachronistic from the get-go, with some particularly corny and laughable dialogue. -Tom Keogh.

Having developed his skill as a master of contemporary crime drama, writer-director Michael Mann displayed every aspect of that mastery in this intelligent, character-driven thriller from 1995, which also marked the first onscreen pairing of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. The two great actors had played father and son in the separate time periods of The Godfather, Part II, but this was the first film in which the pair appeared together, and although their only scene together is brief, it's the riveting fulcrum of this high-tech cops-and-robbers scenario. De Niro plays a master thief with highly skilled partners (Val Kilmer and Tom Sizemore) whose latest heist draws the attention of Pacino, playing a seasoned Los Angeles detective whose investigation reveals that cop and criminal lead similar lives. Both are so devoted to their professions that their personal lives are a disaster. Pacino's with a wife (Diane Venora) who cheats to avoid the reality of their desolate marriage; De Niro pays the price for a life with no outside connections; and Kilmer's wife (Ashley Judd) has all but given up hope that her husband will quit his criminal career. These are men obsessed, and as De Niro and Pacino know, they'll both do whatever's necessary to bring the other down. Mann's brilliant screenplay explores these personal obsessions and sacrifices with absorbing insight, and the tension mounts with some of the most riveting action sequences ever filmed-most notably a daylight siege that turns downtown Los Angeles into a virtual war zone of automatic gunfire. At nearly three hours, heat qualifies as a kind of intimate epic, certain to leave some viewers impatiently waiting for more action, but it's all part of Mann's compelling strategy. Heat is a true rarity: a crime thriller with equal measures of intense excitement and dramatic depth, giving De Niro and Pacino a prime showcase for their finely matched talents. -Jeff Shannon.

Its key selling point may be a pre-stardom turn from Russell Crowe, but Heaven's Burning is a nice enough Australian independent movie in itself. The premise is by no means original-the story of Colin (Crowe), his lover Midori (Youki Kudoh) and their flight from pursuers on both side of the law owes much to Bonnie & Clyde, True Romance, Thelma & Louise, even Romeo & Juliet-but is given a hard-edged twist by director Craig Lahiff. On the run not only from the law and gangsters but also Midori's humiliated husband (Kenji Isomura, offering the movie's only truly great performance), the couple find themselves travelling through an Australia populated by rednecks, estranged racial groups and Lynchian freaks, the most memorable being a drunk wheelchair bound accordion player portrayed by Men at Work vocalist Colin Hay. The violence comes thick and fast, and is often wincingly brutal and graphic, but from it all emerges a quite touching love story. -Phil Udell.

Intricately plotted and smartly paced, this gangster saga clicks as whodunit, social satire and explosive thriller. The piece is crowned by Bob Hoskins' career-making turn as a London mobster courting respectability and Helen Mirren's subtly detailed performance as his upper-crust mistress. Cockney wiseguy Harold Shand is a would-be burgher whose domination of the city's underworld stems from his shrewdness as a mediator and his skill at harnessing political and economic clout. As Easter approaches, he's poised to launch an aggressive real estate development scheme along the depressed Thames waterfront when all hell breaks loose: a trusted lieutenant is brutally murdered, Shand's mother is nearly killed in a car bombing, one of his pubs is blown apart and the visiting American don crucial to the pending deal is quickly growing wary. Barrie Keeffe's original screenplay keeps the viewer a step ahead of Shand, providing us with a telling but teasingly incomplete glimpse of the misstep by his underlings that has set chaos loose. At the same time, Keeffe underlines the bourgeois pretensions of the rough-hewn, barrel-chested Shand, how the elegant Victoria (Mirren) helps serve those ambitions and the myriad parallels between Shand's minions and the local politicians and police only too willing to join in his scheme. Tart, funny dialogue and alternately playful and pungent Eastertide imagery complete Keeffe's shrewd design-two key scenes, in a meat locker and a warehouse, invoke the Crucifixion itself. Even with lesser performances, the script and John Mackenzie's solid direction would make The Long Good Friday a keeper but Hoskins's explosive portrait of Shand and his descent toward brutal revenge elevates the film into the very front rank, earning admiring comparisons to TheGodfather, Scarface, GoodFellas and other classics of that genre. -Sam Sutherland Straddling two decades, The Long Good Friday is a gangster film with a thoughtful and provocative core. Made in 1979, but not released-after a near-comical saga of proposed re-editing and overdubbing recounted in the booklet-until two years later, it combines the gritty realism of 1970s movies (Get Carter, The Sweeney) with the nouveau riche, fake-glamour culture of the 1980s. [+]