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Since Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops first asserted their right to silence, the cop movie has been a staple of genre film. It has proven to be a rich field for filmmakers from a wide range of political and dramatic backgrounds, whether they are showcasing rogue mavericks or hilariously inclined friends, exploring corruption or heroics against the odds.

Trends come and go, just like in any genre with set norms. The 1980s increased the spectacle and the gags, from the one-man wisecracks of Beverly Hills Cop (1984) to buddy-cop pair-ups, which were frequently canine (Turner & Hooch, 1989) as well as human (Lethal Weapon, 1987). The 1970s were known for some of the gritty thrillers in the genre, including Dirty Harry (1971) and The French Connection (1971).

With films like Dick Tracy (1990) and Last Action Hero (1993), the 1990s brought a postmodern twist to the genre, albeit with minimal commercial success. However, they hardly shaped the decade’s overall approach to the genre. There was far more going on elsewhere in any given year.

Charles Burnett’s 1994 exposé of police corruption, The Glass Shield, which is currently available on dual-format Blu-ray and DVD, is one lesser-known addition to the canon of the 1990s. It has taken over two decades for this movie to receive a respectable home video release in the UK, and this version is among the best things that have happened to the film in its tumultuous career.

The Glass Shield is a somber examination of racism and corruption that starts out as a comic-book fantasy about a mock-hero before following the moral collapse of a young recruit with big eyes. However, Miramax essentially buried the film upon its release, having already criticized the director for his conclusion, even though Burnett is regarded as one of the best contemporary American directors, having made seminal films like Killer of Sheep (1978) and To Sleep with Anger (1990). To capitalize on Ice Cube’s fame from Boyz n the Hood (1991), the movie was marketed to moviegoers as a gangland thriller. However, a modern trailer completely misrepresented the film, making Ice Cube, who essentially made cameos, the main character.

From Stormy Monday (1988), the Newcastle noir that marked his big-screen debut, to One Night Stand (1997), the former London Film Festival closer, filmmaker Mike Figgis specialized in the sensuous, adult drama that is becoming more and more uncommon these days. Although it may not be his best film, Internal Affairs is an inspired corrupt-cop story that has a sultry game of cat and mouse with samba music between roughhouse patrolman Richard Gere (pouty) and internal affairs detective Andy Garcia (shouty).

Despite all of the peacocking that is happening, these boys in blue don’t spend any time on what must be very rigorous beauty regimes. Their off-duty shirts are stuffed into high-riding trousers with calculated off-handness, and their toxic displays of macho amorality are subordinated to a just-so bouffant. Despite an unavoidable feeling that Garcia is the one he would want to be demonstrating his truncheon to, Gere’s bad guy maneuvers use weaponized sexuality, making advances on his opponent’s wife (nothing carbon dates an early 90s picture like Nancy Travis).

Miami Blues (1990)
Similar to Mike Figgis, George Armitage has not been active lately, at least not since his problematic adaptation of The Big Bounce (2004) starring Elmore Leonard. With this witty, fashionable adaptation of Charles “Cockfighter” Willeford’s first Hoke Moseley book, he’s considerably more confident. Only Fred Ward, one of the two Sgt. Moseleys making their way through the Miami Blues, is the real deal. The second is a finger-bending impostor, an inventive rip-off artist who is eager to role-play his way into suburban ease (played with irrepressible charm by Alec Baldwin in one of his greatest early roles).

The opening scene’s God’s-eye perspective, enhanced by the soundtrack’s “Spirit in the Sky,” conveys a sense that the events are larger than Baldwin’s Frederick Frenger Jr. and foreshadows an unavoidable fatalism reminiscent of a pastel-hued noir picture (that costume and production design!). Although Armitage extracts a great deal of quirky detail from the events, largely due to Baldwin’s endearing sarcasm, the film’s main force is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays the brilliant but dim-witted hooker Pepper.

Steel Blue (1990)

Given that police film is frequently a boy’s club, Kathryn Bigelow’s third feature is somewhat calming. Despite its highly unrealistic narrative devices, Blue Steel is still a brilliant study of female emancipation. When Jamie Lee Curtis tells a skeptic about her occupation at a friend’s barbecue, he asks, “Do you carry a gun?” The jerk asks, “Why would you want to be a cop? You’re a pretty woman.” Without skipping a beat, tough Curtis responds, “I like to slam people’s heads up against walls,” quickly turning him into a stuttering mess.

Bigelow creates a number of male opponents that her blue-collar hero, who is unlucky in love, must defeat. The idea of a woman in uniform mentally attacks everyone, from the coworkers who can hardly hide their contempt to the violent father who makes fun of her mother; from the stick-up artist who takes away her badge to the rent-a-wacko serial killer who has an unhealthy crush. As her camera drools over every nook and cranny of JLC’s service revolver and exposed shirt during the title credits, Bigelow in turn blatantly fetishizes the blues and pistol, much as she did for her 1981 biker-flick debut, The Loveless. After ninety minutes, the uniform is taken back, and the scales shift from being objectified to being empowered.

Following Serpico (1973) and Prince of the City (1981), this third installment of Sidney Lumet’s unofficial trilogy on police corruption features Timothy Hutton as Al Reilly, a young police attorney hired to cover what seems to be a clear-cut case: the murder of a small-time Puerto Rican dealer by larger-than-life NYC cop Mike Brennan. As an unreconstructed product of what he perceives as simpler times, when everyone understood their place in his racially defined global order, Nick Nolte portrays Brennan as a cornered, wounded bear. As his unchallenged hold on the city starts to wane, he sobs, “I want it the way it used to be.” “You’re fucking finished, you lose control of this jungle.”

Q & A is a film that is deeply ingrained in its vocabulary, depicting a police culture of racial hierarchies that have been fossilized and filled with encounters. Lumet removed his name from TV cuts that lessened the linguistic charge’s toxicity, and it was the first of just two screenplays for which he claimed solo authoring credit. The Q&A is a statement of record in and of itself, and Lumet presents the facts in a straightforward manner while providing procedural clarity. As explained in this amazing snippet from a 1991 episode of the BBC’s Omnibus, the director’s dedication to lengthy practice sessions is what makes this run-down, seedy environment feel so truly inhabited and fosters such amazing performances.

1992’s One False Move

One False Move, directed by Carl Franklin from a brilliant script by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, is a masterful work of narrative and directing simplicity that merits greater recognition as one of the best police dramas of the 1990s—indeed, one of the best films of the decade.

With his girlfriend and psychopathically silent accomplice, hair-trigger Thornton rips off a drug dealer in the opening moments, which essentially introduce the first of the film’s competing trios. Two LA police officers soon follow them, joining forces with Arkansas lawman Dale “Hurricane” Dixon (Bill Paxton), a naive small-town sheriff who is ecstatic about a chance at the big time. Although they are a masterfully portrayed group, Paxton is the film’s true star. His casual prejudice and previous connections to Thornton’s girl expose his imperfect humanity, even if he first wins our compassion as the target of the city officers’ mockery. The climactic confrontation is given a fatalistic feeling of wastefulness, if not the weight of tragedy, because of the meticulous attention to character detail throughout.

Supercop, the third police story (1992)

Who knows what the Weinstein brothers were thinking when they re-scored, shortened the length of nine sequences, removed seven, and dubbed Supercop into English before releasing it in US theaters. It was still the shorter edit, even though the company would later produce a DVD that would go back to the original Cantonese and remove the awful new music (shout out, Tom Jones). Needless to say, if you’re going to find a copy of this Tarantino favorite, try to view the Hong Kong cut instead of the dubbed version.

Even though it’s always entertaining to see Jackie Chan perform, this entry is elevated by Michelle Yeoh’s arrival to the franchise. With verbal and physical cues that combine the style of Buster Keaton and Howard Hawks, lightning-fast battle scenes are staged to even faster dialogue. But what really leaves people in awe is the climactic clash in Kuala Lumpur, when a variety of visceral, jaw-dropping stunts are performed on automobiles, trains, motorcycles, and helicopters. Some close calls are shown in the ending credit outtakes. Just off camera, you can picture the army of insurance men apparently holding their breath.

Deep Cover (1992)

A year before Laurence Fishburne’s Oscar-nominated role in What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), Deep Cover, the second feature from former Predator-fodder Bill Duke, gave him an about-time-too lead after a substantial stack of TV directorial credits. Fishburne portrays teetotal police officer John Hull, who dresses in triple denim, forgoes his badge in favor of the streets, and attempts to break into Jeff Goldblum’s narcotics ring.

Duke uses a variety of artistic tactics to highlight Fishburne’s collapsing sense of self, drawing on issues of race and class as well as the well-worn cliché of the thin line separating police and criminal. The actor’s languid narrative, however, suggests a waking dream—a straight-laced police officer’s criminal-kingpin nightmare in which he plays out the transgressions of a long-repressed father. For a movie that delivers Jeff Goldblum one of the greatest Shabba Ranks music cues, Deep Cover is a forgotten gem that has been out of circulation for a long time on UK home video.

1992’s Hard Boiled

As anyone who has watched Paycheck (2003) will attest, John Woo’s ten-year American journey didn’t produce particularly impressive results, despite the outrageous excesses of Face/Off (1997). Since then, he appears to have entered a new stage of his career, going back to Hong Kong to reinvent himself as David Lean’s counterpart in action film with two four-hour epics, Red Cliff (2008/9) and The Crossing (2014/15). To witness Woo at his best—indeed, to witness the action movie at its best—you had to travel back 25 years to what must have been the heyday of the squib industry.

Some of the best celluloid set pieces can be found in the bullet ballet that is Hard Boiled, a stylistic masterpiece. Woo doesn’t address the cost of violence as forcefully as he did with Bullet in the Head (1990), from the flour-coated kiss-off of the first tearoom battle to the epic blitzkrieg of the hospital confrontation. Rather, with a camera as dynamic as his characters, he delivers a symphonic, sensual onslaught of coolness and lethality. In spite of the hyper-masculine conventions of the genre, Woo finds complexity in character development within a fundamental framework that is superficially filled with tropes.

Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Abel Ferrara’s 1992 masterpiece depicts God’s lonely man reaching his nihilistic apotheosis, while Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) cast its personal and communal anxieties in spiritual terms (en route to a Brooklyn Bridge Golgotha) and Raging Bull (1980) responded to questions of masculinity with a bellow into the void. Twenty-five years later, Bad Lieutenant’s raw power hasn’t diminished. Ferrara’s film is the kind of movie that is best viewed on the dirtiest 16mm print you can find, even though it is available in remastered high definition. With his unwavering eye for deviance, Ferrara chronicles the route to grace from an opening scene in which Harvey Keitel’s unnamed copper bumps into a coke under a rearview mirror crucifix while parked outside his children’s school.

Keitel delivers the performance of his career, captured in extended, continuous takes, his soul exposed like an open, diseased wound. Ferrara’s once-removed, documentary-style perspective not only unnerves, but it also gives his protagonist’s accusations of God’s absence a tangible edge (“Where were you? You rat fuck. Despite all the filthy exploitation film tropes that led to the film’s NC-17 certification, this is the pinnacle of spiritual, transcendental cinema: a depiction of New York City as the latter days of Sodom.

Heat (1995)

Michael Mann’s Heat, which famously brought Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together on screen for the first time, is a complex crime drama that revolves around the antagonistic cop-criminal dynamic. This is not a case of good versus evil, or of a hazy distinction between the two. Like so many of Mann’s characters, these are just folks motivated by a steadfast, if conflicting, sense of purpose. Their only asset is capability. With a resigned sigh, Pacino’s officer tells his wife, “It’s like I said: all I am is what I’m going after.” In contrast to the film’s emotional high point, which is De Niro’s master thief’s last-minute about-turn on a romance still in the grip of blind desire, that is the bottoming out of “the down slope of a marriage,” a gentle departure.

The adversarial empathy that unites cat and mouse as two components of a single entity is not limited to the well-known coffee shop encounter. With De Niro facing the camera and Pacino facing away, the two men hold hands in the film’s last shot, which chooses yin-yang symmetry. With only the unimaginable misery of other people contaminating the pursuit’s single-mindedness, this mutual, unbreakable resolve—and determinism—cuts like a bullet across Mann’s enormous canvas.