The best Bruce Altman’s crime movies

Freddy Heflin is the sheriff of a place everyone calls “Cop Land” — a small and seemingly peaceful town populated by the big city police officers he’s long admired. Yet something ugly is taking place behind the town’s peaceful facade. And when Freddy uncovers a massive, deadly conspiracy among these local residents, he is forced to take action and make a dangerous choice between protecting his idols and upholding the law.

Joey Gazelle is a low level mobster whose job it is to dispose of "hot" guns from mob killings. But Joey has been hiding these guns in the drywall of his basement, instead of tossing them in the river. When Joey's son and his best friend, Oleg, witness Joey hiding some guns from a botched drug deal, Oleg steals one of the guns and shoots his abusive stepfather with it. Things are bad enough, but Oleg's stepfather happens to be the nephew of a psychotic Russian mob boss, who happens to be in business with Joey's crew on a gasoline scam. But now Joey's got a dirty cop from the botched drug deal on his case, not to mention the hot .38 out there on the street. As well as Oleg, who can connect Joey to the gun. And if Joey manages to make it through the night, he's still got to answer to his wife.

A rush-hour fender-bender on New York City's crowded FDR Drive, under most circumstances, wouldn't set off a chain reaction that could decimate two people's lives. But on this day, at this time, a minor collision will turn two complete strangers into vicious adversaries. Their means of destroying each other might be different, but their goals, ultimately, will be the same: Each will systematically try to dismantle the other's life in a reckless effort to reclaim something he has lost.

A phobic con artist and his protege are on the verge of pulling off a lucrative swindle when the con artist's teenage daughter arrives unexpectedly.

When an office full of Chicago real estate salesmen is given the news that all but the top two will be fired at the end of the week, the atmosphere begins to heat up. Shelley Levene, who has a sick daughter, does everything in his power to get better leads from his boss, John Williamson, but to no avail. When his coworker Dave Moss comes up with a plan to steal the leads, things get complicated for the tough-talking salesmen.

In this biting and disturbing coming-of-age tale from writer-director Michael Cuesta, life is bittersweet along the L.I.E., also known as the Long Island Expressway, as suburban teen Howie Blitzer learns all too clearly. In the space of a week, he loses nearly everything and everyone he knows and is left to navigate his adolescence virtually unsupervised.