+13
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is #24 on my list. Here's a short review I wrote a few years ago:
This is an enjoyably gritty '70s crime flick. The "Friends" in the title might as well be in quotations because Eddie, the kind of cool, cynical and wizened Boston gangster Robert Mitchum was born to play, is finking on them in order to avoid a lengthy jail sentence. This absence of loyalty and assurance in the criminal underworld - as well as in the law's efforts to take it down - pervade this movie in this and other ways, whether it's in the dealings of Eddie's associate Jackie Brown, a cautious to a fault gun runner wonderfully played by Steven Keats, or in the machinations of Dave Foley, an ingenious cop slyly played by Richard Jordan. However, as this movie's bank robbery scenes make clear, the jobs are all about loyalty because even the slightest deviation from the plan can result in complete disaster. Speaking of these scenes, while they were filmed with an economy and a style that is a far cry from similar scenes in movies like Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven or Affleck's The Town, they're still so tense that I forgot to breathe. These scenes do more showing than telling, but this is still a very talky movie, and while a lot of the dialogue crackles, it often comes across as long-winded. Even so, it's a flaw that only slightly affected my understanding of what was happening and my enjoyment on the whole. Besides, we should be thankful for how this and other flourishes likely influenced the works of directors such as James Gray and Quentin Tarantino.