Every Michael Mann movie ranked, including Ferrari

Hardly a controversial pick, The Keep is one of several movies made by Michael Mann that could generously be described as compromised. A hard swerve from his theatrical debut, Thief, Mann’s stylistic flourishes prevent The Keep from burying itself in dreary self-importance. The film’s robust production design and effects carry The Keep’s inscrutable plot about a group of Nazis awakening an ancient spirit that only a Jewish historian (played by Sir Ian McKellan) can contain. As cool as the monster Molasar looks, the old-world evil can’t turn this expressionistic fable into entertainment. As would be a complaint throughout his career, The Keep’s dialog is impossible to hear, sapping the movie of whatever narrative propulsion Mann can muster. The director can get by on vibes alone, but The Keep’s musty atmosphere can only engage in fits and starts. Still, he does strike a distinct mood. Aided by another classic Tangerine Dream score and Nick Maley’s impressive effects, The Keep is an interesting failure that nevertheless inspired some of the aesthetic confidence of his next film, Manhunter. Today, The Keep has something resembling a cult following—just don’t include the director as one of its members. Mann disowned the film back in 2009.

Sandwiched between the releases of Miami Vice and Blackhat, Public Enemies provides a spiritual prequel to both, bridging the surveillance state’s past, present, and future across the 20th century. Not content with serving one master, Mann’s crime epic also works as a biopic in the vein of Ali‌, merging the auteur’s twin interests for the first and only time. Mann’s digital camera rides shotgun with John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) as he outruns the nascent FBI’s ace G-Man, Melvin Pervis (Christian Bale). Mann gives this unconventional history lesson the immediacy of Ali and the digital clarity of Collateral, capturing fine, grainy detail in the film’s many low-light sections. It’s a fitting look for a movie about the Bureau’s burgeoning nationwide network that puts the analog, grassroots fandom of Dillinger out of business. However, Mann strains to find a rewarding emotional center. A miscast Marion Cotillard struggles to gain a foothold with whatever accent she’s aiming for, poisoning any chance for chemistry with Depp. The romance only occasionally breaks the film’s spell as the director finds a fascinating, if redundant, exploration of themes he has mined many times before.

After his first stab at Heat with the TV movie L.A. Takedown, Mann veered deep into the past with The Last Of The Mohicans, his first of many historical epics. Adapting James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier adventure with recent Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, the director orchestrates a sweeping but flawed romance of survival that feeds Mann’s burgeoning artistic strengths and broadens his cinematic scope. Arriving a year after Dances With Wolves’ Best Picture win, Mohicans’ manages to downplay the latent white savior complex that plagued its predecessor. Playing Hawkeye, the adopted white son of a Mohican family, Daniel Day-Lewis is unsurprisingly captivating, embodying Hawkeye’s grace and confidence with seeming ease. Hawkeye’s mastery of the landscape gives way to balletic old-world action, to which Wes Studi and Steven Waddington contribute the percussive sound of clubs bludgeoning skulls and a persistent snivel as the film’s respective repulsive villains. But this is a love story first, one of Mann’s best, and Day-Lewis’ chemistry with Madeline Stowe, who plays Cora, the daughter of the British Colonel Hawkeye he’s paid to protect, matches the passion of Randy Edelman and Trevor Jones’ swashbuckling score. Though you can’t take your eyes off Day-Lewis or Studi, the machinations of the French and Indian War threaten to weigh the movie down in the center. Mann rebounds with a sensational final stretch, largely thanks to his convincing star-crossed lovers and, of course, Daniel Day-Lewis wielding dual muskets.

Despite its reputation (and box office), Blackhat has all the hallmarks of a good Michael Mann movie: An intense focus on process, a convincing criminal underworld and, of course, a terminator-adjacent lead who changes his programming for no one except the right woman. Watching its widely available theatrical cut makes it easy to see where things went wrong. Last-minute edits moved the film’s mid-story nuclear explosion to the beginning, robbing the movie of any rising action and giving an awkward, unsatisfying structure that certainly doesn’t help the jargon- and mumble-heavy dialog. Still, the writer/director channels a techno-apocalypse that’s just to the left of our world. The computers aren’t Matrix sexy, but the filmmaking is, with a sweeping romantic and humanist atmosphere that brings heft to the gunplay, remixing a Mission: Impossible-style plot into something wholly new and alive. Once you get past the damaged structure, which only makes the jargon-heavy dialog more confusing, Mann crafts a tactile world of keyboards and thumb drives that create logistical headaches and nuclear threats for world governments and their citizens. The recently released director’s cut puts the film in the correct order (had we ranked that one, it might’ve cracked the top five). However, in its compromised form, there’s no mistaking Blackhat for a solid action movie on the cusp of greatness.

Ali may not float like a butterfly or sting like a bee, but it does pack a punch. Though he can’t totally shake his own intense fame, Will Smith’s impressive impression is well-studied and strangely engaging in this sprawling biopic about the best ever to do it. Focusing on the champ’s split responsibilities between his community and his personal life, Ali’s journey from a target of police harassment to the rope-a-doping defeater of George Foreman at the Rumble In The Jungle is a complex dance as the boxer balances the sanctioned violence of the ring with the chaos of the streets. Though Smith would probably relate more to Ali’s status as a social pariah in a post-slap America, he and his director make the challenges of being a Black celebrity who is unwilling to cow to draft boards or white critics in the middle of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War the biggest bout of his career. The film also gives us a rare look at the on-screen chemistry of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, which Mann captures elegantly and intimately against the deep blues of his palette. Though Ali’s episodic screenplay, credited to Mann, Stephen J. Rivele, Christopher Wilkinson, and Eric Roth, runs several rounds too long, there are enough offbeat casting and acting choices, such as Jon Voight’s Howard Cosell and Jamie Foxx’s Bundini, to claim a technical victory.

Finally crossing the finish on his long-gestating melodrama about automotive legend Enzo Ferrari (played by Adam Driver), Mann smartly hones in on Enzo’s fraught personal and business relationship with his wife, Laura (an explosive Penélope Cruz), following the death of their 13-year-old son. As Ferrari, Driver embodies the classical Mann man, a compartmentalization project where every emotion—except, of course, the desire to die in a race—is walled off deep inside. Enzo swallows each feeling like an acidic espresso shot as Laura stalks the streets of Italy, a scorned woman, bitterly absorbing her husband’s infidelity and reckless business sense. And yet their explosive emotion and repression-induced sarcasm are so funny and magnetic that they threaten to blow the obligatory, breathless racing footage off the road. Like many of the director’s protagonists, Enzo distances himself from his fraught personal life, so he gambles the company on a longshot thousand-mile race. Punctuated by uncanny and terrifying car crashes that challenge the steely resolve of the car’s creator, Ferrari is a welcome return for the 80-year-old director who shows no signs of slowing down.

Michael Mann made Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter debut, Red Dragon, all his own with Manhunter. Trading the serial killer fetishization of Harris’ bestseller for the mundanity of catching them, Manhunter elevates its pulpy origins to an introspective procedural. As Will Graham, William Peterson is the prototypical Mann protagonist, a cop tortured by his ability to understand and empathize with killers. He hunts a murderer of families whose calling card is placing mirror shards in his victims’ eyes. Manhunter doesn’t reach the heights of Mann’s future cat-and-mouse thrillers, but it cemented some of the director’s earliest obsessions, creating a chilling symmetry between Graham’s focused investigation into The Tooth Fairy (Tom Noonan) and the grisliness of the crimes. As Graham disconnects from his family and enters the killer’s mind, the Toothfairy agonizes over what it means to give in to humanity after so many murders diminishing it. We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Brian Cox’s Hannibal Lecktor, which resembles Hopkins in name only (and even that has caveats—Hopkins spells it “Lecter”). In Manhunter, Lecktor doesn’t lead the cop to a killer; he leads the cop to himself. This highlights the critical difference between Graham and the monster he pursues: Graham is not insane.

Taking the cops out of the equation for the most part, Collateral sees everyday Angelenos squaring off with the most highly trained killing machine on Earth: Tom Cruise. Tapping into Cruise’s effortless psychotic intensity, Mann pits an ordinary service worker, a cab driver named Max (a panicked Jaime Fox), against the prototypical Mann antagonist in Vincent (Cruise). This comically effective assassin can lay a cartel to waste without blemishing his grey suit. In this hostage film on wheels, Vincent becomes Max’s internal insecurity system, pouncing on Max’s perceived weaknesses and mocking his dream to own a limo company. The stakes are street level and personal, heightening an unrelenting action as Mann speeds through a rarely seen Los Angeles of alleyways and subway trains (yes, L.A. has a subway). The director finds unique ways of presenting the City of Angels and working with digital cameras for the first time in his career to frame Max’s ride to self-actualization via Vincent’s monologues and gunplay. But Vincent vastly underestimated the resolve of Los Angeles taxi drivers, generating some of the most suspenseful action sequences of the director’s career. Fox and Cruise elevate each other, but Mann’s quick and dirty filmmaking makes this thriller a masterpiece.

Few directors arrived in theaters as fully formed Michael Mann and Thief, his first domestically released theatrical feature, has the confidence of a veteran. Of course, Mann’s film school included reporting on student protests and filming the Jericho Mile from the confines of Folsom State Prison, all of which gives Thief its ripped-from-reality atmosphere. Thief is a poetic, hard-boiled thriller about a fiercely independent safe cracker (James Caan), the best in the business, whose steely resolve is compromised by a new love (Tuesday Weld) and the promise of a respectable life. Shot in rain-slicked Chicago and lit by gunfire, headlights, and neon signs, Thief turns its lead into a safe waiting to be cracked, twisting his psychology to the beat of Tangerine Dream’s score. With its crime novel poetry and Robert Prosky, Dennis Farina, and Jim Belushi delivering it, Thief contains the essence of Mann’s cinematic interests. It’s our first glimpse of Mann’s world: a thriving criminal underworld populated by a dream stable of character actors and real-life cops and robbers.

One-upping the Watergate paranoia of All The President’s Men, The Insider is less about getting the story and more about getting the story out. Mann’s film is the canary in the coal mine for the media’s surrender to corporate America, showing, in great detail, what a producer on the world’s most powerful news show must endure to report the truth. In this case, we follow anarcho-journalist Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino), as he takes a break from securing interviews with the heads of Hezbollah to nail the tobacco industry. Paired with the simmering suburban rage of Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), an ex-tobacco executive turned whistleblower, Pacino scales the cocaine energy of Heat and hoo-ahing of Scent Of A Woman performances way back for a focused masterclass in ambition and determination. But Mann doesn’t have to do much to make the world of terrorism or corporate espionage threatening, applying the ticking-clock energy of Heat’s bank heist to his first piece of non-fiction narrative filmmaking. It’s in his surreal flourishes that we see Mann’s style evolving, getting deeper into the heads of his subjects than ever before and doing a genuine service in his sympathetic depiction of endangered whistleblowers. Epic in scope and rigorous in its detail, The Insider turns this 60 Minutes segment into a battle for the soul of America and a rare victory for its beleaguered public.

There are undoubtedly people who hate this film. Released July 4th weekend, 2006, Miami Vice wasn’t the dayglow-drenched MTV cops of the 1980s. Mann reconfigures his early breakthrough as a harder, dirtier, and more abstract crime film that hums along on atmosphere and mood, a transcendental thriller that envelops the viewer in sound and feeling. Though Crockett (Colin Farrell as a character more mojito than man) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) still go undercover to take down the cartel, the film trades pastel and art deco for dingy digital photography. This early foray into the grainy world of pixels and bits gives Miami Vice a striking visual template borne as much from the camera’s mechanics as the costumes, locations, and fractured, jagged editing. Miami Vice’s digital photography creates an ominous and foreboding battlefield for Crockett, who finds himself in a revelatory romance with a cartel lieutenant he’s trying to take down. Crockett’s rendezvous with Isabella (Gong Li) provides a sweeping romantic wind that gushes through the film, coloring the motivations of everyone in its path. It’s a movie where the shadows of regret haunt the characters at every turn, where the highs of what could’ve been crash quicker than a go-fast boat. Haunting, thrilling, and sexy as hell, Miami Vice sees Mann take the artistic aims of Heat and challenge them, melting them into concentrated genius.

Could No. 1 be anything else? Mann’s masterpiece checks many boxes, distilling his interests, obsessions, and strengths into a single epic. Ostensibly a crime movie, Heat treats a film we’ve seen a million times before with the utmost reverence and care, propelling the action with realism and intelligence by tracking the planning, execution, and unraveling of one of cinema’s most beloved traditions: The bank robbery. Led by Al Pacino and Robert De Niro delivering some of the finest performances of their careers as the ultimate yin and yang cop and criminal, Heat channels the dichotomies of Manhunter and Public Enemies and delivers the director’s career-spanning thesis in 30 seconds flat. Given more space and time to tell his story, the writer/director builds a sprawling Los Angeles filled with heartbreaking vignettes of casualties of the criminal justice system and those who operate outside it. Through its expansive three-hour runtime, Mann creates a contemplative and reflective mood, as Neil McCauley and Vincent Hannah muse on their philosophical points of view and take great pains to live by those codes. Yet the chaos of the lifestyle, represented through the vicious malice of the serial killer Waingro (Kevin Cage) and Neil’s surrogate son, Chris (Val Kilmer), upends their plans, crafting a network of revenge and justice that Mann seamlessly weaves into unrestrained moments of beauty. It’s a great film, and we’ve got our head all the way up it.