The Greatest New Year's Movies of All Time

5. Ocean's 11 (1960)

Danny Ocean recruits an assortedband of thieves to pull off the crime of the century -- robbing five Vegas casinos on New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, most of the $ goes up in flames.









4. Dick Tracy

This story about the titular police detective, set in 1930s in an unnamed Midwestern metropolis, climaxes when local crime boss Alphonse "Big Boy" Caprice is released from jail on New Year's Eve.

After finagling inside info out of one or Caprice's goons, Mumbles, Tracy follows Big Boy to his club, leading to a shootout between the gangster's hired guns and police. Big Boy flees the scene pursued by Tracy and the two find themselves in a standoff with gangland upstart "Breathless" Mahoney.

SPOILER ALERT:

Things do not go well for Big Boy and Breathless.

3. The Apartment

Office worker Bud doesn't even have his own cubicle, so he lets various middle-managers at the company use his apartment as a place to bring side-chicks. He hopes they'll repay the favor with promotions. But he keeps sleeping in the hallway of his building and he keeps his exact same job -- naturally.

The story ends on New Year's Eve when Bud's friend and co-worker, Fran, figures out, at a New Year's Eve party, that Bud, unlike personnel manager Jeff Sheldrake (who she'd been creeping with), actually loves her. Armed with this realization, she rushes to his apartment -- the apartment. But when she gets there she hears a loud pop. Fearing the worst (they'd both admitted to attempting suicide in the past), she bursts in only to discover that the sound she heard was Bud popping the cork on a champagne bottle. And with that, the two lovebirds ring in the New Year with bubbly...and a game of gin rummy.







2. Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale details the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, who was celebrating the New Year with friends and fellow Oakland, California residents when he was shot to death -- while unarmed and handcuffed -- by a local transit cop. The 22-year-old's real life murder was captured on video by several witnesses at the scene and the shooting resulted in mass protests and riots in Oakland.







1. Belly

Belly centers on the criminal exploits of Queens-born friends Tommy and Sincere. Set against the backdrop of the impending new millennium, Tommy and Sincere start bad (robbing nightclub managers at gunpoint) and get worse (trafficking heroin in the Midwest).

Everything comes to a head during the countdown to January 1, 2000, as Tommy considers whether to cap off the life he's known with the murder of an innocent man at the behest of a federal agency or to refuse to squeeze the trigger, making himself a wanted fugitive but turning over a new leaf as suggested by his target -- a selfless civil rights leader. The moment, which all of the previous events were building to, perfectly captures the paranoia that pervaded inner-city communities at the time and the doomsday prophecies -- spread, in part, by rappers -- that circulated among them.