Films with villains you can't help but understand

An oil man's greed consumes everything and everyone around him — Daniel Day-Lewis builds one of cinema's great monsters from pure ambition.

A hungry, sociopathic freelance cameraman films LA crime scenes for profit — Gyllenhaal makes ambition itself feel like a horror story.

A mother tries to understand how her son became capable of the unthinkable — unnerving because it never gives you a clean answer.

A wife stages her own disappearance to frame her husband — Fincher makes you complicit in rooting for someone genuinely terrifying.

A woman set on avenging her friend's assault targets men who think they're the good guys — furious, stylish, unafraid of an ending that stings.

A young man's affair with an older woman resurfaces years later at her war crimes trial — complicates guilt in ways deliberately hard to sit with.

A grifter cons his way up through carnival life and high society alike, and the film lets you watch every step of his own downfall coming.

A failed clown's slow unraveling into violence, told entirely from inside his own distorted perspective — Phoenix makes it impossible to look away.

A hitman gets hired by a family that can't afford to pay him in cash — pitch-black Texas noir that gets more disturbing by the minute.

A drifter falls under the spell of a charismatic cult leader — Hoffman and Phoenix circle each other like two damaged halves of one person.

Truman Capote exploits a killer's trust to write In Cold Blood, and the film never lets him — or you — off the hook for it.

A social climber's affair threatens the wealthy marriage he's engineered, and his solution is chillingly, plausibly rational.

A Wall Street banker's obsession with status curdles into violence — satire so dry some people still miss the joke entirely.

A con man talks his way into a wealthy friend's life, then decides he'd rather just become him — Highsmith's charming sociopath, perfectly cast.

A retired gangster gets strong-armed back into one last job by a terrifying old associate — Ben Kingsley is pure menace in every scene.

A hitman reluctantly takes in the orphaned girl next door — morally uneasy in ways the film knows exactly what it's doing with.

The real-life Australian criminal Mark 'Chopper' Read gets a portrait that's as darkly funny as it is genuinely frightening.

Charlize Theron transforms into real-life serial killer Aileen Wuornos, and the film makes her poverty and abuse impossible to ignore.

A violent teenager gets 'cured' through state-sanctioned conditioning — Kubrick's satire is still uncomfortably ahead of the conversation.

A child murderer gets hunted by both police and the criminal underworld who want him gone even more — Lang's original serial-killer thriller.