The IMDb staff came together to round up their favorite crime movies, shows, and documentaries.
Here are some great movies worth streaming that you won't see at the Oscars this year.
Related lists from IMDb users
Title: American Splendor (2003)
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| Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Chris Ambrose | ... | Superman |
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Joey Krajcar | ... | Batman |
| Josh Hutcherson | ... | Robin | |
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Cameron Carter | ... | Green Lantern |
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Daniel Tay | ... | Young Harvey |
| Mary Faktor | ... | Housewife | |
| Paul Giamatti | ... | Harvey Pekar | |
| Harvey Pekar | ... | Real Harvey | |
| Shari Springer Berman | ... | Interviewer (voice) | |
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Larry John Meyers | ... | Throat Doctor (as Larry John Myers) |
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Vivienne Benesch | ... | Lana |
| Barbara Brown | ... | Nurse | |
| Earl Billings | ... | Mr. Boats | |
| Danny Hoch | ... | Marty | |
| James Urbaniak | ... | Robert Crumb | |
Harvey Pekar is file clerk at the local VA hospital. His interactions with his co-workers offer some relief from the monotony, and their discussions encompass everything from music to the decline of American culture to new flavors of jellybeans and life itself. At home, Harvey fills his days with reading, writing and listening to jazz. His apartment is filled with thousands of books and LPs, and he regularly scours Cleveland's thrift stores and garage sales for more, savoring the rare joy of a 25-cent find. It is at one of these junk sales that Harvey meets Robert Crumb, a greeting card artist and music enthusiast. When, years later, Crumb finds international success for his underground comics, the idea that comic books can be a valid art form for adults inspires Harvey to write his own brand of comic book. An admirer of naturalist writers like Theodore Dreiser, Harvey makes his American Splendor a truthful, unsentimental record of his working-class life, a warts-and-all self portrait... Written by Sujit R. Varma
Successfully innovative, American Splendor combines fiction and reality in a spellbinding and amusing way, winning awards at Cannes and Sundance, and proving its maxim that life is pretty complex (and endlessly fascinating) stuff . . .
The story features Harvey Pekar, as himself, as the played by actor Paul Giamatti and as the comic book persona that he has created based on himself. Pekar is downbeat, depressed, in a dead end filing job, rather bitter. His best friend is a self-confessed nerd. Yet when the events of his life are epitomized in comic book snapshots they are intensely poignant, they seem to reach the disenfranchised, the dysfunctional within each of us. We follow him into a marriage that is as weird as he is. The originality of the material is reflected in its postmodern style of presentation, self-awareness of audience-manipulation blending seamlessly with entertainment and artistic delivery. Scenes are introduced and blended with comic book taglines, storyboarding, and even transitions from interloping set discussions with the real Pekar to the actor playing the scene under discussion. If it sounds pretentious, it's not simply because it works so well and in an unpretentious way. Lovingly created and very moving. Probably the first real classic of 2003 and not to be missed, and for lovers of jazz/blues a soundtrack collectors item.
(Seeing it at the Edinburgh International Film Festival I also had the privilege of seeing the real life Pekar, his wife and adopted daughter together with Paul Giamatti, truly topping off a multi-media experience haha!)