In the corpus of what we still refer to as Latin American cinema, a significant group of films have focused on stories about the Latin American crime world. Among these are La virgen de los sicarios (1999), Amores perros (2000) and Cidade de Deus (2002). Such productions have become increasingly common since the 1990s, coinciding with the final stage of neoliberal capitalist modernisation. These films have generally been analysed from a "cinema and society" perspective, i.e., exploring how they have reflected the processes of criminalisation of the working class subject and the socioeconomic transformations in Latin America 3/4 (for example, in the work of Christian León or Andrés Vélez Cuervo) 3/4. Conversely, this article examines them in terms of their aesthetic dimension, to show how they have developed a film genre that is unique to Latin American cinema, in dialogue with the social focus of the so-called Latin American New Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.