Animal Kingdom Directed by David Michôd Mesrine: Killer Instinct Directed by Jean-François Richet It's easy to espouse the survival of the fittest when you're packing heat.

Survival of the fittest is the prevailing theme of Animal Kingdom, the assured feature debut of Australian writer-director David Michôd. So you don’t expect much from its barely-there, mouth-breathing protagonist, Joshua “J” Cody (James Frecheville), who’s first introduced staring at a game show on the telly and sitting next to a passed-out woman. Except replace “passed-out” with “dead” and “woman” with “mom.” J casually tells the EMTs who eventually arrive that it’s likely a heroin overdose, then calls his estranged grandmother, explaining in a monotone that he needs her help arranging a funeral and whatnot, because the 17-year-old admittedly doesn’t really know what to do.

Grandma’s reaction is the second indication that the Cody family ain’t quite right. Upon hearing news of her daughter’s death, Janine (Jacki Weaver) coos her sympathies and is all smiles when she comes to pick up J and move him into her home. It’s then we find out she’s a den mother to a brotherhood of criminals, all uncles to J from whom his mother shielded him. In a voiceover, J muses that she did so “because she was scared. I think they were all scared, even if they didn’t show it.” They don’t show it; instead, they shoot off their mouths and their guns, sometimes enlisting J’s help for more innocuous adventures such as threatening some douchebag on the road “to show him who’s king.”

The alpha dog in this circle is eldest son Pope (an oily Ben Mendelsohn), who spends the opening of the film in hiding, wanted by both the cops and other gangsters. When he does show up at Janine’s, he immediately takes over, enlisting J’s help in a plot to seek revenge for a family colleague who is murdered after being spotted with Pope. Two policemen die. Now J is no longer “invisible” (as he once observes when a bathroom hand dryer fails to start for him) and can’t hang with his girlfriend, Nicky (Laura Wheelwright), without endangering her life, too.

For all its drugs and criminality, Animal Kingdom is decidedly low-key. There’s rarely any bluster preceding its violence; Michôd instead opts for quiet and sometimes eerie tension, as in a scene in which a seemingly abandoned car, in the middle of a road with its doors swung open, serves as bait for the cops the Codys kill. Pope constantly asks others for their confidence (particularly one of his brothers, whom he suspects is gay), and though it’s ostensibly out of concern, you know he’s really trying to sniff out weakness. It’s a detective (Guy Pearce) who spells out to J the film’s titular metaphor, explaining that in the Australian bush it’s a constant battle of strong versus weak. Naturally, he suggests J would be among the strong for ratting out his family. J’s not so sure.

Frecheville gives an aptly infuriating performance as the mostly passive nephew, but it’s Mendelsohn and Weaver whom you’ll remember. The latter’s squat, well-appointed Janine is especially intriguing, kissing her kids on the mouth, cooking for them, and baring her teeth in grins instead of growls even when she starts playing as dirty as her cubs. Developments in the final chapter are also unforgettable—but they wouldn’t be nearly as shocking without Michôd’s accomplished control of the story’s steady boil.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct Directed by Jean-François Richet

The code that gangsters live and die by apparently translates across borders. In Mesrine: Killer Instinct, a French killer and thief invokes “the rules” when an enemy attempts to take him out while he’s walking with his young daughter. But his boss scoffs with a line that belongs in Animal Kingdom: “The only rule in this world is the law of the jungle.”

The fittest in this first of a two-part series is Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel), a former soldier who gets bored living with his parents and working in a factory after the Algerian war. So he joins a friend with the “under-the-table” job of armed robbery, supervised by the Vito Corleone-esque Guido (an unrecognizable Gérard Depardieu). Mesrine proves a smooth criminal, coolly evading capture (in one funny scene, he and his partner pretend to be cops when owners catch them in their home) and readily puffing his feathers via trash talk or gunfire. The ladies, whores and otherwise, love him, and though Guido worries that Mesrine will change when he settles down with a Spanish brunette named Sophia (Elena Anaya) and has kids, that doesn’t happen until Mesrine finally serves some time in prison. He then takes a real job for about a second, but returns to crime when he’s laid off, telling an alarmed and soon battered Sophia, “Between you and my friends, I’ll always choose my friends.”

Jean-François Richet’s stylish, fast-moving adaptation of Mesrine’s autobiography is what Michael Mann’s dull biopic of John Dillinger, Public Enemies, should have been. Cassel, who’s thus far been relegated to small villainous roles in Hollywood, is handsome yet ratlike, charming yet brutal—balances that are crucial to finding something engaging in such a monster, especially over two films. (Mesrine and a partner-in-crime lover are even referred to as Bonnie and Clyde.) Scriptwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri doesn’t waste a word over 113 minutes, with dialogue that is sharp but not too clever and always moves Mesrine’s story forward. If you want a straight-up history lesson, look elsewhere: An opening disclaimer states that “[a]ll films are part fiction. No film can re-create the complexity of a human life, each with its own point of view.” To illustrate, Richet offers multiple-frame views of a man and a woman surreptitiously meeting; the gimmick is unnecessary and annoying, but it’s over with the intro credits.

For a film about a gangster, Mesrine is remarkably conservative with its bullets—not that there aren’t bucketloads. But whereas some of the only particulars that sticks in Public Enemies are the constant sprays of gunfire, the violence here feels more organic than gratuitous. And when things really go boom, it’s spectacular, including a tense, late-chapter prison breakout and a literally explosive subsequent scene in which Mesrine and a fellow escapee return to the jailyard to bust out more of their peers.

There’s maximum bloodshed but minimal blood; an epilogue following this chapter’s necessarily open ending tells of the unfortunate before getting to its antihero. “As for Jacques Mesrine,” the title card teases, “end of part 1.”