There are some movies that can just be called "Shadowrun movies," whether they inspire thoughts and feelings of Shadowrun or make you want to play Shadowrun. My group has a short list, but we're always on the look out for more, for those days when we don't feel like rolling dice.

Here's some to start us off:

The Matrix (duh)
Johnny Mnemonic
Ocean's Eleven (either version)
The Italian Job (either version)
Kill Bill
Pulp Fiction
Way of the Gun
Ghost Dog
The Maltese Falcon
Semi-Automatic
Strange Days

Anybody got more?

And since I'm dumb, I checked my DVD collection to see what I forgot:

Bladerunner (slap me with a wet fish and call me Rachael for missing this one)
Ronin
The Hire

Is it that time again?

At the moment, I'm seriously considering running a suburban BTL dealer game based on Weeds, which follows a suburban MILF homemaker who turns to drug dealing to maintain her lifestyle after her husband dies of a heart attack.

I'm pretty much convinced that "Domio" is just about the perfect shadowrun movie, other then the lack of high tech. The sleazy Johnson whose up to much more than he claims, the simple job that goes totally wrong when all the lies catch up, the casual act of horrific violence from a minor miscommunication, etc.

The Sting
Léon (shame on you for not adding this one)
Nikita (french version is better)

and somehow I think Crank belongs here too.

why does it have to be Hollywood though...

Collateral
The Four Brothers
The Unforgiven (Clint Eastwood version)
The Warriors
Ghost in the Shell
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
Deathwish series

Clockwork Orange (Classic dystopian future)

Akira (Good if you want way over the top, like a corp trying to gengineer a super mage or force bond a powerful spirit to a human. Tone the power level way down and insert corp experiment gone way wrong and it would work better. Maybe good for a metaplanar quest.)

The Movies Most Quoted During our Shadowrun Games:

Reservoir Dogs (Common Quote: Guys you aren't acting like professionals. Why aren't we acting like professionals?)
Boondocks Saints (No quotes more of a we have to take the law into our hands because the real police have to sit around and do paper work kinda feel)
Lucky Number Slevin (How the everything makes sense, then doesn't, then does again. Though shadowrunners never do that much legwork.)
Smokin Aces (GM has us run into other shadowrunners on the same job all the time and we usually deal with it the same way they do in smokin aces which is to expend a lot of bullets.)

Banlieu 13
LA Confidential

Children of Men
Sin City

A Scanner Darkly

and for the hooders out there
Children Of Men
Boondock Saints

And if you're really feeling friskly you can take a look at some documentaries covering some real life Shadowruns (Black Ops).

Loose Change (9/11 was the biggest of shadowruns- you've got riggers remote commandeering planes flying them into buildings, corporate security teams rigging the WTC buildings with explosives, the theft of the gold bullion from the bank vaults in the WTC basement, the destruction of evidence pertaining to hundreds of SEC investigations, the assasination of John Oneil- the foremost US intelligence expert in regards to the person chosen to be the patsy for the attacks Osama Bin Laden, creating a reason to attack Afghanistan so the UniCal can get their oil pipeline through Afghanistan, corporate media infiltration- Jerome Hauer- to paint a picture other than what people saw with their own eyes, evidence of government scripting of the news- BBC reports WTC 7 had already collapsed 26 minutes before it actually did collapse, and to top it all off the vice president issuing a NORAD stand down order and controlling all these actions through the cover of wargames from his bunker- with the help of PROMIS software)

Terrorstorm (conducting bombings in Iran to blame on the democratically elected president Mohamed Mossadeq who made the mistake of nationalizing the oil fields because British Petroleum wasn't giving a big enough cut of the profits to Iran, PROJECT GLADIO- the P2 Lodge-secret NATO forces- staging terrorist attacks in Italy to blame on the Red Brigade to paint communists as a terrorists to scare the populace into supporting capitalsists in the cold war, the Gulf of Tonkin lie to capture civilian support for an invasion of Vietnam, the attack on the USS Liberty by Isreali forces in order to blame it on Egypt to create a pretext for the US to attack Egypt, the Reichstag fire carried out by Hitlers forces in order to blame his political opponents so he could crack down on civil liberties and seize total power, the London 7/7 bombings carried out by the British military to drum up support for the fake war on terror aka imperialist exspansionism)

I can see most of the linkages between movies and Shadowrun except a few.

Ronin is the definitive techno-thriller movie (best exemplified by Millennium's End RPG).
Pulp Fiction just doesn't make the connection with me. Then again, it could be because I hated the movie (so did the friend I went with).

I'd never really thought of Italian Job or Ocean's Eleven as Shadowrun inspiring movies but I can easily see it.

Ah, Banlieu 13 - had to go look that one up on IMDB as I wasn't sure if it was District B-13 (US title) or not. Fun movie.

Cyber City Oedo (anime) feels even more like Shadowrun than Ghost in the Shell does to me. Both are higher tech than Shadowrun but have the right feel.

Mission impossible 1 and 3

ROBOCOP, the entire universe (megacorp, private police, cybermancy and invoked memory stimulator, street gang and violance, mr. johnson (the number 2 guy at OCP), combat drone, AI (the serie), dystopian future, double cross..The best movie for inspiration and feeling.

Advent children (boitechnologie and genetics, magic and summuning in a future setting, dystopian city, adept (tifa, rude and rufus)

Equilibrium

As gritty and depressing as it might be, the movie that I want all of my Shadowrunning sessions to aspire to is Heat.

Last session, I was so proud of us. Our physad had blown away a street doc's bodyguard, and the doc himself was cowering in a corner. He was a witness to this murder, as well as another committed earlier. Slaw, the physad, glanced over at my character, the mage, and I nodded at him. He geeked the doc without a moment's hesitation.

We could've spared the guy's life. He was an innocent, more or less. But if we got caught, we'd already get a murder rap, so it wasn't worth keeping another guy alive who'd witnessed the whole thing.

If you've ever seen Heat, then you'll know what I mean. If you want to know what it's really like being a criminal, watch this movie.

sometimes i want Heat, sometimes i want GitS:SAC. sometimes i want a De Niro / Kusanagi mash-up.

one thing about Heat--it's a fantastic movie, and it's definitely a good model for many games. but it's about professional criminals who act professionally, which doesn't necessarily describe all runners. crime is rampant enough in SR that you can actually get away with being less than professional, if only for a little while.

my old main character (who's going into semi-retirement) would have fit in well with De Niro's crew in Heat. my current handful of main characters, not so much.

In addition to the above (especially Ronin), I would add:

The Usual Suspects (1995)

Keyser Söze is obviously a Great Dragon.

I have to second the nod for Equilibrium.

Twin Peaks. Leland Palmer becomes possessed by a powerful free spirit that goes by the name Bob. Agent Cooper is an adept. Evil spirits live in the woods. Renault handles drugs, prostitution and gambling. Then there's the native american deputy, Hawk.

Lucky Number Slevin
The Departed
Snatch
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels
Get Shorty

For me:

Akira
Alien
Aliens
Ghost in a Shell
Ronin
Mimic
Johnny Mnemonic
Straneg Days
La Femme Nikita (French version, not TV series)
Blade Runner
Howl's Moving Castle

I'll add a few :
- Brazil (for the oppressing and repressive way of life)
- Twelve monkeys (for the mood and eco terrorist plot)
- Subway (i doubt you can find it in english but it's a french movie made by Luc Besson who also did Léon and Nikita + the 5th element. Excellent movie for some kind of underground way of life)
- Lord of War (for merc wanabees and any run in Africa)
- New York 1997 (for the truely "punk" feeling of Cyberpunk genre)
- Mad Max (for a Cal free state run)
- Sneakers (with an excellent casting : Robert Redford, Sydney Poitier, Dan Akroyd, excellent team work of security experts and pre deckers)
- Spy games (high tech and low tech espionage, very good for runs involving foreign politics)
- Le prix du danger / The price of peril (French movie that had an american remake with Swartzeneger called Running man. The french version is darker and less action oriented : the running is 100% urban with "real" people around, really excellent)
- Cypher (a true shadowrun. err without matrix magic and cybernetics ... but its all about an infiltration in a corp for another corp. excellent story, superb Lucy Liu )

An excellent selection of movies, to really embodie the feel..
..But I'd add..

...the Die Hards
...Charlies Angels 2 [for a light feel]
...Fifth Element
...Appleseed
...the Blades
...Swordfish
...LXG [with tweaking]
...Aeon Flux
...AD Police


Just my thruppence...

How about this for getting you in the mood for Shadowrun "You're a superstar" by Love Inc.

How about ...
Escape From New York
Escape From LA

for Barrens games?

Any "heist" movie that employs high-tech can easily be adapted to Shadowrun. Examples:
Ronin, Heat, and The Score (the DeNiro triple-play)
Sneakers (mentioned earlier)
Oceans Eleven and Twelve (although a bit light-hearted compared to SR)
Entrapment
Thomas Crown Affair

The fictional world of Sin City perfectly mirrors the gritty urban feel of SR sprawls (minus magic and sci-fi elements).

Serenity (*not* necessarily Firefly)
Cowboy Bebop
The eclectic teams in these sci-fi stories can easily translate into Shadowrunners.