“Yardie,” Idris Elba’s directorial debut, is a more personal take on the routine crime film. Despite all of the genre’s double-crosses, failed heists, and Mexican stand-offs, the repetition of these tropes has lessened their impact (a generation of ironic Tarantino rip-offs surely didn’t help). But “Yardie,” based on a novel by Jamaican-born British author Victor Headley, is rooted in enough layers of personal devastation and regret to make the movie more emotionally wrought than many of its peers.

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