This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Glass-cutting power tools, priceless crown jewels, and two scooters to escape on. The story of the thieves who targeted the Louvre last weekend could have been ripped from a movie. For anybody feeling inspired (ideally not to commit a robbery of their own), The Atlantic’s writers and editors have recommended seven heist films that won’t swindle you out of a good time.
Inside Man (streaming on Netflix)
Besides being an excellent genre film, Inside Man is a testament to Spike Lee’s range. The plot follows a Dog Day Afternoon–style hostage situation, a sometimes-thrilling, sometimes-goofy détente between bank robbers and police officers that is miles away, conceptually, from the barbed cultural critique of Do the Right Thing or the biographical sweep of Malcolm X. Race certainly figures into Inside Man, and the screenplay (written by Russell Gewirtz) contains moments of social commentary, some less subtle than others—but by the mid-2000s, Spike Lee had nothing left to prove on that front. And what a cast! Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, Willem Dafoe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Clive Owen, and, of course Denzel Washington, who outshines all of the rest. In a just world, we’d get a blockbuster this good every year.
— Will Gottsegen, staff writer
***
To Catch a Thief (streaming on MGM+ and Paramount+)
If you watched footage of that ladder truck pulling up to the Louvre and thought, Hmm … needs more glamour, here is your perfectly feline fix. I will confess that the heists at the center of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film are not themselves that sophisticated, but the movie is really more preoccupied with how good Cary Grant looks in a tuxedo anyhow; it is very French in that way.
Grant is a retired burglar who’s pulled back into the game when a copycat frames him. He joins bejeweled mother-and-daughter tourists (played by Jessie Royce Landis and Grace Kelly, respectively) ostensibly to smoke out the real culprit but mostly to flirt a lot with both of them.
To Catch a Thief may fail as a thriller, but can you really hold that against a film that unfolds along the French Riviera? Only the south of France produces those turquoises and fuchsias, and only Technicolor captures them. The setting outsparkles even Grant. It’s a fabulous place to spend a few hours planning what you’d wear to a robbery.
— Drew Goins, senior editor
***
Ocean’s Eleven (available to rent on YouTube, Prime Video, and Apple TV+)
Ocean’s Eleven makes crime look like choreography: a heist unfolding exactly as it should, with just enough chaos to keep it interesting. Less than a day after walking out of prison, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) is already scheming to rob three Las Vegas casinos in one night. He has three rules: don’t hurt anyone, don’t steal from people who don’t deserve it, and play like you have nothing to lose.
I’m not usually one for suspense (I’m the kind of person who checks how a movie ends while I’m still watching it), but this is the one heist film I can sit through. It’s not stressful to watch—just satisfying, clever, and fun. Not only is it a classic, but it also never feels dated; no matter how many times I’ve seen it, the cast always clicks, and the humor still lands. By the end, you’ll probably catch yourself wishing you could join the crew—not for the money or the win, but for the satisfaction of pulling off something that elegant.
— Rafaela Jinich, assistant editor
***
The Good Thief (streaming on the Roku Channel)
On its face, Neil Jordan’s remake of a 1956 French caper seems like a poor man’s Ocean’s Eleven. (It doesn’t help that the only streaming version I could find looks like it was bootlegged with a camcorder.) Nick Nolte plays Bob, a charming heroin addict and aging thief attempting one last score: robbing the vault in a Monte Carlo casino on the eve of the Grand Prix, the busiest night of the year. It’s just the type of impossible heist a man out of chances would try, which is what Bob lets the authorities think and Jordan lets the viewers think while they are both up to something else.
Modern heist movies tend to feature genius thieves masterminding Rube Goldberg–esque plans that defy physics, logic, and credulity. But in The Good Thief’s winsome third act, Bob and his ragtag crew improvise their way through a scheme that hinges on the film’s true subject: luck. Luck may not be fair, but it is occasionally democratic and can find even a down-and-out junkie gambler if he puts on a tuxedo nice enough to fool security.
— Evan McMurry, senior editor
***
Baby Driver (streaming on Prime Video)
Some may classify the getaway driver as the most boring person on a crew of hardened criminals: no shoot-outs, no lifelike masks, no rappelling skills required. But the director Edgar Wright made sure the same couldn’t be said about the protagonist of Baby Driver. Miles, also known as “Baby” (Ansel Elgort), has tinnitus, and music helps him drown out the ringing. The songs he listens to score his high-octane escapes after a robbery goes down; he evades a fleet of cop cars on the highway to the frenetic beat of “Bellbottoms,” and embarks on a parkour-style speed run through a mall to “Hocus Pocus.” I can’t promise that it’s a relaxing watch, but this twist on the heist genre is worth a couple of hours of your evening. Plus, you may even leave with a new song stuck in your head.
— Stephanie Bai, associate editor
***
The Mastermind (out now in theaters)
In the opening scene of Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, a man pilfers a small object from a local museum to practice for a larger burglary he has planned—but this isn’t exactly a heist movie. The Mastermind, which I recently reviewed, follows J. B. (Josh O’Connor), a father of two and an amateur thief in 1970 Massachusetts, whose M.O. amounts to glancing around to make sure the guards aren’t paying attention. But his more ambitious scheme, to steal four Arthur Dove paintings with a few accomplices, soon goes sideways after he speeds off with the art in his trunk. For much of The Mastermind’s run time, Reichardt examines how J. B.’s poorly conceived plan upends his life. There are no heist-movie hallmarks—no scenes of him carefully assembling a crew, no voice-overs outlining the master plan. Reichardt, it turns out, is the one doing the double-crossing. Yet the film’s small-scale, low-stakes drama fuels its appeal. Reichardt roots around in her protagonist’s mind to understand why he’d so casually risk losing his comfortable middle-class life for a few pieces of art.
— Shirley Li, staff writer
***
Fantastic Mr. Fox (streaming on Disney+)
The object of theft in Fantastic Mr. Fox is not money or jewels—it’s food and drink from three oafish farmers. As someone who finds many heist movies for grown-ups complicated and hard to follow, I love the simplicity of this movie about a patriarch fox who wants to feed his family and friends and bring some excitement into his middle-age era. The action scenes are lively and suspenseful, but the real joy of the movie is its meticulously constructed visual world and the sweet, melancholic portrayal of family life.
— Eleanor Barkhorn, senior editor
Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:
- Pete Hegseth is the Pentagon’s holy warrior.
- “My car is becoming a brick.”
- The parental-happiness fallacy
The Week Ahead
- The Running Ground, a memoir by Nicholas Thompson on family, personal growth, and lessons he learned through a lifelong habit of running (out Tuesday)
- Season 4 of The Witcher, following a monster hunter embroiled in a bloody and magical battle (out Thursday on Netflix
- Anniversary, a thriller about a tight-knit family whose unity shatters as a movement called “The Change” takes hold of the nation (out Wednesday in theaters)
Essay
What an Iranian Filmmaker Learned In Prison
By Arash Azizi
For more than a decade, after the government of Iran deemed his work “propaganda against the system,” the filmmaker Jafar Panahi was banned from making films or leaving the country. He spent some of that time in prison and under house arrest, but he still found ways to produce art—including the 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, which was recorded in his Tehran apartment and smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival on a flash drive. The ban has since been lifted; even so, Panahi chose to make his latest film, It Was Just an Accident, in secret, without an official permit. This month, he showed the thriller at the New York Film Festival.
Much of Iran’s clandestine cinema, including some of Panahi’s earlier works, is didactic, focused on valorizing the victims of the regime’s injustices. But It Was Just an Accident turns the camera inward, toward the pugnacious debates that pit Iranians against one another.
More in Culture
- When one word changes an entire film
- It’s not enough to read Orwell.
- The great ghosting paradox
- The unexpected profundity of a movie about bird-watching
- Sabrina Carpenter knows what she’s doing.
- Dear James: My stepson’s biological dad is a terrible human
- A novel that understands where romance is going
- The worst art thief in America
Catch Up on The Atlantic
- A “death train” is haunting South Florida.
- George Packer: Why the “No Kings” protest moved me
- A tool that crushes creativity
Photo Album
During the five-day festival, celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs around the world, lamps are lit to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
Explore all of our newsletters.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
