Best Heist Movies of All Time: 10 Perfect Plans
A heist film is a machine with two halves. First you watch the plan get built, which is the pleasure of competence. Then you watch it break, which is the pleasure of consequence. The best ones make you understand the plan well enough that you feel each thing going wrong. Start with Rififi, which invented the form and still has the best silent robbery sequence ever filmed, then Heat for the modern peak and The Killing for the one that taught everyone how to fracture the timeline.
Rififi (1955)
Jules Dassin, blacklisted out of Hollywood, made this in France and included a thirty minute robbery with no dialogue and no music. It is still the greatest sequence of its kind.
Every heist film since is a variation on it, usually a noisier one.
Heat (1995)
Michael Mann's crew are the most convincing professionals in the genre, and the bank job goes wrong in exactly the way real ones do, at the last possible moment and because of someone else's mistake.
The Killing (1956)
Kubrick's racetrack robbery, told out of order decades before that was a style. Sterling Hayden's plan is beautiful and the ending is one of cinema's great shrugs at human effort.
Inside Man (2006)
Spike Lee's best studio film, and the one that keeps a step ahead of you the whole way. Clive Owen is calm, Denzel Washington is tired, and the trick is genuinely clever.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
The anti heist. Pacino's robbery falls apart within minutes and turns into a street carnival, and Sidney Lumet just lets the day get longer and hotter. Based on a true one.
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Melville again, and the most elegant heist ever staged, a near silent jewel robbery executed by men who barely speak. The deep cut for anyone who thinks Ocean's Eleven is where cool begins.
Sexy Beast (2000)
The job is almost incidental. What you remember is Ben Kingsley as the most frightening man in British cinema, arriving at a poolside to ruin a retirement.
Thief (1981)
Mann's debut, with James Caan as a safecracker who wants an ordinary life and has written it down on a collage. The safe cracking is real, taught by a real one, and the film is furious.
The Italian Job (1969)
The pleasure here is not tension, it is charm, and the ending is the best cliffhanger joke in the genre. Michael Caine at his most Michael Caine.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
John Huston made the template. A crew assembled, a job executed, and every man undone by the thing he personally cannot resist. Everything above owes it something.
- The genre has two halves: the plan being built, then the plan breaking. The best films make you understand the plan.
- Start with Rififi for the origin and Heat for the modern peak.
- For deep cuts, watch Le Cercle Rouge, Thief and The Asphalt Jungle.
- Dog Day Afternoon is the essential counter example, a heist that fails immediately and becomes something else.
The whole idea
Watch one movie this week. Talk about it Friday.
We pick one film. You watch it alone, on your own time. Friday at 7:30pm PT you get ten minutes on Zoom with one other person who watched it too. No club, no homework, no small talk.
See this week's pick $5Common questions
- What is the best heist movie of all time?
- Rififi (1955) for the pure form and its wordless robbery, Heat (1995) for the modern version done at full scale. Most people should start with Heat and work backwards.
- What is the most realistic heist film?
- Thief (1981) and Heat (1995), both by Michael Mann, who used real technical advisers with real convictions. The safe cracking in Thief is genuine technique.
- Is Dog Day Afternoon a heist movie?
- It is the inverse of one. The robbery collapses in the first fifteen minutes and the rest is a hostage stand off that turns into street theatre, which is why it belongs on any serious list.