Best Heist Movies

The heist film is one of the most-structured genres in cinema. The form has a recognisable three-act architecture: the crew is assembled, the plan is laid out, the heist is executed (and usually goes wrong in a way the plan did not anticipate). The films that succeed in the form do so by treating the logistics as serious dramatic material rather than as filler between the action sequences.

Our picks across seventy years of the form.

The picks

• Rififi (1955) — Jules Dassin. The original heist-procedural blueprint. The famous thirty-minute, near-silent jewellery robbery.
• Heat (1995) — Michael Mann. The downtown LA bank robbery and the shoot-out that followed.
• Inception (2010) — Nolan. A heist inside dreams. The genre stretched to its theoretical limit.
• Reservoir Dogs (1992) — Tarantino. The heist film with no heist on screen.
• Ocean's Eleven (2001) — Steven Soderbergh. The ensemble heist done with maximum craft.
• The Italian Job (1969) — Peter Collinson. The Mini Cooper getaway. Endlessly imitated.
• Inside Man (2006) — Spike Lee. The bank-vault hostage thriller with the slow second-act flip.
• Ronin (1998) — John Frankenheimer. Robert De Niro. Paris and Nice car chases.
• Le Cercle Rouge (1970) — Jean-Pierre Melville. French heist film with no dialogue during the central robbery.
• Dog Day Afternoon (1975) — Sidney Lumet. The Brooklyn robbery that was supposed to be quick and became fourteen hours.

Why the form is so durable

The heist film's structural appeal is that the audience knows the broad shape of the plot in advance. There will be a crew. There will be a target. There will be a plan. The plan will fail. The audience's pleasure is in the specifics: what's the target, who's the crew, how does the plan fail. The pre-set structure allows directors to focus their creative energy on the variations rather than on inventing form.

This is also why the genre has produced some of the most-respected genre cinema of every decade since the 1950s. Almost every major director has, at some point, attempted a heist film — even directors not generally identified with the form (Stanley Kubrick's The Killing in 1956, Wes Anderson's elements of Bottle Rocket in 1996, the Coens' multiple heist-adjacent films). The form rewards the directors who can take its conventions seriously.