Home Featured Content

9 Movies That Celebrate The Art Of The Heist In All Its Forms

Heist films are an art unto themselves. They often overlap other genres – crime, thriller, film noir, romantic comedy – but the central element is, must, and will always be the perfect heist. The planning and the execution must be perfect, the criminals charming (most of the time), the take lucrative, the baddies so very bad. A well-planned heist is cinematic poetry – it has tension and cleverness and at its best keeps the audience guessing right up until the end.

[h2] Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) [/h2]

Recommended Videos

French films of the 60s and 70s were adept at taking quintessentially American crime stories and putting them in a French setting – they invented the term for film noir, after all. Le Cercle Rouge feels like The Killing re-adapted for post-war France, with a heady dose of  existential angst thrown in for good measure.

Alain Delon, Yves Montand and Gian Maria Volonte are career criminals from very different backgrounds out to pull-off an elaborate and seemingly impossible heist from a high-end jewelry store. On their trail is Commissaire Mattei (Andre Bourvil), as likable a police investigator as you’ll ever find in a heist film. The boys run afoul of underworld and police alike, sometimes via coincidence, sometimes via their own poor decision-making.

Like The Killing, the outcome of Le Cercle Rouge is almost a foregone conclusion, but it’s fascinating how they get there. The slow-burning story takes a great deal of time to set up our characters, playing with sympathies and the inevitable coincidences (or acts of fate) that bring the characters together. It also includes one of the tensest heist sequences ever committed to film – a good twenty minutes entirely without music or dialogue, as the plan unfolds before the audience. I honestly wanted to get up and applaud.

Continue reading on the next page…