Issue 122: Heists Archives - Bright Wall/Dark Room

Tenet is the ultimate expression of Christopher Nolan’s decades-spanning project of capturing subjectivity on screen, conjuring a twilight world where the nature of reality, God, time, right and wrong, and free will, are left in the trenches of ambiguity.

Stealing Reason from God: Theft in Time Bandits and The Fisher King

Griff Maloney·

Issue 122: Heists

If Time Bandits is a child's polemic against greed and selfishness that ultimately ends in the reveal of the truth of the universe, then The Fisher King is a movie in which our hero steals the truth about himself back from the cold hands of the universe and an uncaring God.

In this black and white still from Jules Dassin's RIFIFI, five men sit around a table, playing cards, drinking. One has a cigarette in his mouth. All wear fedoras, suit jackets, ties. They look at each other with suspicion.

Easing the Pain of Betrayal: On Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955)

Jason Christian·

Issue 122: Heists

Rififi was Dassin’s comeback film, his revenge fantasy film, a revenge not only on foes across the pond but on capitalism itself. And what better way to represent militant class struggle than by depicting a team effort to expropriate the ruling class’s most ostentatious emblem: diamonds?

And When It Rains the Rain Falls Down

Frank Falisi·

Issue 122: Heists

By theorizing acting as the vessel by which a genuine self might appear in a moving image, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon constantly collapses self and other, truth and performance. It generates its own tension.

The People We Used to Be: On Sneakers and Being Young and Dumb

Carrie Courogen·

Issue 122: Heists

Sneakers is a film about a lot of things: ever-advancing modern technology, personal privacy in the earliest days of the digital age, still-frosty international relations of the post-Cold War era, guys being dudes, and the ways in which the American government—to put it broadly—sucks.

Rabbit Rides a Pale Horse

Natalie Marlin·

Issue 122: Heists

This is the first of many subversions in Sexy Beast (2000), Jonathan Glazer’s debut. This is the place where another heist film would end: the comfortable paradise—the idyllic retreat to a luxurious retirement—staked upon the ill-gotten gains earned from a life of theft.

Death, Actually

Mark Dzula·

Issue 122: Heists

While Bonnie and Clyde appropriates the contours and beats of its historical figures’ actual lives, the film uses techniques of elision and abstraction to create a starkly erotic Pop portrait of doomed lovers—and the infinite, tender tension that holds them together.

The Pink Panther’s Women Perform the Real Heist

Suyin Haynes·

Issue 122: Heists

The most captivating aspect of Blake Edwards's The Pink Panther lies with its two female leads, their identities partially obscured, elusive, just beyond our reach—much like the mirage of the eponymous diamond.

Episode #29: Missions: Impossible (with Bilge Ebiri)

Veronica Fitzpatrick & Chad Perman·

Issue 122: Heists Podcast

Your mission, if you choose to accept it: we’re talking across Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), and Mission: Impossible (1996) with the brilliant Vulture/New York Magazine film critic, Bilge Ebiri.

an illustrated head and shoulders of Lee Marvin as Frank from POINT BLANK is framed by a ripple of yellow circles, making his head a target of sorts.

That Night at Alcatraz: Point Blank (1967)

Greg Cwik·

Issue 122: Heists

John Boorman's Point Blank is inexplicably intricate and enigmatic, cool and cryptic, a relentlessly modern film about a relentlessly brutal man with single-minded ambitions—actually, "ambitions'' feels too fancy a word for that body-sized fist known as Lee Marvin.

In an image from Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, two men fight on top of a speeding train. The man on the right is dressed in black and seems to be pushing the man on the left, dressed in a tan jacket and dark pants, off the edge of the top of the train.

About Face: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One & The Selling of Tom Cruise

Nicholas Russell·

Issue 122: Heists New Releases

Ethan Hunt has been engineered as Cruise’s go-to export, the slippage between character and actor deliberate; Hunt is the closest an audience gets to seeing Cruise act like a normal person.

My Money Is Still In Your Pocket: The Death of the American Dream in Michael Mann’s Thief

Sarah Welch-Larson·

Issue 122: Heists

Michael Mann’s Thief, like its protagonist, elides the romance in favor of efficiency. Frank’s me-against-the-world attitude is both armor and weapon in a one-man crusade to fund his American dream.