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Money Heist is still the best Netflix show to watch

Before Squid Game came along, Money Heist proved that fans in America would put up with subtitles for the right show. Money Heist began as a Spanish original series in 2017 before Netflix picked up the streaming rights later that year. From there, it didn’t take long for the show to find new fans around the world, and Netflix ordered additional episodes of the series before Money Heist came to a conclusion after its third season in December 2021.

The show throws you right into the heists

The relationship drama is compelling, the stakes are always going up.

Yet in the streaming era, nothing ever really ends, especially when a show has such a sizable audience. A spinoff series, Berlin , featuring Pedro Alonso’s title character, is coming to Netflix on December 29. As if you needed an excuse to revisit Money Heist , here are three reasons why it’s still one of the best Netflix shows to watch.

One of the things that we appreciate the most about Money Heist is that it doesn’t make you wait around for the good parts. The show often throws the viewer right into the middle of an elaborate heist that was conceived by The Professor (Álvaro Morte), a criminal mastermind who doesn’t seem to believe in doing anything small.

The initial heist is so daring that the entire team has to take hostages and hold their positions for days even as the police surround them outside. It’s a high risk and high reward situation that makes the drama surrounding the heist so deliciously intense.

You wouldn’t think that there would be much time for love in a show like Money Heist , but it’s pretty determined to have its thrilling heists punctuated with some good old-fashioned romance. That said, there’s nothing traditional about the relationship that develops between The Professor, nee Sergio Marquina, and Raquel Murillo (Itziar Ituño), an inspector for the National Police Corps in Spain who was in charge of stopping The Professor’s team.

When Raquel learns who Sergio really is, it doesn’t mark the end of their relationship – it’s only the beginning. Even the show’s breakout character, Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), nee Silene Oliveira, has her romance with Rio (Miguel Herrán), nee Aníbal Cortés. Tokyo’s just not as trusting of other people, even her partners.

It’s probably a good thing that Money Heist had a relatively short run on Netflix. Because this was a series that had to constantly raise the stakes through each season, which would have ultimately been unsustainable had it lasted any longer. The initial schemes of The Professor were bold, but his later plans seemingly threw caution to the wind and put the entire team into dangerous situations.

Of course, the fun of that is watching the team squirm out of trouble by the skin of their teeth. They may not always like each other, but this group needs each other. And that’s the message that the show sends while also staging some pretty impressive heists.

Watch Money Heist on Netflix .

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TV and Streaming | ‘Heist’ review: The true crime Netflix…

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Things to do, tv and streaming | ‘heist’ review: the true crime netflix docuseries plays fast-and-loose with the truth.

Things are more complicated in real life. Large-scale robberies aren’t usually undertaken to right karmic wrongs, but because people are motivated by more personal and immediate concerns. Sometimes it’s as simple as: The opportunity presented itself.

Over the course of six episodes (each 40 minutes apiece), the true crime Netflix docuseries “Heist” centers its focus on three major inside jobs. The participants featured were eventually caught and they served time. Now they’re here to tell their story (presumably for a fee paid by the show’s producers). The show’s format takes the form of actor re-enactments interspersed with present-day interviews with the real people involved — or so you’re led to believe.

“Real” turns out not to be true, at least in one case. It’s only at the very end of the two episodes focused on Heather Tallchief — who took part in the 1993 theft of millions from an armored truck in Las Vegas — that we learn, via vague wording splashed across the screen, that we haven’t been watching Tallchief narrate her own story at all: “Due to the ongoing investigation into Roberto Solis (her accomplice), Heather chose to remain anonymous for her safety. Her interview was recreated word-for-word by an actress.”

This rationalization raises more questions than it answers. Tallchief lived as a fugitive for 12 years in Amsterdam under a false name. But in 2005, she turned herself in and, notably, spoke to the media. Footage and images of her are already out there. Is she currently living under her real name? A fair question that goes unanswered. Here’s another omission: Tallchief became pregnant by Solis shortly after they absconded with the money. The relationship ended before she gave birth, and she raised the child alone. That son, now a young adult, is interviewed here. Presumably it’s really him and not an actor, but it makes you wonder why there are no concerns about his safety.

None of this makes any sense and the show’s production company Dirty Robber and director Derek Doneen glide right over all of it, emulating their subject’s dishonesty: You, the viewer, have become the mark. If this seems relatively harmless — you’ve been swindled out of nothing more than 80 minutes worth of your good faith — it’s worth thinking about this in a larger sense, because playing fast and loose with the truth has a way of undermining the entire series. I didn’t trust anything I saw on screen after that.

Still, it’s fascinating viewing, if a relatively inelegant format. It bears similarities to the NatGeo series about travelers caught smuggling drugs internationally, but the tone of “Locked Up Abroad” has always been tinged with regret; the people at the center of each episode understand their profound errors in judgment in hindsight. That’s true of “Heist” as well, but the show really wants to have its cake and eat it too, layering in a soundtrack of swinging brass as if were an episode of the fictional “Hustle,” rather than a real-life story that left the family of those involved feeling deeply confused and hurt. That pain, still raw after so many years have passed, may be the show’s strongest insight.

“Heist” also focuses on the massive theft of expensive bourbon in Kentucky in 2013, a crime dubbed Pappygate in a nod to brand of bourbon in question, Pappy Van Winkle. It’s not only the story of Gilbert “Toby” Curtsinger, a former distillery employee who describes himself as “the kind of guy that you knew could get stuff,” but also of a publicity-seeking sheriff of the small town of Frankfort.

The show also spotlights the robbery of more than $7 million stolen from Miami International Airport in 2005. The heist was organized by Karls Monzon, who was clearly underestimated by those who knew him. His planning was meticulous but his choice of co-conspirators was not and that’s when things spiraled violently out of control.

It’s impossible to watch the series and not think about the many one-percenters who get away with worse. The Wall Street bankers and executives who went unprosecuted and unpunished in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Or the recent investigation by ProPublica that found the nation’s billionaires sometimes pay zero federal income taxes, availing themselves of “tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people.” A heist by any other name is still a heist in spirit.

The big score is almost always a mirage, but it’s a fantasy that endures because there’s something so satisfying about the promise of getting one over on an unfair system and powerful entities who, when given the chance, exploit us without a second thought.

“Heist” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: Netflix

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Best Heist Movies of All Time

The Bling Ring (2013) 60%

The Newton Boys (1998) 65%

Bandits (2001) 64%

Danger: Diabolik (1968) 65%

2 Guns (2013) 64%

Mission: Impossible (1996) 65%

Small Time Crooks (2000) 66%

The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019) 66%

Heist (2001) 67%

Wrath of Man (2021) 68%

Army Of The Dead (2021) 67%

The Fate of the Furious (2017) 67%

Tower Heist (2011) 67%

Public Enemies (2009) 68%

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) 68%

Point Break (1991) 69%

Ronin (1998) 70%

Ocean's Thirteen (2007) 70%

Ocean's 8 (2018) 68%

Set It Off (1996) 70%

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) 69%

Triple Frontier (2019) 70%

Mission: Impossible III (2006) 71%

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) 70%

The Driver (1978) 79%

The Score (2001) 74%

The Italian Job (2003) 72%

The Great Train Robbery (1978) 77%

Snatch (2000) 74%

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) 75%

Dragged Across Concrete (2018) 76%

The Good Thief (2002) 77%

Fast Five (2011) 78%

Kelly's Heroes (1970) 79%

Sneakers (1992) 80%

The Bank Job (2008) 80%

The Italian Job (1969) 81%

Ocean's Eleven (2001) 83%

Ant-Man (2015) 83%

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) 84%

Bottle Rocket (1996) 86%

The Getaway (1972) 83%

Inside Man (2006) 86%

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) 89%

Heat (1995) 83%

Jackie Brown (1997) 88%

Sexy Beast (2000) 87%

The Lookout (2007) 87%

Inception (2010) 87%

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 90%

The Usual Suspects (1995) 87%

American Animals (2018) 88%

The Pink Panther (1963) 89%

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) 89%

The Spanish Prisoner (1998) 89%

Topkapi (1964) 95%

The Wild Bunch (1969) 91%

Kajillionaire (2020) 90%

Take the Money and Run (1969) 91%

Widows (2018) 91%

A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) 92%

Rififi (1955) 93%

Reservoir Dogs (1992) 90%

Nine Queens (2001) 92%

No Sudden Move (2021) 92%

The Town (2010) 92%

Logan Lucky (2017) 92%

Baby Driver (2017) 92%

Out of Sight (1998) 94%

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011) 93%

Drive (2011) 93%

Thief (1981) 80%

Band of Outsiders (1964) 94%

To Catch a Thief (1955) 92%

The Sting (1973) 93%

Three Kings (1999) 94%

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (2015) 94%

The Killing (1956) 96%

The Red Circle (1970) 96%

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) 96%

A Fish Called Wanda (1988) 96%

Hell or High Water (2016) 97%

Bob the gambler (1955) 97%.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) 98%

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) 98%

The Ladykillers (1955) 100%

The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) 100%

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) 98%

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There Are Only Two Perfect Heist Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes might just be a review aggregator, but its influence is significant — inordinate, you might say. The website that should give you a rough guide as to what critics think about a film has become the arbiter of whether a film is deemed good or not, or in RT parlance, "fresh" or "rotten." This binary would be fine if RT wasn't as influential as it is, but these days the Tomatometer's reach is wide, and our adherence to its decrees often borders on unflinching. A green splat is enough to put most casual viewers off a film, which is a shame because that means hordes of people are overlooking unfairly-maligned classics like "The Comedy," or worse, the delights of the seven John Travolta movies to achieve a 0% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes .

On the other end of the spectrum, there are a handful of movies that have garnered a rare 100% rating, many of which are, shall we say questionable at best. But some are actually deserving of such a designation. There might well be more than two perfect sci-fi movies , but if you're going to give that honor to any films, "The Terminator" and Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" are surely worthy.

Interestingly enough, two appears to be the magic number when it comes to 100-percenters and grouping films by genre/director/actor. According to Rotten Tomatoes, not only are there two perfect sci-fi movies, but two perfect horror movies, two perfect Alfred Hitchcock films, two perfect Jack Nicholson movies, and two perfect "Toy Story" movies. Which makes it pretty easy to guess how many heist films have managed a similar feat. Yep, 17. No, it's two.

Rotten Tomatoes' best heist movie list is confusing

The best heist movies go beyond the standard tropes of the genre. Aside from having some master criminal assemble a crack team of various specialists and meticulously planning the job, there has to be something else propelling the narrative. After all, heist movies basically come with a ready-made plot, so there's got to be a little extra to take the caper to the next level.

In Rotten Tomatoes' ranking of heist movies , the film that manages to do that better than any other is 1974's "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," which currently enjoys a 98% rating on the review aggregator. Why is this film top when number two and three on the list both have a perfect 100% score? Well, because RT is a confusing and troubling thing, but also probably because a new review was added to "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" and it dropped a few percentage points since the list was compiled.

But I digress. What we really want to know is which two films managed to attain that elusive perfect score. Could it be Michael Mann's masterpiece "Heat?" Or perhaps his cult classic debut "Thief?" Surely the "Ocean's Eleven" crew didn't manage a pristine 100? Nope, it's none of these. Instead, the two heist films with perfect RT scores come from jolly old England and, alongside the central robbery, provide a solid helping of comedy to complement the heist shenanigans.

The British heist comedy with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score

So, which heist movies can claim to have garnered perfect Rotten Tomatoes scores? First up is 1951's "The Lavender Hill Mob," which is one of the best heist movies you've probably never seen . The British classic from the legendary Ealing Studios also happens to be one of only two perfect movies to feature Audrey Hepburn , according to RT — surely one of the highest honors the late starlet ever received in her distinguished career. In truth, Hepburn is only in the film for about 10 seconds. The rest of the film is led by the equally great Alec Guinness, who plays bank clerk Henry Holland. Along with Stanley Holloway's Albert Pendlebury, Holland concocts a plan to steal the gold bullion at his bank by smuggling the score out as souvenir paperweights modeled on the Eiffel Tower. This being an Ealing Studios film, there's plenty of dry humor to accompany the illicit scheming.

All of which, it seems, equates to an outstanding critical response. Every single one of the 71 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes for this film is positive. What does "positive" mean? These are the mysterious intricacies of the Tomatometer that make the whole enterprise dubious from the get-go. But it basically means that 71 critics reviewed "The Lavender Hill Mob," and 71 critics liked it in some form or fashion. Most writers celebrated the humor at the heart of the film, with The New York Times ' Bosley Crowther complimenting director Charles Crichton on overseeing the whole thing "with a touch of polite and gentle mockery applied to wholehearted farce." Critics were also enamored with Guinness and Holloway's performances, with the Chicago Tribune complimenting the "warmly human and idiotic" characters. Overall, then, a roaring success, as us Brits might say.

The other British heist comedy with a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score

It seems Guinness and Ealing Studios are the key to cracking the Tomatometer, as the other heist movie with a 100% score is 1955's "The Ladykillers." In this beloved British comedy, Guinness plays criminal mastermind Professor Marcus, who assembles a group of criminal cohorts to rob a security van at London's King's Cross station. Unfortunately, Professor Marcus and co. are in danger of having their grand plans thwarted by Katie Johnson's Mrs. Wilberforce, the lady from whom they rent a room in order to plan their heist. In order to pull off the job, the crew must pretend to be a string quartet who need the room to practice, but Mrs. Wilberforce's enquiring nature makes things difficult at every turn, and as you might expect, comedy ensues.

"The Ladykillers" could have been the end for Alec Guinness , due to an on-set mishap that almost killed the esteemed actor. Thankfully, he survived, though not long enough to witness "The Ladykillers" dominating the Tomatometer. Somehow, I'm sure he's resting peacefully, regardless.

Why is "The Lavender Hill Mob" listed as "Certified Fresh" while "The Ladykillers" isn't? According to Rotten Tomatoes, you need "at least five reviews from Top Critics" in order to be given the certified label. How many reviews from Top Critics does "The Ladykillers" have? Six. So, god knows what's going on there, but chalk it up to the vagaries of RT and let it be a reminder that none of these percentage scores should be taken all that seriously in the first place.

Sex, Violence and Dali Masks: In Praise of ‘Money Heist,’ Netflix’s Crossover-Hit Crime Soap Opera

By David Fear

“My name is Tokyo…”

In the grand tradition of heist crews — and books/movies/TV shows about crooks coming together to pull off a big winner-take-all job — no one uses their real names. They are known only by cities. Those two burly, bearded guys? That’s Helsinki and Oslo. The Romani with a first-rate take-no-shit glare? She’s Nairobi. The baby-faced hacker is Rio, the father-son team go by Moscow and Denver, and the impeccably dressed gent who’ll turn out to be a bit of a sociopath (there’s one in every gang) answers to Berlin. And the young woman pointing a gun at the camera in the very first scene, already on the lam from the law? Meet Tokyo. She’s going to be your narrator over the next five seasons.

None of them are actually from those places, mind you; they’re all either Spanish or Serbian. It’s just that crafting code names using colors is so 1992, numbers aren’t a feasible option and planets are out of the question because no one wants to be “Mr. Uranus.” So cities it is. As for the mastermind who’s brought all of them together, the quiet, socially awkward guy with the glasses? He’s the Professor. The man with the plan intends to have his associates don Salvador Dali masks and red jumpsuits, enter the Royal Mint of Spain, and rob the joint. He knows it won’t be an easy in-and-out job. He’s well aware that the police (notably Raquel, the female officer heading up the response team), the government, and the media will be watching their every move. And the Professor understands that while all of this is happening, he’ll be able to execute his real caper, which is a lot more complicated than what appears to be happening on the surface….

You could call the Spanish TV show Money Heist a serial crime thriller, a bullet-pocked soap opera, an epic love story or, depending on your perspective regarding genres, a makeshift family drama and a pitch-black workplace comedy. What it is above all else, however, is a massive international crossover hit, and the sort of flex that’s allowed Netflix to both sell foreign-language entertainment in America and bingeable programming around the world. Originally a two-season, 15-episode series titled La Casa de Papel that aired on Spain’s Antena 3 channel in 2017, writer-producer Álex Pina’s story of a stand-off between smooth criminals and the state was purchased by the streaming service, diced up into 22 smaller installments and unleashed upon an unsuspecting global public. The result was so immediate that Netflix then commissioned three more seasons, complete with lavish budgets and blockbuster-level set pieces. What started as a popular regional show that went out with a whimper — viewership in Spain dropped by half during the original run of its second half — turned into a phenomenon that’s inspired copycat crimes and real-life resistance symbology.

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And any attempt to describe what the creators and cast have crammed within the format of a typical caper story structure risks turning into a Stefon NYC club recommendation. This series has it all : Shoot-outs, stand-offs and screaming matches. A criminal chessmaster who always thinks 15 moves ahead. A Heat -style cop-versus-criminal scenario, only this time the De Niro counterpart is actively seducing the Pacino character. An insanely photogenic ensemble of actors. Not one but two major robberies, and mini-heists within the main heists. Drunken twerking, Stockholm-syndrome stripteases and a group dance-off to James Brown’s “Sex Machine.” A sympathetic, multidimensional trans character (albeit one played by a cisgender performer). A decades-old Italian anti-fascist song (“Bella Ciao”) resurrected as a chart-topping dance hit , and a pithy, slightly off-color description of quick-and-dirty hook-ups ( “Boom, boom, ciao!” ).

But wait, there’s more. Later seasons feature a blimp that rains money over downtown Madrid, discussions about the ethical ramifications of state-sanctioned torture and the fragility of the global economy, and a pregnant police inspector who admires Putin. Crew members come and go; you witness the death of several major characters, though that doesn’t stop them from returning in a narrative that prizes flashbacks, flip-forwards and a fast, loose approach to timelines. There are chase scenes, elaborate action sequences and a protracted siege that feels lifted from a war movie. “Good” guys become “bad” guys and vice versa, via double crosses, triple-crosses, quadruple-crosses. Violence? There’s lots of it. Sex? Lots and lots of it. The pile-up of plot twists within any given episode becomes dizzying. At certain points during Money Heist ‘s five-season run, it doesn’t seem to jump the shark so much leap over an entire water park full of Great Whites. Prestige TV this is not.

Yet despite — or possibly because of — the sheer volume of ridiculous, logic-straining turns, Heist has not only translated well outside of Spain, it’s managed to become one of the single most watched shows around the world. Prior to Squid Game, the equally popular dystopian thriller from South Korea, the show was Netflix’s number-one foreign-language series by a large margin. (And in an act of God-level corporate synergy, Squid Game ‘s Park Hae-soo will soon star in a South Korean version of the show , produced by Pina for Netflix.) And given the fact that the streaming service quietly dropped the first two seasons of the show shortly after it had concluded its run on Antena without any promotion whatsoever, the sudden broadening of its fanbase came as a shock. Virtually overnight, the show’s ensemble cast became stars and those Dali masks replaced the “Anonymous” Guy Fawkes masks as the face of worldwide rebellion. By the time the second part of the final season dropped in December of 2021, the series had won numerous awards and been the most-viewed television program in a half-dozen countries across Europe and Latin America. It was the most organic example of a Netflix bump imaginable, a word-of-mouth hit thanks to a lingua franca of style, a hot cast and a subversive anti-authoritarian streak.

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That last aspect might be key to understanding why a Spanish “event” TV show which slightly petered out before its conclusion became such a worldwide sensation. A key part of the Professor’s plan is to turn his gang in to folk heroes — and by keeping the public on their side, they can keep the police and the military from storming the gates, should the presence of hostages stop being a deterrent. Never mind that they are, for practical purposes, a for-profit criminal organization, or the eventual revelation that the Professor has a very personal reason for staging this raiding of the country’s royal mint (and, later, the Bank of Spain). They brand themselves as both modern-day Robin Hoods and capital-R Resistance fighters, strategically using the media and surveillance tactics as a form of moral jujitsu against the state; the exposure of documents that indict Spain and other E.U. countries in war crimes and other dodgy activities plays a key part in the third season. They become the “good guys” by comparison.

Once you get into the Netflix-produced seasons, with their cash-infused production design and globetrotting location shoots, you can feel the show retrofitting that aspect — the gang members are now internationally recognized as outlaws who stuck it to the man, the Dali visage as meme-to-logo–friendly as Shepard Fairey street art or Che Guevara t-shirt. Actual activists and protestors in the Middle East, Asia and the U.S. had already adopted the red jumpsuits and masks as a uniform after Money Heist first took off, and the show then amplified that back to viewers. It became a melodrama with a built-in sense of one-size-fits-all rebellion. In Spain, critics might have singled out the pop resistance stance as a reaction to the country’s austerity measures or financial instability on the continent. Once Heist began playing in other regions, however, those audiences could view the Casa de Papel gang’s flipped bird as a mirror to their own issues, whether it was standing up for human rights, standing against totalitarianism or repression, you name it. It was possible to indulge in the usual wish-fulfillment you get with grand escapist entertainment — who wouldn’t be stage an elaborately complex heist and look impossibly cool while doing it, before retiring to your own tropical island? — while plugging in your own subjective machine to rage against. It may have taken stances against sanctioned torture, but the show’s overall political stance was a sexier version of this .

Still, that doesn’t explain how Money Heist managed to conquer the world in record time, or made the seismic impact it’s made everywhere from North Africa to South America. Or how it’s propulsive mix of high melodrama and lowbrow pulp, combined with a slew of genre mash-ups and relentless hit-or-miss twists — we’re still unsure why one already-established bad guy had to inexplicably become a sexual predator in addition to a standard heel — managed to strike a chord with American audiences, even ones weened on post- Reservoir Dogs pomo heist flicks. The fact that the dubbed version seemed to have an edge on its original-language iteration in the U.S. may make those of us who view subtitles as a necessity rather than a hindrance gnash our in teeth in frustration, yet if Netflix’s numbers are to be believed, the show seems to be making audiences more receptive to their foreign programming overall. ( Money Heist crawled so Squid Game could sprint.)

Several of its stars have become bankable outside of Spain as well: Úrsula Corberó, who plays Tokyo, showed up a music video for the J.Balvin/Bad Bunny/Duo LIpa cut “Un Dia” and now has a recurring role in the G.I. Joe franchise; you can catch Álvaro Morte, the charismatic actor who plays the Professor, in Amazon’s bid for the GoT fantasy bullseye, The Wheel of Time. A spin-off series for Pedro Alonso’s Berlin character is in the works, and we assume other beloved characters from the show will drop by as well. Yet to dig into the fit-to-burst, crime-pays telenovela that first brought them to our attention, as it swerves from thriller to romance to camp to black comedy to WTF face-palming cliffhangers, is to feel like you’ve inhaled a gateway drug of sorts. Like the Spanish-Italian “Spaghetti” Westerns of the 1960s and early ’70s that took a familiar set of genre conventions and Euro-subverted them for their own means, Pina and Co.’s series feels like it bending and banging around heist-movie stories in order to make them its own. For every wrong move it makes, it gives you a dozen reasons to feel giddy over its sheer audacity and how high its getting off its own genre fumes. It manages to keep stealing you back to its side. That’s the real heist.

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David Mamet's ''Heist'' is about a caper and a con, involving professional criminals who want to retire but can't. It's not that they actually require more money. It's more that it would be a sin to leave it in civilian hands. Gene Hackman plays a jewel thief who dreams of taking his last haul and sailing into the sunset with his young wife ( Rebecca Pidgeon ). Danny DeVito is the low-rent mastermind who forces him into pulling one last job. Hackman complains he doesn't need any more money.

DeVito's wounded reply is one of the funniest lines Mamet has ever written: ''Everybody needs money! That's why they call it money!'' Hackman plays Joe Moore, a thief whose real love is building and sailing boats. His crew includes Bobby Blane ( Delroy Lindo ) and Pinky Pincus ( Ricky Jay ); and Joe's wife, Fran (Pidgeon), a groupie who has confused danger with foreplay. They pull off a big job, with one hitch: Moore is caught on a security camera. Time to haul anchor and head for Caribbean ports--but not according to Mickey Berg-man (DeVito), who pressures Joe into pulling one last job and insists he take along his feckless nephew Jimmy Silk ( Sam Rockwell ). Jimmy is the kind of hothead who carries a gun because he lives in a dangerous neighborhood, which would be safer if he moved.

The plot moves through labyrinthine levels of double-cross. Mamet loves magic, especially sleight of hand (his favorite supporting actor, Ricky Jay, is a great card artist), and the plot of ''Heist,'' like those of ''The Spanish Prisoner'' and ''House of Games,'' is a prism that reflects different realities depending on where you're standing. It also incorporates a lot of criminal craft, as in the details of the diamond robbery, which opens the movie, and the strategy for stealing gold bars from a cargo plane at the end.

When the movie played at the Venice, Toronto and Chicago film festivals, some critics disliked the details I enjoyed the most. We learn from Variety that ''some late-reel gunplay could have benefitted enormously from more stylish handling.'' This is astonishingly wrong-headed. Does Variety mean it would have preferred one of those by-the-numbers high-tech gunfights we're weary of after countless retreads? ''Stylish handling'' in a gunfight is for me another way of saying the movie's on autopilot.

What I like about the ''late-reel'' gunplay in ''Heist'' is the way some of the shooters are awkward and self-conscious; this is arguably the first gunfight of their lives. And the way DeVito dances into the path of the bullets hysterically trying to get everybody to stop shooting (''Let's talk this over!''). The precision with which Hackman says, ''He isn't gonna shoot me? Then he hadn't oughta point a gun at me. It's insincere.'' And the classical perfection of this exchange: "Don't you want to hear my last words?" "I just did." I am also at a loss to understand why critics pick on Rebecca Pidgeon. Yes, she has a distinctive style of speech which is well-suited to Mametian dialogue: crisp, clipped, colloquial. Mamet loves to fashion anachronisms for her (''You're the law West of the Pecos''). She is not intended as a slinky film noir seductress, but as a plucky kid sister-type, who can't quite be trusted. Mamet goes to the trouble of supplying us with style and originality, and is criticized because his films don't come from the cookie cutter.

Hackman of course is a dab hand at tough, grizzled veterans. (''Dab hand"--that could be a Pidgeon line.) He and Lindo inhabit their characters so easily they distract from the plot twists by the simple sincerity with which they confront them. Their world-wise dialogue is like a magician's patter, directing our attention away from the artifice. And DeVito is one of the most consistently entertaining actors in the movies, with an energy that makes his dialogue vibrate. ''I've just financialized the numbers,'' he explains. He is not a bad man in this movie. Just an unprincipled greedy-guts with dangerous associates.

Close attention may reveal a couple of loopholes in the plot. One wonders why the Pidgeon character would do what she does after the truck crashes. Whether we can be sure that her last revelation is, indeed, her last revelation. And the film ends with a character who gives us a little smile that seems wrong, because he is smiling at the audience and not at what has happened. Unless, of course, he knows the last revelation is not the last revelation.

''Heist'' is the kind of caper movie that was made before special effects replaced wit, construction and intelligence. This movie is made out of fresh ingredients, not cake mix. Despite the twists of its plot, it is about its characters.

Consider the exchanges between Lindo and Hackman: They have a shorthand that convinces us they're worked together for a very long time and are in agreement on everything that matters. Most modern caper movies convince us the characters met this morning on the set.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Heist (2001)

107 minutes

Ricky Jay as Pinky Pincus

Delroy Lindo as Bobby Blane

Gene Hackman as Joe Moore

Rebecca Pidgeon as Fran

Sam Rockwell as Jimmy Silk

Danny DeVito as Mickey Bergman

Patti Lupone as Betty Croft

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Heist’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About Three Major Heists, Told By The People Who Pulled Them Off

Where to stream:, stream it or skip it: 'lie to fly' on fx, about the alaska airlines pilot who tried to crash a plane while coming down from magic mushrooms, "actually frightening": true crime fans stunned by physical resemblance between scott peterson and 'gone girl's ben affleck, stream it or skip it: ‘face to face with scott peterson’ on peacock, which features scott’s first interview since being convicted of his wife laci’s murder two decades ago, stream it or skip it: 'untold: the murder of air mcnair' on netflix, a look back at the shocking shooting death of the tennessee titans legend.

Heist is a six-part docuseries that tells the stories of three newsmaking heists (each heist takes up 2 episodes), told by the person that pulled it off. Aided by supporting interviews, archival footage and extensive dramatic reenactments, Heist tells the stories of these heists in a more stylistic, upbeat manner than most true crime shows.

HEIST : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A shot of a private jet’s door opening up. In the plane is a man in shades dressed in a suit, and an old lady under a blanket.

The Gist: When the man and the “old lady” get into the waiting limo on the tarmac, they close the partition and they start making out. This is the start of the story of how Robert Solis and Heather Tallchief ripped off an armored car in Las Vegas to the tune of over $3 million.

The story of Tallchief (played by Emree Franklin in the reenactments) is one of a childhood with a mostly high and drunk father and his abusive girlfriend. So when she met Solis (played by Patricio Doren in the reenactments) when she was 21, she was enamored. She knew he had a criminal past but didn’t care. She even helped him steal $30,000 from a hotel room safe. They moved to Vegas, and when the cash dwindled, she got a job as the armored car driver for Loomis.

She and her partners had a set route, going to various casinos to empty the ATMs and fill them with fresh cash. She was so inept as a driver, often getting lost, that the guys who collected the money weren’t put off by not seeing her at the pickup point. As Solis pressed her for information about the route, he staked it out for days on end.

On October 1, 1993, the plan was put in action: While at their first stop at Circus Circus, with most of the money in the van, Tallchief was supposed to drive away with the money while her colleagues were inside servicing over a half-dozen ATMs. When she got to the rented warehouse where she met up with Solis, she found herself getting into the old lady getup, wondering if she’s gotten in a little over her head with this known criminal and convicted murderer.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Heist uses reenactments so liberally that it feels a lot like  Unsolved Mysteries (indeed, the case was featured on one of the original version of that show in 1994 and 2001). But it’s upbeat tone reminded us of  McMillions .

Our Take: It does feel like Derek Doneen, who is an executive producer of  Heist  and directed the first two episodes, is trying to show these heists as more glamorous than criminal. It’s likely because, when you have someone who pulled it off on camera right in front of your eyes, someone who’s done their time, you want them to recall the crime like it was some sort of fun caper.

That’s what sets  Heist  apart from most of its true crime brethren, especially on Netflix. Instead of going the dark and foreboding route, with stock footage of guns and blood and harshly-lit crime scene photographs, Doneen and his fellow directors have decided to go the “glam” route, with upbeat music, spectacular b-roll of things like the Vegas strip and downtown, and lavishly-shot reenactments that include intimate photographs.

It’s the reenactments that leave us torn. We have not been not shy in expressing our dislike of reenactments, but we do know that they’re a necessary evil in the true crime docuseries game, mainly because there’s just some parts of the story that can’t be told via talking head interviews and archival footage alone. What we liked about the reenactments in  Heist  is that they’re pretty well-done. We don’t hear the actors speaking, but the actors inhabiting these real people do a good job convincing us that we’re watching something close to what really happened. When you’re using reenactments as extensively as Heist  is, that’s critical.

What we  didn’t  like about the reenactments is that it felt like they went a step or two too far, namely the stills that looked real but somewhat too modern to be real. Other shows have done this, giving us “snapshots” that were stand-ins for photos from the time period of the story, but things looked too staged, too directed to be real. The same was with these photos; they seemed too good, too staged, to be real snapshots. It blurs a line that the filmed part of the reenactments didn’t, and when the line between real and reenactment gets blurred, we feel like we’re being taken for a ride.

We do hope the second part of this story goes over how Solis used his expertise in “Sex Magik” to keep Tallchief from bolting and ratting him out — she surrendered in 2005 and was released on parole in 2010, with Solis still at large. How she evaded capture for 12 years and how the feds narrowed down that Tallchief and Solis were responsible should be interesting to watch.

Sex and Skin: There is a brief interlude during the reenactments that show Tallchief and Solis having sex, with some brief nudity.

Parting Shot: “I didn’t know that my life as a fugitive started with the fluttering of those fucking helicopters above my head,” Tallchief says, while flashes of Part 2 appear.

Sleeper Star: Scott Stewart and Steve Marshall, Tallchief’s co-workers on the Loomis truck, were hilarious in recalling Tallchief’s terrible driving and how they felt when they came out of Circus Circus with bags of money and no truck was there.

Most Pilot-y Line: Like we said, we were ok with most of the reenactments, except for the fake snapshots, which looked staged and artsy.

Our Call: STREAM IT.  Heist is a change of pace from the usual Netflix true crime docuseries, which by itself warrants a recommendation. Whether you think that these heists and the people who pulled them off deserve such an upbeat spotlight is up to you, but the series itself is visually interesting and well-executed.

Will you stream or skip the six-part docuseries #Heist on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) July 15, 2021

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream  Heist On Netflix

• Stream It Or Skip It

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Part 1 – Money Heist

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Money Heist Is the Anti– Ocean’s Eleven

The netflix hit’s crew isn’t the best of the best, but their screw-ups are what makes the show great..

If the pleasure of a heist story is at least in part the joy of precision —of the enjoyable contrast when people with charismatically casual attitudes toward the law turn out to have brilliant discipline and eccentric microspecialties they bring to bear on the con—then Money Heist barely counts. The most popular TV show in the entire world , now in its fifth and final season on Netflix, absolutely relishes mess : physical, emotional, and bloody. The series about a ragtag group of thieves who go by the names of cities (Nairobi, Tokyo, Helsinki) loves not the specialists but the improvisers: the people who can do impromptu surgeries and wield Brownings and throw grenades. Handle hostages. Plant explosives. Deliver babies. Have panic attacks. Sure, it has a “Professor” (Álvaro Morte), the mastermind whose plans account for every contingency until they don’t. It has experts: a computer guy, a counterfeit money artist. But Money Heist —two seasons of which aired in Spain starting in 2017 before it was acquired by Netflix—doesn’t really champion their gifts. It loves them for their soft underbellies and their frequent, outrageous mistakes.

This can be frustrating at first. If you start watching expecting a show about the tidy mind-blowing clockwork of a perfect atraco , as I did, you’ll find plenty of defects. The action sequences, for instance are abundant and silly, featuring almost parodically inconsequential hailstorms of bullets. So is the melodramatic style, which launches with a fatalistic narrator—Tokyo (Úrsula Corberó), traumatized and on the run after a bank heist gone wrong gets her boyfriend killed—and proceeds to toggle wildly between the heist and astonishingly inefficient flashbacks. Frankly, no one seems quite up to what they’re about to attempt—taking hostages in the Royal Mint of Spain and delaying the police for as long as they can in order to print as much money as possible. The genius Professor, who has gathered the crew in an old villa in the countryside to prepare, is nerdy and nervous and monastic. He’s the perfect opposite of cool, and the gang he’s recruited doesn’t seem exactly brilliant. One looks like a teenager, the two Serbs barely speak at first, and the father in a father-son team is explicitly concerned about his son’s stupidity. People fraternize despite the Professor’s strict instructions not to, and a hothead has within just a couple of hours of the heist’s beginning violated the Professor’s directive not to attack law enforcement. So much for the plan.

That, strangely enough, starts to become the real pleasure of Money Heist . No one is particularly good at the roles the genre dictates they should play—not the police, not the military, and not the crooks. The brilliance of the Professor’s plan turns out to be its resilience to fuck-ups. He doesn’t despair when someone in the crew does something dumb, because he’s factored dumbness in. He fucks up, too. When the Professor enters into negotiations with Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the hostage negotiator, I expected an epic clash between two tactical grandmasters. And there is one, sort of: The Professor tries to throw her off by asking obscene questions (which he’s clearly uncomfortable with, but he’s trying to play a creepy Anonymous-type with the altered voice). She’s unfazed, and puts her long hair up into a bun whenever she’s about to address him, willing herself into a hard professional identity she can’t quite occupy. But these performances of adversarial competence start to fray because, this being Spain, Raquel keeps taking breaks from her job as a hostage negotiator to grab a sad cup of coffee or glass of wine at her local, where the Professor is also hanging out. Her mother has the beginnings of dementia, her ex-husband was abusive and wants custody of their daughter, and she’s trying to be the superwoman the genre clearly expects her to be—but she’s fragile, lonely, and careless. It will give you some idea of how weird this show is when I say that she ends up going on a date with the Professor—thinking he’s a nice guy— in the middle of the hostage negotiation . Me, watching: THIS IS NOT PROFESSIONAL! IT IS NOT HOW ANYONE IS SUPPOSED TO BEHAVE!

But that’s sort of the point. My initial irritation that the police negotiator, a woman, was sometimes unforgivably dopey dissipated when I realized that in Money Heist, no gender has a monopoly on dopeyness. And after a while, I started to find these flashes of incompetence absolutely delightful. The mistakes are what make this more than a show about the smooth stealing of money. Here’s what distinguishes Money Heist from other heist stories, in my view. The Professor isn’t just working Raquel; he’s genuinely into her, too, and making bad decisions. Meanwhile, his team is stuck inside the Mint, making bad decisions of their own. It takes time to print all the money they want, and people don’t do well when they’re tired. The team starts getting pissy and unpredictable. They pull guns on each other because they’re cranky. Make painful confessions. Play mind games. Fall in love. Mutiny. Debate consent. The hostages have issues too, and the crew attends to them—up to and including requesting an abortion pill for a secretary, Monica (Esther Acebo), whose affair with her boss Arturo (Enrique Arce) is souring under the combination of the heist and the discovery that she’s pregnant.

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If this “heist” is starting to sound suspiciously like a telenovela, it should: We learn that certain parties are desperately ill, that others are filled with regret over past decisions. The show is a thousand times more interested in emotion than in technical brilliance or violence. Money Heist is like Game of Thrones in reverse. If the latter starts off killing characters and dispensing realistic consequences only to have diapered its principals in plot armor and illogic by the end, Money Heist transforms from a joyous and mostly deathless game into a grim quasi-apocalyptic reckoning. The beginning may be silly and the consequences slow to arrive, but come they do. So does the PTSD. The first heist is utopian, positing a plan so robust and forgiving of human error that it can withstand obstacles ranging from panic attacks to snipers and arrests and interrogations. The second heist breaks that capacious fantasy. The balance of telenovela to action shifts in favor of the latter. This darker world includes torture. The military gets involved. It’s a lot less fun.

That the fifth season is deeply painful to watch is a function of how wonderful a game the show used to be. I haven’t yet mentioned the show’s most iconic contribution to pop culture: the red jumpsuit with the Salvador Dalí mask. This is the uniform the crew dons and forces all the hostages to wear. The idea—kind of an extension of Inside Man —is that the crew needs to be visually indistinguishable from the hostages so that law enforcement can’t tell them apart. There’s a leveling effect, and that confusion isn’t just tactical; it’s political. The Professor says in the first season that this is a war for hearts and minds. No blood can be spilled or they risk losing the public whose imagination they will (and do) capture—they are of the people, and they’re not stealing from anyone, not even the greedy banks the public bailed out. They’re just printing new money! It’s a victimless crime. This works. People like the gang and start lining up around the Mint dressed up like them in solidarity. For a time, at least, their presence limits what law enforcement can do.

The funny thing is that the show exceeds its premise: the cute Money Heist concept, a riff on Guy Fawkes masks and Anonymous and our fascination with Robin Hoods, really is channeling public hostility toward a financial system that serves its own interests. The anti-fascist anthem “Bella Ciao,” which our thieves sing on their last night together before the ordeal begins, has become a protest anthem again around the world thanks to this show, and the Money Heist outfit, complete with Dali mask, has shown up at protests everywhere from Chile to Puerto Rico to Lebanon to Iraq.

I’m not going to talk about the second heist—which encompasses seasons 3–5—since it’s still unfolding. But it’s worth mentioning that it begins because one member of the crew is bored of her luxurious but secure life on an island and wants to party. This is a pro-partying, pro-people show, and even its direst moments are leavened by flashbacks to happier times when the gang was sitting around drinking or singing or conspiring. Heists may be efficient, but Money Heist is not: The pleasure it takes in the group trumps the necessities of the plot. Not even the characters who paid the ultimate price disappear; the show loves them so much that one gets a whole prequel of a plotline in Season 5 that has yet to intersect with the main story. (Only the second half of Season 5 is now on Netflix; the final five episodes will arrive Dec. 3.).

I’m not exactly interested in hailing Money Heist as a “great” show precisely because I think it argues, in its pleasurable, silly, and excessive way, against the tyranny of excellence. What I want to defend instead are its flaws and those of its characters. The implied “We are the 99%” message that endears the crew (and perhaps the show) to the public works precisely because the thieves aren’t even a little bit exceptional. Heists are usually about an elite, just differently defined. Money Heist isn’t. It revels in mediocrity and repeatedly, generously, forgives it. Sure, there are fights, but no one really blames anyone else for their fuck-ups, however catastrophic the consequences. If the traditional heist depends on a humbling and almost punitive theory of human supercompetence, Money Heist centers amnesty for its opposite.

The startled actors, who never expected to become celebrities on this scale, are likely stuck being the goofy, delightful icons this show has made them. Money Heist ’s refusal to glorify them as cool badasses equipped them with the ability to move audiences with their panic and indiscipline and joy and grief. A genre that’s typically about how experts can best exploit human frailty (that’s what cons do, after all) is instead pretty compassionate about how messed up everyone is and how many mistakes they make. If capitalism expects people to produce—if it expects competence— Money Heist is an anarchist effort, offering up a world where even the thieves take breaks.

‘Money Heist’ season four review: addictive thriller is the most underrated show on Netflix

Álex Pina's Spanish language crime series has breathed new life into a tired genre

Heist movies have a bad reputation. They can be overly complex, repetitive in terms of plot and sometimes clichéd. In fact, they’re so derided that shows like Rick and Morty and Community have made whole episodes with the format as a punchline. The heist hasn’t fared much better on TV either – which is why it’s so refreshing when a series like Money Heist comes along.

La Casa De Papel  (literally ‘The House of Paper’), as it’s known in its original and more catchy Spanish title, follows a gang of mysterious robbers who occupy and ‘steal’ buildings on the orders of their nameless boss, the Professor (Alvaro Morte). The target of this crew’s heists across the four series so far is the government. Clad in crimson overalls and wearing creepy masks made in the form of surrealist icon Salvador Dali’s face, the cast’s striking outfit has been copied by protestors in real-life political movements too.

Season 4 begins with “The Resistance” (as they call themselves) in greater peril than ever before. One of their own is presumed dead and the heist they began the series before has fallen by the wayside. Things are looking very bleak indeed – and the darker tone continues throughout the new episodes. Instead of the idealism of its previous instalments, we watch as the cast deal with psychological trauma, petty infighting and the mental cost of killing. One of the main gripes tellyheads have with the heist genre is that it’s all too perfect. Everything is too slick, too controlled and not much ever goes wrong. There’s no sense of jeopardy. At its best, Money Heist makes you believe its high stakes are for real, along with every bit of drama that comes with it.

In the original heist, Berlin (Pedro Alonso), whose central character pulled the series together with a mix of anti-hero charm and hints of pure sociopathy, was killed in a hail of bullets at the end of season two. Palermo (Rodrigo de la Serna) took his place in part three, but at points in season four he feels like a hollow imitation of his predecessor.

Of course, the fact the series is in Spanish means little bits of meaning are lost in translation for English-speaking viewers. But this show wouldn’t work without its continental framework. Take the government buildings they occupy – grand, stately relics of the Franco era. Ghostly reminders of the country’s fascist past provide the perfect backdrop for the anarchist grifters’ anti-government crusade.

If television programmes like Hustle and films like Oceans 11 through 13 were given socio-political narratives discussing the merits of individualism and wealth, you have to wonder if they’d have been so popular. But the themes of Money Heist are what keeps it fresh and relevant – and although this season sometimes feels flawed, and ennui is definitely setting in, none of those problems really matter.

‘Money Heist’ is streaming on Netflix now

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Movie Review | 'Tower Heist'

Crime Doesn’t Pay. Oh, Wait.

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By A.O. Scott

• Nov. 3, 2011

Rich guys are among the most reliable villains in Hollywood movies, and it takes no special insight to point out that the guys who make and star in those movies tend to be pretty well off themselves. You can call this hypocrisy, but I prefer to think of it as one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism that all of us have to live with.

Today’s specimen is “Tower Heist,” an action comedy produced by Brian Grazer, directed by Brett Ratner and starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy. The previous sentence could be expressed mathematically as a whole bunch of zeros, which is to say that the $20 million that is one object of the heist in question is small change. The movie’s makers and marketers surely expect to take much more than that from you and your friends in the next 48 hours or so, and you could do worse than to chip in your share, with a little something extra for the Coca-Cola Company.

What you will receive in return (in addition to high-fructose corn syrup) is a mild, chaotic and cartoonish dose of populism, set in a Manhattan luxury high-rise at the southwestern corner of Central Park from which the name “Trump” has been excised with the utmost digital care. At the top of this heap lives Arthur Shaw, a Wall Street titan played with twinkly malevolence by Alan Alda.

Mr. Alda, who spent years on “M*A*S*H” turning himself into a paradigm of niceness, has since relished subverting that image, and he generously supplies occasions for the audience to snarl and hiss and gasp at him in indignant disbelief. A genial plutocrat, Shaw fancies himself a man of the people. He loves to remind Josh Kovaks, the building’s manager (Mr. Stiller), that they grew up in the same Queens neighborhood, and he is generally expert at disguising his condescension as bonhomie.

Shaw also turns out to be a Bernard Madoff-like Ponzi schemer, or perhaps something worse (or at least easier to explain in a 10- or 15-second burst of expository dialogue). Among the millions that have disappeared under his watch are the pension fund of the building’s staff and the life savings of a beloved doorman, Lester (Stephen McKinley Henderson), whose dreams of a comfortable retirement are shattered when the F.B.I. arrives to arrest Shaw for fraud.

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