Chicago as a city of dreamy steely blues and sparkling orange and gleaming fluorescence and stately neon. The lights of late, lamented twenty-four-hour delis... always artfully doubled across blackest pavement.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jul 2, 2024

Michael Mann brought a new sensibility to the American crime movie with his feature debut ...

| Sep 22, 2023

That coffee shop/diner scene in the first hour is a clinic, not just for James Caan's performance, but for how Mann views the scene as it progresses.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2023

Mann came out of the box fully formed. He turns Thief into a magnum opus, and every signature of his career is on full display.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 14, 2023

James Caan delivers what might be the best performance of his career.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 13, 2023

...as if Le Samourai got mugged in an Uptown alley.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 22, 2022

If the camera doesn’t like a performer, it simply stares. With James Caan, the camera leans in.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 16, 2022

It has a resolution that sends the whole enterprise whirling down the toilet and leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the viewer.

| Jul 7, 2022

Their courting scenes are masterpieces of flat-out negotiation, harshly lit, and yet somehow Caan and Ms. Weld touch their mutual attraction with an aura of romance.

| Jul 7, 2022

Buried somewhere beneath all the noise and violence in Thief is an interesting and, I would suspect, valid idea. It is that a man's willingness to risk his life varies in inverse ratio to how much he has invested in it.

| Jul 7, 2022

Thief looks like a good movie... But, in spite of director Michael Mann's authentic sets and a workmanlike performance by Caan, the film never crackles. It merely ambles across the screen with no particular place to go.

| Jul 7, 2022

The film's big acting surprise is the performance by Robert Prosky as Leo. In addition to the film's nighttime photography, it is the character of Leo who gives Thief much of its power and realism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2022

It's a good-looking movie, filmed in a polished high-gloss, high-tech style, with lots of energy and color. But Thief is ultimately undermined by a nearly incomprehensible romantic subplot.

| Jul 7, 2022

Caan is a study in emotional contrasts, a character at once likable and unsympathetic.

| Jul 7, 2022

James Caan contributes a good performance as a sometimes-sympathetic title rolist, but a handful of secondary players are more memorable. Thief is full of that sort of contradiction.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2022

There are many reasons why Thief doesn't score, but its prime failing is the overweening script by Michael Mann.

| Jul 7, 2022

Thief shows Michael Mann to be a film craftsman of the first order. If, in subsequent efforts, he proves that he actually has something to say, we can start referring to him as an artist.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2022

[Michael Mann] pounds his film into you in a combination of big, clean images; taut, edgy performances and a score which intertwines both sound and music. There is no respite from Thief; it is bravura movie making.

| Jul 7, 2022

Well-acted, smoothly directed, highly intelligent caper fodder, marred only by gratuitous violence at the finale.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2022

There is some good acting in Thief as well some good directing and generally impeccable cinematography. The script, however, is full of holes, and even where it doesn't have holes it has been stretched so thin you can see through it.

| Jul 7, 2022