Entertainment
10 Greatest Heist Movies of the Last 10 Years
Nothing beats a good heist movie. You get a plan, a crew, a vault, a double-cross, and the specific dopamine hit of watching people pull off something they shouldn’t be able to. The good ones run on pure mechanics. The great ones make you sweat over whether everybody is about to get caught. And the last ten years have been a low-key golden age for the form.
We got full-volume Bayhem, a Steven Soderbergh comeback set at a NASCAR race, Miranda July making us feel weird about families, Sandra Bullock raiding the Met Gala and Jeff Bridges earning an Oscar nomination by chasing two bank-robbing brothers across West Texas. The form is in better shape than it has any right to be. Below, these films are the best of the last ten years. (The top spot is non-negotiable. The rest, we can argue about.)
10
‘Kajillionaire’ (2020)
Miranda July’s con-artist family drama is the kind of movie you watch and then immediately have questions about. Like, is the protagonist really named Old Dolio Dyne? And, is Debra Winger actually wearing a wig that looks like a sentient pile of yarn? The answer to both is, yes. Evan Rachel Wood plays Old Dolio like some kind of feral animal trying to pass as a real girl. Richard Jenkins and Winger are her parents, who have raised her to scam strangers and split everything three ways. Then Gina Rodriguez crashes their operation as chatty stranger Melanie, and the whole house of cards starts noticing just how flimsy it is.
Kajillionaire is a heist movie the way Paper Moon is a heist movie. The actual robbing is almost incidental to what’s going on emotionally, but the schemes do stack up. If you’ve ever been to a Miranda July reading and watched the room split between people on the verge of tears and people checking their phones, that’s the response curve here too. A heist movie about wanting to be loved is still a heist movie.
9
‘The Mastermind’ (2025)
The premise: Josh O’Connor, playing an unemployed architect named JB Mooney, steals four paintings from a suburban museum in 1970 while Vietnam War coverage plays in the background. Kelly Reichardt directs at her usual unhurried clip, with O’Connor bumbling through Massachusetts, Alana Haim playing his wife, and Bill Camp filling out the orbit.
Critics turned out for it, with the consensus calling Reichardt’s pace “laconic,” which is the polite critic word for “slow on purpose.” It won’t be everyone’s idea of a heist movie. The loot gets hauled around in a station wagon and the climax is mostly a man looking at a phone booth. People who want their heist films to feature parkour or banter will hate it. People who already think every great heist is secretly a movie about masculinity in crisis will feel vindicated. Mooney isn’t stealing for money. He’s stealing because his life is small, and he thought theft might make it bigger. Reader, it does not.
8
‘Army of Thieves’ (2021)
Bear with me. Yes, this is the Netflix prequel to Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. Yes, it stars and is directed by Matthias Schweighöfer, who plays a German bank teller named Ludwig Dieter and approaches every scene like a Muppet who has just discovered espresso. And yes, it is a surprisingly charming heist movie, provided you can clear the conceptual hurdle of “this exists in the same cinematic universe as a casino zombie tiger.” Nathalie Emmanuel rounds Ludwig up alongside a crew of safe crackers to break into a legendary set of vaults across Europe before the zombie apocalypse hits the news cycle.
The Europe-trotting is fun and Schweighöfer turns Ludwig into the kind of nervous, sweaty hero you actually want to win. As a piece of heist filmmaking, it’s modest. As franchise salvage operations go, it’s borderline miraculous.
7
‘Ambulance’ (2022)
Michael Bay made a movie where Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II rob a bank, hijack an ambulance, and speed through Los Angeles for two hours while Eiza González performs emergency surgery in the back. Watching Ambulance is like watching someone solve a Rubik’s cube during a car crash. Bay’s instincts have never been subtle, and this is him fully off the leash, gleefully inflicting his style on a 130-minute single-day plot.
Most heists spend the first hour planning and the last twenty minutes running. Ambulance does roughly the inverse. Will (Abdul-Mateen) is a Marine vet who needs major money for his wife’s experimental surgery since his insurance won’t cover it; and the only person who picks up the phone is his career-criminal adoptive brother Danny (Gyllenhaal), who happens to be staging a downtown bank job.
Of course. Will signs on. The job collapses inside a minute — a cop gets shot, the brothers commandeer the ambulance dispatched to save him, and they hit the freeway with the wounded cop and EMT Cam (González) trapped in the back. What makes it work is that the chase is the heist. The vault is mobile, and the clock is real. The brotherhood stuff is the actual engine. Will spends the movie trying to keep Cam and the wounded cop alive while Danny unravels into someone more honest and more dangerous than he meant to be.
6
‘Ocean’s 8’ (2018)
The cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter. That cast was the pitch, the marketing, and most of the movie. Gary Ross directs this all-women spin-off of the Soderbergh trilogy, in which Bullock’s Debbie Ocean assembles a crew to lift a $150 million Cartier necklace off Hathaway’s neck at the Met Gala.
The plot is the kind of breezy contraption where everyone has exactly the skill they need at the exact moment they need it. The heist mechanics are flimsy, but the climactic Met Gala montage (plus Hathaway playing a deluded, vain version of herself) is so worth it. Ocean’s 8 understood that the appeal of a heist movie is spending time with the kind of characters you’d want to commit a crime with, and it delivered on that.
5
‘Triple Frontier’ (2019)
A bunch of ex-special-forces operators — Ben Affleck, looking like he hasn’t slept since 2002; a salted-and-peppered Oscar Isaac; Charlie Hunnam; Garrett Hedlund; and Pedro Pascal — decide to rip off a South American drug lord because the American military pension system is a scam and Affleck’s character is one bad mortgage away from collapse. J. C. Chandor, who made Margin Call and A Most Violent Year, directs with his usual seriousness, which is a strange and welcome tone for a Netflix action movie. The job goes wrong almost immediately, so while the actual robbery is methodically planned, the getaway is corrupted by greed.
Triple Frontier sneaks up on you because it’s pretending to be a guys-on-a-mission flick and is actually a slow disaster movie about American hubris — how a man who has been trained his whole life to extract value from a foreign country might, given the right financial pressure, just go ahead and do it for himself.
4
‘Widows’ (2018)
Steve McQueen, fresh off 12 Years a Slave, decided his next project would be a Chicago crime thriller co-written with Gillian Flynn, based on a 1983 British miniseries. And, because he refused to half-ass things, he cast a who’s-who of female powerhouses: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and Cynthia Erivo. They play the widows of a crew of dead robbers who have to finish the job their husbands started or get killed by Brian Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya (who is terrifying in this, by the way). Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Robert Duvall fill out a deep bench of unsettling men who are each useless in their own specific ways.
It’s the rare heist film that takes the politics of who-gets-to-be-a-criminal seriously. Race, class, gender, Chicago aldermanic corruption, all of it’s threaded through gun choreography and sandwiched between long shots of Erivo sprinting at break-neck speed. Stick around for the reveal in the third act recontextualizes the entire first hour and earns this movie such a high spot on this list.
3
‘Logan Lucky’ (2017)
NASCAR. Pneumatic cash tubes. Daniel Craig bleached blonde with a Southern-fried twang and shouting about hard-boiled eggs. Steven Soderbergh came out of his brief retirement to make a Coca-Cola-soaked heist movie set at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, with Channing Tatum and Adam Driver as West Virginia brothers, Craig as incarcerated demolitions expert Joe Bang (who they have to break out of and back into prison to pull the job off), Riley Keough as their sister, and Seth MacFarlane attempting a British accent. Everyone is having the time of their lives.
This is Soderbergh stretching back into his Ocean’s pocket but with a poverty-tourism guilt that the original trilogy never bothered with, and the result is the rare working-class heist movie that’s actually about more than its characters’ bank accounts. The film’s own characters refer to it as “Ocean’s 7-Eleven,” and the joke works because it’s just so damn good.
2
‘Baby Driver’ (2017)
Edgar Wright‘s getaway-driver musical experiment turns the soundtrack into a fifth wheel. Ansel Elgort‘s Baby (yes, that’s his name) drives for Kevin Spacey‘s mob boss while tinnitus blares classic rock through his head, and the entire movie syncs its violence, footwork, and gear shifts to whatever’s playing. Lily James is the waitress he falls for. Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, and Eiza González are the unhinged crew. The bank robberies are choreographed like dance numbers because they basically are dance numbers.
The “Spacey of it all” has soured the rewatch for plenty of people, fairly. But as a pure piece of heist film-making, the opening Atlanta chase scored to “Bellbottoms” alone justifies the whole exercise. Baby Driver is still one of the most kinetic action movies of the decade and the heist form has rarely been this much fun.
1
‘Hell or High Water’ (2016)
Two brothers — Chris Pine, all weathered regret; Ben Foster, electric and savage — rob a series of small West Texas branches of the bank that’s foreclosing on their dead mother’s ranch, while a near-retirement Texas Ranger named Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) follows the trail. Taylor Sheridan wrote it before he became Taylor Sheridan. David Mackenzie directs it like a grittier Coen Brothers movie.
The reason it tops this list is that it’s a heist movie that understands that every great heist is also an indictment. The brothers aren’t stealing from the bank. They’re stealing their own money back, and the movie isn’t shy about who the real thieves are here. Ten years on, Hell or High Water still feels like the rare modern heist film with something to say and the patience to say it slowly.
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