Heist (2001) Review
David Mamet wrote and directed. Heist is the writer-director showcase that closes out 2001's heist cinema trifecta.

David Mamet wrote and directed. Heist is the writer-director showcase that closes out 2001's heist cinema trifecta.

Frank Oz, De Niro, Brando, Norton, and the best heist ending of the 21st century. The Score earns its 10+ through ninety minutes of pure character setup.

The production closed the intersection for seven days, used 300 cars to recreate the gridlock, and ran the sequence with the kind of practical-effects commitment most modern action films have stopped attempting. Gary Gray made a film that loves its…

Critics judged Wiseman's 2012 Total Recall against the wrong reference film. The 1990 and 2012 versions of Total Recall are different films, not competing films.

Read as a Verhoeven satire of the American Dream, the film makes sense. The 7 accounts honestly for execution problems that remain even when the satirical reading lands.

Season 2 earned higher critic scores than Season 1 and got worse. The cyber attack disaster, the institutional collapse, the cowardice.

Critics gave The Pitt Season 1 a 96% score. Because the show ran out of reasons to watch it at full speed.

Wings Hauser's Ramrod is one of genre cinema's genuinely frightening villains, casual, flat, and relentless across a single Hollywood night. That's not a bad place for a genre film to land, it means the ambition outpaced the execution in specific,…

Paul Schrader grew up in a strict Calvinist household in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a hard film to watch, not because of what it shows, which is less explicit than its reputation suggests, but because of what it understands about…

Futureworld (1976) earns its 7 as a lean 1970s paranoid thriller. Cheesy, dated, and genuinely unsettling.

Westworld Season 1 is near-perfect science fiction television. The other three seasons are a masterclass in how prestige TV destroys itself.

The Adjustment Bureau earns its 9 by doing something most high-concept films fail at completely: it makes the concept personal without letting the concept. The idea, that a bureaucracy of angelic agents manages human fate, adjusting events whenever people deviate…
The craft notes in these reviews come from the same eye Richard Lowe brings to books. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way the best films do, start with a conversation.
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