Things seem mysterious to Green Mill after spending many years in prison. This man is trying to return again. He has a very specific picture of what he wants from life because he needs his wife and children.
It's one of those films where you feel the authority right away: This movie knows its characters, knows its story, and knows exactly how it wants to tell us about them.
It's almost as if Mann was shot out of the womb fully formed as a visual artist, because the slick, neon-lit widescreen images of 1981′s Thief echo his later films.
[Michael] Mann has a talent for making cops into Cops, crooks into Crooks, and heroes into Heroes, for telling stories where stark types of the kind found in noir or crime fiction are transformed into legends.
Mr. Mann may well become a very good theatrical film maker but, among other things, he's going to have to learn how to edit himself, to resist the temptation to allow dialogue that is colorful to turn, all of a sudden, into deep, abiding purple.
The Skinny
June 03, 2015
Thief wears its genre as a badge of honour from the very first scene.
