Lost in Criterion
Lost in Criterion
Lost in Criterion
Spine 691: Thief
1 hour 45 minutes Posted May 22, 2026 at 6:04 pm.
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Having finished the World Cinema boxset, we had resigned ourselves that we would have to go back to doing some acrobatics to read Marxism into the films for awhile again, but little did we expect that Michael Mann's Thief (1981) isn't just a stylish heist film but is also (and moreso) a rumination on the exploitation of labor and rent seeking. There's power in a union, but there's also apparently power in burning everything down just to show your boss who has control.