Critic Reviews

The world's most successful ring of diamond thieves is inventively and insightfully explored in the documentary Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers.

The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers' bravura with an organisational flair of its own.

It occasionally succumbs to the pitfalls of the mock-thriller kitsch it slyly dismantles, but it's made up for in a wry and experimental visual style that satirically paints a vibrant crime fantasia.

The movie's most exciting when the precision and jaw-dropping nerve of the gang holds center stage.

Smash and Grab has a grating, repetitive score and can look a little homely on the big screen. But unlike many true-crime accounts, it cherry-picks its material successfully and preserves the conspiratorial sense that we’re learning the ins and outs of an illicit art.

You can’t make this stuff up. But Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers would be fascinating even if it wasn’t so timely.

Marking does an admirable job of ceding centerstage to the Panthers without letting the film turn soft or letting her subjects turn themselves into latter-day Robin Hoods.

The doc breezily sketches out the process of casing, smashing, grabbing, escaping, and fencing, not in as much detail as David Samuels's stellar New Yorker piece on the Panthers a couple years back, but with some added pathos.

It’s a fascinating inside look, made all the more thrilling by Marking’s access to actual Pink Panthers.

Marking...does her best to keep it lively, mixing in actual security-camera footage and animated re-creations, along with pieces of old tourist promotions, newsreels, and industrial films. But Smash & Grab’s overall tone is too reserved, given the subject matter.