Critic Reviews

Nolte's gambler-bandit Bob Montagnet is a triumph of imagination, touched with electric existential poetry.

This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.

Nolte is not only made for the role, he's also rehearsed it in real life.

One of Jordan's best films, and almost certainly in Nolte's top two percentile.

There's a zest and brilliance in Neil Jordan's racy heist thriller The Good Thief that makes it almost intoxicating to watch.

Nick Nolte plays a great shambling wreck of a wounded Hemingway hero in The Good Thief, a film that's like a descent into the funkiest dive on the wrong side of the wrong town.

So smooth and satisfying it makes the similar "Ocean's Eleven" look like a game of three-card monte.

The ultimate caper, a work of brazen ebullience.

Indeed, The Good Thief is a fairy tale, not just in the plotted fun of the heist and counterheist, or in the clever twist thrown in at the end, but in the grandiloquent myth, so passionately espoused by Melville, of the crook as a man of honor and elegance.

Melville's seedy characters and engrossing friendships are well preserved, thanks largely to strategic redeployment of his crisp dialogue. As revamped caper films go, this offers considerably more texture than Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11."