Indeed, all that distinguishes Coogan's film from British heist pictures of the 1950s and 1960s is the vulgarity and excursions into grossness.

Recently released on DVD, the witty, well-received heist picture "Inside Man" suggests that Mr. Lee would make a splendid old-school Hollywood auteur, shading the margins of mainstream entertainments with his pet themes and trademark quirks.

I've often thought that one of the reasons filmmakers are perpetually drawn to heist pictures is that an elaborately planned, extravagantly risky criminal caper can serve as a metaphor for filmmaking itself.

With its featherweight premise, casually amoral heroes, and exotic locales, it conjures up an era (the '60s and '70s) when twisty, romantic heist pictures were routinely ground out as tax shelters--and sometimes cast with the producers' model girlfriends, so that expensive vacations could be written off, too.

Great reviews for this "cheeky, blackly comic heist picture" (Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly ), the debut from British director Guy Ritchie.

Imagine another actor with a mashed-potato face upstaging a churning, noisy, crudely violent heist picture simply by coming in two beats later than everyone else in the constantly railing cast.

Robert Aldrich's Mickey Spillane crime drama "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), with Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer, and Stanley Kubrick's classic heist picture "The Killing" (1956) will be shown today and tomorrow.

Mr. Soderbergh understood that all he had to do was show some finesse and he could get away with this low-blood-pressure heist picture, keeping the tiny germ of a story about hitting the casinos.

Next he directed the heist picture, Set It Off, with Jada Pinkett and Queen Latifah.