Crime 101

Bart Layton made his feature directing debut on 2012’s The Imposter. Telling the bizarre story of a Frenchman who in the late 1990s pretended to be a missing San Antonio teen, it is one of the greatest documentary films I have ever seen. Layton’s second film, 2018’s American Animals, saw the British filmmaker telling another tale of an unusual crime, this time as more of a narrative film. It was a solid movie, though not one that garnered the attention it should have.

For Layton’s third film in the director’s chair, he remains interested in crime, but this time it is not of the true variety. Crime 101 adapts Don Winslow’s 2020 novella of the same name, giving us a fictional narrative. You’ve heard the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. When it comes to Layton, truth makes for a more compelling film than fiction. But Crime 101 still taps into the director’s considerable strengths and with a cast of seasoned pros that should both pique and reward your interest.

Our protagonist is Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth, better known as Marvel’s Thor), an efficient and exacting gentleman thief in Los Angeles. Mike’s social calendar is as sparse as his rented residences. This is a man devoted to his calling, someone who has been able to rob jewels at gunpoint without hurting anybody or making enemies. Using information he’s acquired, Mike knows where to be and how to get away clean, leaving the robbed parties to simply file an insurance claim and be made whole.

The unwitting current source of Mike’s intelligence is Sharon Colvin (Halle Berry), a veteran insurance agent who keeps getting overlooked for a promotion to partner. Sharon is trusted to court the business of figures of influence and wealth, figures like gun enthusiast/art connoisseur Steven Monroe (Tate Donovan). From what we can see, Sharon works hard but is not the best at her job and the writing on the wall at her workplace is discouraging: a younger female agent has just been hired and is already getting asked to take over some of her files.

Our third layer of intrigue here comes in the form of law enforcement. Mark Ruffalo plays Lubesnik, a detective whose meticulous attention to detail pushes him to solving the armed robberies that have been committed along the West Coast’s 101 freeway.

That highway is behind the title’s number, although as an introduction to crime cinema, you could do far worse. You could also do better, something Layton seems to know by borrowing from several landmarks in crime cinema. In the casting of Ruffalo, this evokes David Fincher’s Zodiac. In themes, narrative, and execution, this plays closer to Heat and Drive, two of the finest Los Angeles crime dramas of the past… ever?

Layton knows how to put together an atmospheric thriller and Norwegian cinematographer Erik Wilson (Masterminds and the Paddington trilogy) does a terrific job of making sure this is as striking visually as it is narratively. The cast is well-assembled and includes Nick Nolte, Barry Keoghan, Corey Hawkins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid‘s Devon Bostick in supporting roles. Ruffalo is the standout, injecting levity and eliciting sympathy as a (supposedly) paunchy guy whose marriage falls apart, leading him to try yoga. I think this is at least his sixth movie playing a detective or special agent and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it.

Ruffalo’s fellow Avenger Hemsworth gets more screentime and spotlight. It’s fun seeing him playing someone other than Thor and he has more success here in a movie modeled after Michael Mann than he did in the movie he made with the Mann himself, Blackhat. Unfortunately, the lead character is a total cipher, one who keeps his difficult past a secret even as he awkwardly enters into a relationship with Maya (Monica Barbaro), an attractive young publicist who rear-ended his car. It is impossible to watch their scenes together and not think of Robert De Niro’s romance with Amy Brenneman in Heat. That romance may not be the part of Heat that keeps people revisiting that 1995 epic (including Mann, who wrote a prequel/sequel novel and intends to film it this year), but it humanizes the cat-and-mouse tale and gives De Niro’s career criminal Neil McCauley stakes and hopes. Hemsworth is definitely no ’90s De Niro, though, and his chemistry with Barbaro (a surprise Oscar nominee for her turn as Joan Baez in 2024’s A Complete Unknown) never hits its mark or convinces us it’s real, adding little but length to a 140-minute film.

As captivating as Keoghan has been in movies like Saltburn, The Banshees of Inisherin, and the director’s own aforementioned American Animals, he feels like he’s in a different movie than everyone else here. His bleached blonde, chaotic evil motorcyclist recalls Ryan Gosling’s The Place Beyond the Pines stunt driver/bank robber and he can’t live up to those comparisons any better than Hemsworth can match Gosling’s laconic Drive lead.

I’m sure my fellow critics will lament Layton’s career trajectory and I cannot deny that each of his follow-up films for me has dropped another half-star off of The Imposter‘s near-perfection. It’s hard to argue that the director, who also takes lone screenwriting credit here, is gravitating towards the safe and familiar after his first films foretold a bold new voice in either documentary or narrative cinema. There is some disappointment in the fact that we’ve waited eight years since American Animals and fourteen since The Imposter for this? A movie that one could have imagined Anchor Bay Entertainment releasing in 2010?

That is definitely underselling Layton’s third film, which I found engrossing and enjoyable for most of its first two hours, before its final fifteen minutes or so struck some false notes. This is the kind of artful, complex, unbranded adult movie that is endangered in theaters in 2026. It may be a little derivative of classics we all know and love. It may be a little on the nose with its commentary about the distribution of wealth and sexism and ageism in the workplace. But it’s still a genuinely good time and the best movie I’ve seen in a theater in months.

There is enough to like about this to want Layton to keep making movies and consider picking up the pace. Ground-breaking and boundary-pushing are great, but I’m just happy to encounter a new movie that’s as absorbing, mature, layered and visually appealing as Crime 101 is.