At a 2018 press conference for Ocean’s 8, the cast was asked what effect their “strong female roles” would have on the audience. “Encouraging children to crime,” Cate Blanchett deadpanned in response. That could very well be the origin story for the characters of I Love Boosters, Boots Riley’s delightfully demented newheist comedy about a group of professional shoplifters who find themselves caught up in a much bigger struggle against the exploitative fashion industry and the evils of capitalism.
Riley treats it as almost incidental that I Love Boosters is led by a predominantly female cast including Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, and Poppy Liu. Still, given how Hollywood’s most famous heist flicks are a bit of a boys’ club, that female solidarity becomes its own powerful subtextual element of Riley’s social commentary. While heist movies like Ocean’s Twelve, The Italian Job, and Now You See Me will occasionally feature a woman or two on the team, movies where women truly drive the heists are much rarer. Here are 11 movies where women are the ones who realize that some crime does pay.
The best and worst thing about this all-female riff on Ocean’s Eleven is the choice to set it at the Met Gala. On the one hand, it’s a fittingly stylish equivalent to the Vegas casino setting of the original. On the other, it’s a baffling backdrop for the film’s thesis that women are better suited to this heist because “a him gets noticed, a her gets ignored, and for once we want to be ignored.” That’s famously not the case when it comes to flamboyant fashion events, but it’s hard to hold that against the movie too much when it lets Sandra Bullock, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, and especially Anne Hathaway and Cate Blanchett have this much fun together. When Ocean’s 8 came out, there was a lot of handwringing about what the movie had to say in a “post #MeToo world,” but, really, the best thing about this flawed but entertaining spin-off is that it’s not actually trying to say anything all that meaningful about the female experience. The women aren’t given sympathetic backstories or altruistic motives. They’re just pulling off a multimillion-dollar jewel theft for the love of the game and the joy of the camaraderie.
Set It Off (1996)
While the heist genre is often associated with light, zippy fun, there are some compellingly weighty entries too—including this ’90s classic from director F. Gary Gray starring Jada Pinkett Smith, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, and Kimberly Elise as a quartet of friends from the Los Angeles projects. Watching the women’s wildly different personalities bounce off one another is a reminder of what’s lost in ensembles where one character is tasked with representing their entire race and gender. Here Latifah gets to be a hotheaded showboat, Elise gets to be sweetly naïve, Pinkett Smith gets to be a quiet dreamer, and Fox gets to be a pragmatist who argues that robbing a bank is just “taking away from the system that’s fucking us all anyway.” Set It Off gives each of the four lifelong friends their own unique motivations for turning to crime to break free of the cycle of poverty and dehumanization. But while not having money can destroy lives, Set It Off knows having money can do the same. Gray’s film reaches high heights as an action thriller, but even higher ones as a character-driven drama that brushes up against the poignancy of a Greek tragedy—all while delivering one of the best Godfather parodies ever put onscreen.
The Bling Ring (2013)
“I want to rob,” begs entitled teen Nicki Moore (Emma Watson) in Sofia Coppola’s stylish exploration of the real-life “Bling Ring” gang who stole over $3 million from various celebrity homes in the late 2000s. While heist movies tend to either glamorize the thrill of thieving or lean into the tragedy of reaching for something you can never have, Coppola deploys an intriguingly ambiguous middle ground. In a culture that obsesses over celebrity and glamorizes overconsumption—where the biggest reality TV stars have walk-in closets just for their Louboutin heels—where does the rot truly start? Coppola captures both how cool the members of the Bling Ring feel pulling off their various heists and how profoundly uncool their break-ins actually seem in practice; they steal from stars who have too much stuff to notice in order to sell their loot for cash they don’t actually need. There’s a streak of nihilism in The Bling Ring—right through to its bleak final kicker.Perhaps that’s the only rational response to the horrors of late-stage capitalism.
Sugar & Spice (2001)
The early 2000s were a stellar time for sneakily smart satirical dark comedies about cheerleaders. But I’m A Cheerleadertackled gay conversion therapy, Bring It On explored cultural appropriation, and Sugar & Spice took on the difficulty of the American Dream. When pitch-perfect high school couple Diane (Marley Shelton) and Jack (James Marsden) find themselves pregnant and kicked out by their parents, Diane and her cheerleading squad get inspired by a girls’ night viewing of Point Break to make ends meet by committing armed robbery at a local grocery store bank branch. “All we have to do is watch a bunch of movies and learn from their mistakes!” perpetually perky Diane tells a murderer’s row of early-aughts teen stars including Mena Suvari, Melissa George, Rachel Blanchard, Sara Marsh, and Alexandra Holden. With its oddball comedic sensibility (and a funny turn from Marla Sokoloff as a jealous B-squad member), Sugar & Spice argues that having a supportive himbo boyfriend is nice, but it’s your cheerleading sisters who truly have your back when it counts.
While some female-led heist movies treat their protagonists’ gender as incidental,Steve McQueen’s neo-noir thriller is about women stepping into a man’s world. Specifically, Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, and Michelle Rodriguez enter the realm of organized crime when their husbands are killed while robbing a local crime boss—leaving the widows to pay back the debt. That means pulling off their husbands’ plan to steal $5 million from the home of a corrupt Chicago alderman. Roping in a pre-Wicked Cynthia Erivo as the fourth in their quartet, the widows must grow from women who are used to being taken care of into active players in their own survival. That makes Widows a heavier entry in the heist movie genre—less about the thrill of stealing from the rich and more about the desperation that forces women to step into a steely power they didn’t know they had.
Mad Money (2008)
Though it was advertised as a broad comedic romp, Mad Money is really more of a dramedy about the crushing cycles of capitalism. Diane Keaton stars as an upper-middle-class housewife who has to take a job as a janitor at a Federal Reserve Bank when her husband (Ted Danson) is downsized. There she meets fellow blue-collar employees Queen Latifah and Katie Holmes and puts together a plan to swipe the cash the Reserve is going to shred anyway. “We’re a consumer society, aren’t we?” Danson explains in an interrogation room framing device. “She got consumed.” Inspired by a real-life British theft and directed by Thelma & Louise screenwriter Callie Khouri, Mad Money was poorly reviewed when it came out but has some interesting things to say about greed, victimless crimes, and the hollowness of the American Dream—not to mention the kind of unlikely female friendships you can only make at work.
How To Steal A Million (1966)
Before Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery teamed up to sexily steal some art in 1999’s Entrapment, Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole did the same in this 1966 William Wyler charmer. O’Toole may play the experienced art thief, but it’s Hepburn who ropes him into helping her steal a famous Venus statuette from a Paris art institute before the museum can discover her art forger father lent them a fake. That leads to a delightfully innovative late-night heist set piece as Hepburn and O’Toole hide out in a utility closet before going proto-MacGyver to get around the museum’s advanced security system. As much a romantic comedy as a crime caper, How To Steal A Million delivers all the whimsy, chemistry, and suspense you could want from a stylish mid-century romp.
Bandidas (2006)
Most heist movies linger in the planning process, but this 2006 Western sees Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz team up mid-action, as two 19th-century Mexican women with very different reasons for robbing the same bank.Cruz is a horse-loving farm girl looking to steal from the rich to give to the poor, while Hayek is a privileged snob seeking revenge against the cruel American land baron who killed her father to steal his property. Together, they turn to famed bank robber Sam Shepard to teach them the true art of the heist so they can protect the people of Mexico from exploitation. Bandidas balances its anti-colonial themes with a zippy buddy-comedy tone that’s kind of like if Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid were fueled by the mid-aughts male gaze and a dollop of lesbian subtext. Add in a charming comedic turn from Steve Zahn as an early forensic scientist, and this one is perfect for anyone who feels like Wild Wild West maybe could have worked if it were 70% less deranged.
Bound (1996)
If “be gay, do crimes” were a film, it would be this neo-noir feature debut from future Matrix directors, the Wachowskis. Set predominantly in and around a Chicago apartment owned by mafia money launderer Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), Bound is interested in female desire in all its forms. “For me, stealing has always been a lot like sex,” ex-con handywoman Corky (Gina Gershon) tells Caesar’s sultry moll Violet (Jennifer Tilly). Not only do Corky and Violet want each other, they want the $2 million that’s about to pass through Caesar’s apartment. That means they have to trust one another—and outthink the mafiosos around them—to get it. Pulling from the tradition of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock as much as Quentin Tarantino, Bound puts a lesbian romance at the heart of the kind of crime-heist story that would traditionally treat its female characters as little more than fashionable accessories.
There can be a thin line between a heist movie, a scam movie (Emily The Criminal, Heartbreakers, Queenpins), and a crime movie (Thelma & Louise, Spring Breakers, Jackie Brown). You could make an argument for placing Hustlers in any category, but there’s something heist-like about the heightened style that backdrops this story of strippers who come up with a scheme to drug rich Wall Street guys and max out their credit cards. Set on both sides of the 2008 financial crisis and featuring standout performances from Constance Wu and a should-have-been-Oscar-nominated Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers is about the similarly thin line between glamour and struggle—and the emotional risk of treating your criminal colleagues like family.
Catch That Kid (2004)
Lest it seem like heists are only for adult women, a tween Kristen Stewart sets an inspiring example for little girls everywhere by pulling one off in this mid-aughts family comedy released in the wake of Spy Kids. Based on a 2002 Danish blockbuster, Catch That Kid stars Stewart as a rock climbing whiz who decides to rob an evil bank to steal the $250,000 her family needs to fund the experimental surgery that will let her injured dad walk again. (Talk about a parentified oldest daughter!) Though she ropes in her mechanically minded friend (Max Thieriot) and a burgeoning middle school tech expert (Corbin Bleu), they’re mostly just in it because they have a crush on her. Stewart is the brains behind the operation—and the Ethan Hunt-style thrill-seeker who has to free-climb 100 feet into a high-tech bank vault. While Catch That Kid isn’t a particularly great movie, it’s fun to watch a kid’s feature go through all the classic heist tropes so earnestly; all with a savvy, decidedly not-romance-obsessed female lead at its center.
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