Crime 101 a sleek and starry heist thriller, Scare Out isn’t Zhang Yimou’s best

Crime 101 (M18)

141 minutes, opens on Feb 26
★★★★☆

The story: The fates of three individuals in Los Angeles intersect along Southern California’s Highway 101, where career criminal Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth) executes his jewellery robberies. Halle Berry’s insurance broker Sharon Coombs is his maybe-accomplice, and Mark Ruffalo’s Detective Lubesnick is on to them.

The three stars are at the top of their game in the American heist thriller Crime 101, which hinges on the time-honoured “one last job”.

A cache of priceless gems is on the way to a billionaire’s (Tate Donovan) Beverly Hills wedding. If all goes to plan, it will be Mike’s “walkaway money” to retire from a lonely life of larceny.

The target is Sharon’s client. Abetting Mike is her revenge on her chauvinistic agency after she is passed over for promotion.

Lubesnick, too, has a reprehensible boss, who is pushing him to clear the case to meet department quota, rather than actually solve it.

But the lawman is principled and persistent, and he has identified Mike despite the phantom thief leaving no trace and eschewing violence.

No one could have foreseen Mike’s mentor (Nick Nolte) bringing in a sociopathic biker (Barry Keoghan) to intercept the final score.

English writer-director Bart Layton’s (American Animals, 2018) gripping urban neo-noir is clearly no mere Heat reheated, however indebted it is to Hollywood auteur Michael Mann’s 1995 masterwork.

Layton’s adaptation of a 2020 Don Winslow novella notes the social inequities beneath the city’s seductive sheen.

Mike himself was a poor damaged child of foster homes. The entwined frenemies are characters easy to root for as their motivations converge, leading to them sticking it to the system and making a fresh start.

Hot take: Crime does pay, satisfyingly, in a sleek high-stakes drama with a 24-carat cast.

Scare Out (NC16)

104 minutes, now in cinemas
★★★☆☆

The story: China’s classified intelligence has been breached. Jackson Yee and Zhu Yilong co-star as national security agents caught up in a race to trace the leak.

Scare Out by Chinese cinema godhead Zhang Yimou is China’s first contemporary espionage techno-thriller.

Long past the iconoclastic youth of his Red Trilogy classics (1987 to 1991), when he might have critiqued the surveillance state, the director enthusiastically embraces his government’s arsenal of drone footage and facial recognition right from the extended opening chase scene through a futuristic Shenzhen.

In pursuit are Zhu’s senior officer Huang Kai and his men, including Yee as loyal deputy Yan Di, and the quarry is a shadowy American (Nathaniel Boyd).

Oh no, is this blockbuster – backed by China’s Ministry of State Security – propaganda to demonise the West?

Operation Scare Out will allay that concern as the investigation launched to track down the enemy leads instead to Huang and Yan.

The mission’s canny commander (Song Jia) sets the teammates against each other to pinpoint which, between them, is the traitor, and a serviceable spy adventure with over-excitable cuts and barely coherent twists reveals itself to be a character study about personal weakness, fear and greed.

Huang has become ensnared by a honey trap (Yang Mi) and is clearly compromised.

Yan, though, has secrets of his own. Yee is an actor on a streak after his astonishing performance in the Cannes Jury Special Prize winner Resurrection (2025) by mainland visionary Bi Gan. Yee’s seemingly dedicated operative is the one to watch in the flawed anti-heroes’ psychological battle and moral test.

Hot take: This is middling Zhang Yimou, who is capable of stylish cloak-and-daggery like Cliff Walkers (2021) and Full River Red (2023).