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Lost in Criterion · May 22 · 1 hr 45 min

Spine 691: Thief

Having finished the World Cinema boxset, we had resigned ourselves that we would have to go back to doing some acrobatics to read Marxism into the films for awhile again, but little did we expect that Michael Mann's Thief (1981) isn't just a stylish heist film but is also (and moreso) a rumination on the exploitation of labor and rent seeking. There's power in a union, but there's also apparently power in burning everything down just to show your boss who has control.

0:00-1:45:16

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Having finished the World Cinema boxset, we had resigned ourselves that we would have to go back to doing some acrobatics to read Marxism into the films for awhile again, but little did we expect that Michael Mann's Thief (1981) isn't just a stylish heist film but is also (and moreso) a rumination on the exploitation of labor and rent seeking. There's power in a union, but there's also apparently power in burning everything down just to show your boss who has control.

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