Name: The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-10-23T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 88 min
Cast: John Turturro, Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Tatiana Maslany, Steve Buscemi

Harry Lehman is very good at a job that no longer pays. He lifts wallets on the subway, and the wallets are thin now: a phone that can be tracked, a stack of platinum cards that will be cancelled before he reaches his fence. Then he takes a small device from a rich kid’s car without knowing what it is. It is a crypto wallet, the kid is the heir of a crime family, and Harry has a few hours to get it back.

John Turturro plays Harry in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, written and directed by Noah Segan, the actor best known as a fixture of Rian Johnson‘s films from Brick to the Knives Out series. The setup is pure crime thriller, with a deadline, a debt and a vengeful family. Segan’s key decision, as the critics who saw it describe it, is to keep that machine and take the gun out of it. Sony Pictures Classics takes the film across the United States this week.

Turturro, Buscemi and Esposito as a city’s last old hands

The casting tells you what kind of crime film this wants to be. Steve Buscemi plays Ben, the pawnshop owner who fences Harry’s takes. Giancarlo Esposito plays Allan Warren, a police detective who knows Harry well. Tatiana Maslany plays Kelly, Harry’s estranged daughter, and Will Price plays Dylan, the young heir who wants his property back. Victoria Moroles plays Eve, Ben’s daughter, a computer whiz who handles the parts of the world the two old men cannot read. Jamie Lee Curtis appears in a single scene, which IndieWire describes as a turn as a mob boss. Writing for AP, Jake Coyle put the appeal plainly: “A lot of the movie’s joy is seeing such archetypal New York performers on their home turf.”

That is the thesis of the ensemble. These are actors whose careers are bound up with the city, cast as people the city is pricing out.

Turturro, 69, grew up in Hollis, Queens, and still lives in Park Slope. He told AP he has always built characters out of people he meets: “I interview a lot of people and I take things from them. They know I’m going to.” He called it, laughing at the overlap with Harry, “Like a thief in the night.” On the trade itself he was precise: “The whole skill of it is that the person doesn’t know.” And on the city: “People don’t look at you anymore.” According to IndieWire, he prepared by lifting from the cast and crew. AP reports that the performance has brought him Oscar talk, which could mean the first Academy Award nomination of his career.

From Rian Johnson’s stock company to writer-director

Segan has spent two decades as a supporting presence in Johnson’s work: Dode in Brick, Kid Blue in Looper, a part in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Trooper Wagner in Knives Out, and roles in Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man and Poker Face. His first feature as director, the vampire film Blood Relatives, was made for Shudder, and he starred in it himself. This time he stays behind the camera. Johnson’s company T-Street produced with MRC, and Johnson is an executive producer. IndieWire calls it a microbudget film.

The craft choice that defines it is a subtraction. “The film’s boldest choice may be what it refuses to show,” Beandrea July wrote in her A-grade IndieWire review. “No guns are waved. No bodies pile up. Violence exists as pressure rather than spectacle.” She notes that when Harry finds a gun among his takings, he throws it in the trash. A thief who will not carry a weapon, in a genre that usually ends in one going off, is where the premise makes its argument.

That argument is about value, not crime. Harry works by rules, July writes: analog only, no credit cards, no fraud. His skill has not disappeared; the economy has simply moved to where his hands cannot reach. Variety’s Tomris Laffly, who made it a Critics Pick, framed it as a film that “quietly mourns a bygone era, when life was analog, and so were its criminals.” The crypto wallet at the centre of the plot is the purest version of that problem. Harry can hold it, but he cannot open it, value it or even tell what it is.

What the praise leaves out

The reviews are close to unanimous. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus calls it “a graceful character study that affords John Turturro one of the best roles of his career”, and Metacritic lists an 81 from 16 critics. The dissent is worth reading anyway. InReview Online called the film “enjoyable but disposable” and argued that “there’s no twist to the theme”: the generational jokes and Harry’s backstory, in that critic’s view, are “borrowed from so many other films that they seem like an afterthought.” Even July, its strongest champion, found the funk-inflected score “may land a bit heavy-handed.”

There is also a structural question the premise does not settle. A film that mourns the city’s disappearing characters by casting the most famous of its character actors risks turning nostalgia into the argument rather than the subject. And the commercial test has only begun. In its first reported weekend, on six screens, it took $138,657, according to Box Office Mojo. A gentle, gunless crime film plays differently in Manhattan than in a multiplex two time zones away.

Credits and release

John Turturro as the pickpocket Harry Lehman lifting a phone at a bus door in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026) — John Turturro in *The Only Living Pickpocket in New York* (2026)

Noah Segan wrote and directed the film. The cinematographer is Sam Levy, the editor Hilda Rasula, and Gary Lionelli composed the score. Leopold Hughes, Katie McNeill and Ben LeClair produced for MRC and T-Street, with Johnson, Ram Bergman and Johnny Holland as executive producers. The cast also includes Karina Arroyave as Harry’s wife, Rosie, Lori Tan Chinn and Kelvin Han Yee. It runs 88 minutes and is rated R.

The film premiered at Sundance on January 27, 2026, played out of competition at the Berlinale and went on to Karlovy Vary, Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics, which bought worldwide rights after Sundance, has it in limited release in New York and Los Angeles and opens it nationwide in the United States on Friday, October 30, 2026. France follows on December 30 under the title The Last Pickpocket in New York. Harry’s whole skill is not being noticed; the film now needs the opposite.