‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’ Berlinale Review: Analog Crime in a Digital City

Harry Lehman is a pickpocket from the old school—like, really old school. No online scams, no cloned credit cards, not even a Venmo hustle. His whole game is slipping a hand into a coat pocket or handbag and walking away with cash, a wallet, some jewelry, maybe a watch if he’s lucky. The rest? Trash can, mailbox, gone. No drama. Then it’s off to a longtime fence—another neighborhood lifer—to flip the goods for just enough cash to keep the lights on. All of it playing out over a slinky funk groove that sounds like it drifted in from a forgotten ’70s blaxploitation B-side. This is New York crime cinema in its purest, grimiest form.

And here’s the kicker: Harry and his fellow Bronx-based operator are played by John Turturro and Steve Buscemi—two guys who don’t so much act like they know the streets as wear that knowledge on their faces. Turturro’s whole deal is manual. No slick talk, no social engineering—unless he’s desperate, it’s all about hand speed. Buscemi’s running a similarly analog operation: he can barely boot up his ancient desktop, which he mostly uses for email anyway. The rest of the job is just eyeballing whatever Harry brings in and naming a price nobody argues with. Trouble is, fewer and fewer people are walking around with anything analog worth stealing.

This throwback caper—more wistful, funny, and oddly tender than violent—finds Harry still working because he needs the money to care for his ailing wife (Karina Arroyave), who’s bedridden and completely dependent on him. But one day, routine turns into risk: he slips into a rich kid’s luxury car and lifts the usual haul—cash, a pricey watch, a memory card—and a gun, which he immediately ditches. What he doesn’t realize is that the kid, Dylan (Will Price), is seriously wired into something big, and that little card is worth enough to send people looking for him all over the city.

Harry quickly clocks that he’s in over his head and tries to buy time, even if he has no clue how to crack whatever’s inside that USB with his old-school methods. What follows is a slow-burn race against the clock—Dylan and company are always just a step behind—that pushes The Only Living Pickpocket in New York into unexpectedly heavy territory. Not just as a crime story, but as a reckoning for a man who suspects his best days are behind him, and that maybe—just maybe—what matters now is taking care of others for a change.

Directed by Noah Segan and produced by Rian Johnson, the film moves with the loose, patient rhythm of a ’70s indie drama. Sure, the bones are pure police procedural—Giancarlo Esposito shows up as a cop who’s more friend than foe, and later Jamie Lee Curtis drops in—but Segan frames it all from a more reflective angle. These aren’t young hotshots. The danger circling Harry now touches everyone around him: his wife, and his estranged daughter (Tatiana Maslany), a relationship defined by absence and the quiet ache it leaves behind.

Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York feels like the kind of movie that barely gets made anymore. Crime films these days want action (this has almost none), younger leads (most of this cast is pushing seventy), and a steady climb in tension. Segan—this is his follow-up to Blood Relatives (2022)—is after something else. The movie plays like a sequel to a film that never existed, revisiting criminals and cops who might’ve mattered 30 or 40 years ago and are now getting by on muscle memory and hard-earned wisdom, fully aware that their time’s almost up—and that someone younger is always waiting in the wings. Not that they’re ready for the job.

Shot in corners of New York so far from the tourist trail you can practically smell the ungentrified concrete—scenes unfold across all five boroughs—and punctuated by perfectly placed tracks (LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down” opens the film and basically doubles as commentary), Segan’s lean 88-minute feature grows more melancholic as Harry digs himself deeper into trouble. By the end, a handful of clever, quietly moving twists lock both its characters—and that forever seductive, forever treacherous skyline—into memory. The city that never sleeps may still be there. But it’s definitely not the same town they came up in.