John Turturro‘s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York could well be the story of Sundance Film Festival 2026. Written and directed by Noah Segan, this new crime thriller’s reputation is already something to behold after premiering just yesterday (Jan. 27). While we await an official Rotten Tomatoes rating, there are plenty of reviews to browse through.
Pickpocket takes viewers into the shifty world of career criminal Harry (Turturro), who makes an awful mistake when he nicks the belongings of a local tough-nut named Dylan (Will Price). Giancarlo Esposito, Tatiana Maslany, and Steve Buscemi star alongside the Severance favorite here, and The Hollywood Reporter dubbed the whole thing a “quiet knockout.”
“Turturro is unshowy but magnificent in his best film role in years, an honorable hustler who still carries himself with dignity despite a lifetime of regrets and a world gradually leaving him behind […] What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors […] Watching The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, you are reminded of how rarely we now get to see movies fully shot on locations in the city and how there really is no substitute for the real thing.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian applauded the movie for being “one of the best” New York stories “in a while.”
“Harry’s life might be in danger but there’s a charming hangout movie breeziness to his travels around the city, having to find his way without Google Maps. Even though a reunion with his estranged daughter might seem a little too schematic, it allows for a wonderfully effective performance from Tatiana Maslany, who brings decades of anger and sadness into a single scene. She also tells Harry he looks like s***, maybe the film’s most far-fetched moment, given how great Turturro is looking at 68 — a cool but not overstyled man about town — and he’s such a likable, if morally dubious, companion that I would have gladly spent longer with him.”
Variety went on to commend Turturro’s “mesmerizingly tender performance” while also describing Pickpocket as “the kind of unapologetically local love letter to the Big Apple and its less-illustrious denizens that New York deserves.” Deadline boldly claimed: “It’s an early call, but next year’s under-the-radar awards season may well start here; get in early and put Turturro on the ticket.”
‘Pickpocket’ Almost Made a Real Criminal Out of John Turturro
Amusingly, while promoting his buzzy movie at Sundance, director Segan told Deadline that his 68-year-old leading man got so confident at pickpocketing for real, he even considered dipping into people’s jackets when the cameras weren’t rolling.
“There were days where I would see John or he would call me and go, ‘You know, I was on the 2 Train, just coming back from a game, and I saw somebody and I just thought, you know, I could. I didn’t! But I could…'”
To get into the mindspace of Harry, Turturro read David W. Maurer’s 1964 book “Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern” and took tutorials from “performance artist pickpocket” Apollo Robbins. Audiences will get to see the results of his hard work and dedication once The Only Living Pickpocket in New York hits theaters (or streaming, depending on who distributes the film following its Sundance run).
- Release Date
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January 27, 2026
- Runtime
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88 minutes
- Producers
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Ben LeClair, Katie McNeill
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
