john tuturro

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026)

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Modern life is increasingly difficult for Harry Lehman (John Turturro), whose lifelong pickpocketing career doesn’t yield the same profits it used to in the present year of 2026, where everyone’s money is digital and their consumer electronics are easily trackable and difficult to fleece. Estranged from his daughter Kelly (Tatiana Maslany), he spends his days on the streets and in the subways trying to get together enough money to cover medical expenses for his comatose second wife, Rose. When he manages to lift a set of keys off of a young punk named Dylan (Will Price, who plays Tim Robinson’s son on The Chair Company) driving a classic car, he empties out a duffel with some cash and a USB drive, which he recognizes as a computer gadget but doesn’t know anything else about. When his regular fence Ben (Steve Buscemi) plugs it into the pawn shop’s computer, neither of the old men understand that they’ve managed to tip off the drive’s owner to their location or that they’ve got their hands on a crypto wallet worth close to a million dollars. By the time Dylan shows up to Ben’s shop and ransacks it looking for the crypto drive, it’s already been hawked to Ben’s counterpart in Chinatown, forcing Harry to go on a trek to get it back before Dylan, who turns out to be the scion of a mafia family, kills Rose.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is an elegy for a lost era and a lost city, which it telegraphs from its opening moments, set to LCD Soundsystem’s “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down.” It also feels as if it’s drawing inspiration from the 1974 film Harry and Tonto (down to the main character’s name), which was also about a New Yorker experiencing late in life alienation from the city that had been his home for his entire life, and whose situation leads him to a single, meaningful encounter with his estranged daughter. While Art Carney’s Harry goes on an emotionally uplifting journey where we join him in finding a place in a changing world, Pickpocket is a much more bittersweet narrative, as we know from the moment that Ben reveals that Dylan’s family is connected to organized crime that Turturro’s Harry’s days are numbered. Everywhere he goes, Harry Lehman encounters others of his generation who are unable to keep up with the times. His friendly-but-antagonistic relationship with soon-to-retire detective Allen Warren (Giancarlo Esposito) is marked by a mutual respect, but Warren has also been relegated to a basement desk because he “can’t be retrained” for cybercrime; Ben is useless with computers and requires assistance from his granddaughter Eve (Victoria Moroles) for anything more advanced than checking his emails; the crime boss who is Dylan’s grandmother (Jamie Lee Curtis) expresses the same hesitancy about crypto currency as Harry does for cell phones, and is ultimately right to be concerned. The world of crime that they all know and can contemplate, theft on a scale from petty to grand, no longer exists.

The key difference between Dylan and Harry is that for the former, crime is a business. At one point, Dylan complains that his family doesn’t respect that he’s trying to bring them into the twenty-first century by lamenting that they can’t send him off to an Ivy League school and then get annoyed that he’s committed to “first concepts.” For the latter, crime is a way of life. Harry doesn’t moralize his way of “earning” a living, he just does the only thing that he knows how to do, acting as part of a larger economic ecosystem. Dylan is established early on as a fad chaser, as he orders a drink because he was inspired by an influencer and ends up hating it. As the bartender says, nine thousand likes on the video he saw does not translate to nine thousand people trying the drink. This scene also establishes something important about how the two men approach their business; Dylan is loud, flashy, and trendy, and only gets away with what he does because of his family connections, while Harry’s entire mode of being revolves around being unnoticed, quiet, and unassuming, and his line of work ultimately cost him his family. Neither is a particularly good way to live, but it ends up proving easier for an old dog to learn a couple of new tricks than it is for a young buck to learn not to run his mouth; if Dylan hadn’t been so concerned with showing off his smart watch and all of its features to Harry, then Harry would never have had the small victory that he does in the end. Although this could lead to the film feeling too reactionary in a “it’s the children who are wrong” way, the narrative smartly balances Dylan’s arrogance by including both Ben’s aforementioned granddaughter and a young pickpocket that Harry catches in the middle of a lift and briefly mentors.

Turturro is quite good here, although this is such an undemanding role that an actor of his talent could sleepwalk through it (which Curtis does in her single scene). The film goes out of its way to show you that Harry is very talented at what he does. Lock-picking, palm-greasing, and wallet-lifting come to him as easily as breathing; it’s just that those skills aren’t relevant in a more modern world. As such, the film also feels like a comment on the decline of the power of labor in the modern age. Turturro is fun even if he’s not being challenged as an artist, and he and Buscemi have an easy natural chemistry that ensure the film is worth checking out just to see the two of them spend some time together, if nothing else. If one had to choose between Buscemi’s performances in Wild Horse Nine and Pickpocket, his nomination for best supporting actor should be for this one. I’ll admit to some bias because I adore her, but Maslany is the real standout for me here. She fulfills the same role that Ellen Burstyn did in Harry and Tonto as the daughter that our main character has let down too many times. The dialogue is rote and a little trite—”I go to a real job [for my family],” “My family doesn’t get bologna sandwiches from a food bank while I’m waiting for a bond ticket,” etc.—but Maslany is magnificent and wrings pathos from the tired tropes anyway because she’s just that good.

Carefully riding the line between conservative movies that your dad would like because old salts get the upper hand over young upstarts and a lo-fi heist picture, this is one to check out, although it’s not going to be one that you need to rush out to theaters to see on the big screen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Monkeybone (2001)

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There are two immediately obvious reasons why the special effects horror comedy Monkeybone is worth revisiting in 2022: its director and its star.  Henry Selick’s upcoming Wendell and Wild is his first feature film since 2009’s cult favorite Coraline, and it appears to be perfectly in rhythm with the stop-motion nightmares for kids that have defined his career.  Not only is Monkeybone Selick’s only live-action film to date, but it also happens to feature another beloved 90s figure who’s making a comeback this year: Brendan Fraser, who’s soon to launch a Best Actor awards campaign for Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser is in his wacky, live-action Looney Tunes mode in Monkeybone, as opposed to the dramatic vulnerability mode he brings to films like Gods & Monsters and, presumably, The Whale.  Trapped in a literal nightmare-world induced by a coma, Fraser’s comic book artist protagonist goes to war with his own cartoonish creations in a physical version of the Hot Topic mall-goth fantasyscapes Selick made his name on in A Nightmare Before Christmas.  It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Tim Burton directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, one made even more fascinating by the fact that it flopped hard on its initial release – investing $75mil on a $7mil payoff.

To my shame, I don’t want to spend much time praising what Selick nor Fraser achieve in Monkeybone.  No, I want to praise Chris Kattan.  I outright groaned when Kattan’s name showed up in the opening credits, expecting the SNL veteran to be voicing the titular, annoying cartoon monkey sidekick character as an extension of his Mr. Peepers sketches.  It turns out that Kattan is totally innocent on that front; Monkeybone is voiced by John Turturro, the scamp. He’s also supposed to grate on the audience’s nerves, as evidenced by Fraser’s constant efforts to get him to shut up & go away every time he opens his obnoxious little mouth.  For his part, Kattan doesn’t show up until about an hour into the runtime, playing the corpse of a gymnast who died in a horrific accident.  Through convoluted cosmic circumstances that involve a deal with Death herself (played by Whoopi Goldberg, naturally), Fraser’s comatose cartoonist takes over the gymnast’s body mid-organ donation and flees the hospital into an unsuspecting world.  Kattan’s physical acting as an animated corpse with a broken neck and organs plopping out of its open body cavity had me absolutely howling with laughter.  It was the quickest I’ve ever turned around on a famous actor’s presence in a film, encountering Kattan’s name with dread, then finding his performance so deliriously funny that I almost threw up from the physical exertion. I suppose it’s also worth pointing out that another 2022-relevant actor played a major part of that movie-stealing gag: Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk as the perplexed surgeon who trails behind the undead gymnast, continuing to harvest his organs as they fall to the ground behind him.  It’s sublimely silly.

As screechingly funny as Monkeybone gets during Kattan’s third-act zombie run and as wildly imaginative as Selick’s coma-induced Land of Nightmares set designs can be, its legacy mostly resonates with a what-could’ve-been melancholy.  Selick might have become a household name if this film didn’t flop so spectacularly. Or at least we wouldn’t get his work confused with Tim Burton’s quite so often.  Grimmer yet, Fraser, Kattan, and Rose McGowan (playing a humanoid-cat cocktail waitress, of course) have all gone public with stories of behind-the-scenes sexual abuse from major Hollywood players in the #MeToo era, haunting the film with questions of where their careers might have gone in a better world.  In the aftermath of those revelations, Fraser’s getting his late-career comeback, McGowan’s become a self-appointed spokesperson for the movement, and Kattan has continued to live in relative, semi-retired anonymity (give or take an affectionate shoutout in this summer’s Nope).  I don’t know that Kattan deserves the same red-carpet career revival as his co-stars, or if the actor would even be interested in a proper Kattanissance if it were an option.  I do know this, though: his performance is absolutely the highlight of Monkeybone, somehow outshining all of the cheeky monkeys, cyclops babies, Guernica bulls, and Nazi Mickey Mouse prison guards that Selick packs into the frame.  It would have been an interesting relic even without Kattan, creating an amusement park dark ride version of the kinds of grotesque cartoons that only aired on late-night Comedy Central in the 1990s.  Still, Kattan’s late-in-the-game intrusion is what pushes it over the line from interesting to essential.

-Brandon Ledet

Desperately Seeking Wren

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In her documentary Confessions of a Suburban Girl, director Susan Seidelman examines the Patriarchal social conditioning she and her peers were hindered with as teens in 1960s suburbia. Trained from birth to be dutiful housewives safely tucked away from the dangers of The Big City where their husbands would work, these girls were “protected” to the point of suffocation. It’s no surprise, then, that Seidelman and her frustrated buds idolized the “Bad Girls” of their community: the leather jacket-wearing, go-go dancing, sexually adventurous reprobates that were meant to be serve as cautionary tales but instead registered as heroes who bested the system. You can easily detect this fascination with the defiant Bad Girl archetype in both of Seidelman’s first two features as a director. In her debut (and our current Movie of the Month), the 1982 No Wave drama Smithereens, Seidelman takes us on a grimy, dispirited tour of post-punk NYC under the guidance of Wren (played by Susan Berman) – a selfish, cunning brat who will exploit anyone in her orbit if it means surviving another day. Smithereens is a fascinating character study of a desperate Bad Girl who’s running low on resources to keep her deviant, starving-artist lifestyle going, to the point where she threatens to abandon audience sympathies entirely with each new grift. Wren is more of an anti-hero (as well as her own antagonist) in that way. For a truly heroic portrait of a Bad Girl from the Big City, you’d have to look to Seidelman’s big studio follow-up to Smithereens: Desperately Seeking Susan.

None other than 80s (and 90s & 00s) pop icon Madonna stars as the titular Bad Girl in Siedelman’s second feature – a character who’s infinitely cooler & more lovable than the prickly, survival-minded Wren. Susan represents a fantasy of what a bohemian life in the Big City would look like to a sheltered woman from the suburbs in desperate need of adventure & romance. Roseanne Arquette costars as the audience surrogate: a terminally bored, milquetoast housewife who looks to Bad Girls like Susan as escapist wish-fulfillment fantasies. After stalking this strange woman through her personals ads in newspapers, our protagonist finds herself trailing Susan in real life as well. She leaves the sheltered safety of the suburbs to follow Susan around NYC like a cartoon character floating behind the steam trail of a cooling pie, totally mesmerized. This fascination is clearly more about envy than desire, and the movie-magic fantasy of the picture is a traditionally farcical mix-up of concussions, misunderstandings, and mistaken identities wherein the two women swap lives for a short, wacky time. In Smithereens, Seidelman fixates on the harsher realities of what Bad Girls from the Big City would have to do to scrape by since her freedoms require a life without safety nets. Desperately Seeking Susan is more about the romantic fantasy of that lifestyle as seen from an outsider’s perspective, something she and her peers shared as sheltered teens. In both instances, a life of suburban doldrums is effectively framed as a prison sentence in contrast to the daily struggles of a Big City free-spirit who answers to no one – except when she’s negotiating a place to sleep that night.

Desperately Seeking Susan is decidedly less punk & less challenging than Seidelman’s No Wave debut, but it’s still just as interested in the lives of frustrated, bored women in search of a life worth living. Both films work exceedingly well as a guided tour of 1980s NYC and as period-specific fashion lookbooks. That latter concern may be the only area where Susan truly outshines Wren. Every single outfit Madonna wears in Desperately Seeking Susan is impossibly perfect, and most of the excitement of the picture is in the suspense of what she (or the concussed woman who mistakenly believes she is her) is going to wear next. Wren’s tour of a post-punk NYC is a little more useful from a street-level documentarian standpoint, but Susan’s adventures in the city do happen to touch on some gorgeous dive bar & thrift store locales, as well as an insanely dense list of soon-to-be-somebody personalities of the era: Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, Ann Magnuson, Steven Wright, The Honeymoon Killers’s Shirley Stoler, the triplets from Three Identical Strangers, etc. etc. etc. Seidelman invites this 1:1 comparison between Wren & Susan in the very first scene of the film, where Madonna is introduced taking selfies with a Polaroid camera in a direct echo of one of Smithereens’s most iconic scenes. Whereas Smithereens is a bummed-out reality check of what the Bad Girl lifestyle means for people who have no choice but to live it, though, Desperately Seeking Susan is a “The clothes make the woman” fantasy where being a Bad Girl only means liberation from a life of dutiful housework & childrearing. Both perspectives are valid, and both are made more valuable when considered in tandem.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the No Wave summer-bummer drama Smithereens (1982), check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at the director’s suburban beginnings before moving to the big city.

-Brandon Ledet

Landline (2017)

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Obvious Child, the first collaborative feature from director Gillian Robespierre & actor/comedian Jenny Slate, was a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing bomb-thrower of a film. Robespierre snuck a realistic, formally honest drama on addiction & abortion into American theaters under the guise of a safe, by-the-books romcom. Slate’s persona in the film as an aggressively juvenile stand-up comedian made the experience even more sharply pointed, as it at least vaguely mirrored her own life & art. Unfortunately, I cannot report that their reunion for an Obvious Child follow-up is anywhere near that striking in concept. Detailing the lives of a family in crisis in the mid-1990s, Landline sidesteps the deeply personal politics of Obvious Child to tell a much more familiar, universal story. Slate’s natural persona is still allowed to inform her character, but it’s also diluted by a larger ensemble, including turns from indie scene notables John Tuturro, Jay Duplass, and (MVP) Edie Falco. There’s no real hook to Landline the way Obvious Child’s “the abortion romcom” elevator pitch is immediately distinctive, but Slate & Robespierre still manage to extend the fiercely honest sensibilities of their first collaboration into this less thematically confrontational territory.

A frustrated NYC teen (Abby Quinn) struggles with her idealistic sense of home life & self-identity when two dual acts of adultery disrupt her familial structure. Just when she discovers her playwright father (Tuturro) is likely cheating on her eternally stressed mother (Falco), her adult sister (Slate) also begins an affair behind the back of her fiancée (Duplass). The two sisters & their mother form a solid trinity of female perspectives that dominate this narrative, but the heart of the film lies mostly in the teen’s struggle to negotiate the balance between the ideal of honesty and the fact that the truth could destroy someone. She acts out in frustration, turning to recreational drug use & delinquency to enact a sense of control and starting petty name-calling bouts with both her her sister & mother. These insult trades can range from the harmless (“tattle tale,” “irritant”) to the bitterly harsh (“Fuck you, cunt!”), but order is gradually restored to their dynamic as the two romantic affairs naturally work themselves out. Huge, life-changing mistakes are made impulsively & with fervor and the teen at the center of the storm is petrified of repeating earlier generations’ follies at the expense of people she loves. (Honestly, introducing this family to Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson would be super beneficial in dispelling her fantasies about the private, romantic lives of East Coast intellectuals). Ultimately, though, familial bonds prove stronger than short-term resentments and everyone emerges a stronger, more forgiving person on the other end.

The most striking choice for Landline, stylistically, is its story’s 1995 setting, which thankfully extends beyond nostalgia markers like floppy discs & Oprah to touch on the historical drug addiction issues & limited forms of communication that shaped the era. The tagline “1995 – When people were hard to reach” is much tidier than the movie’s treatment of internal, familial conflicts of communication & honesty, but at least points to how the setting was integral to tapping into the film’s themes. The 1990s timeframe also allows for a wildly varied soundtrack ranging from Steve Winwood’s embarassing “Higher Love” to The Breeders’ delicate delight “Drivin’ on 9.” You can tell Robespierre employs the same cinematographer as she did for Obvious Child (Chris Teague), since interior spaces in both films visually share a kind of lamp lit intimacy, even if Landline is less thematically aggressive in its treatment of adultery as Obvious Child is in its politically casual look at abortion. There are moments in Landline that register as emotional devastation (“I’m flailing,”) and others that aim for broad, dark comedy (a Jewish character receiving head during a weepy drama about Nazis). The temporal setting & Robespierre’s tendency towards brutal honesty set the stage for both ends of that divide to hit with full impact, although they’re contained in a much more familiar, well-worn story than the one told in her debut.

-Brandon Ledet