‘Crooks’: Hyper-Stylized Crime Caper Doles Out Death, Danger & Destruction [Tribeca Review]

Right from the first frame, Mickey Keating’s Crooks makes it very clear that this is not some run-of-the-mill crime story. It’s a dreamlike experience that operates at extremes and achieves a lost-in-time, grindhouse crime caper aesthetic that’s incredibly compelling. Crooks taps into pulpy, hard-boiled film noir territory and then pushes it to an absurdist apex. It’s a world in which betrayed characters are getting stabbed in the back the moment they turn around. Crooks is a love letter to a lost style of filmmaking that’s an exhilarating return to form for Mickey Keating and one of 2026’s most audacious movies

Mickey Keating is a fascinating filmmaker who has always felt like he’s on the cusp of breaking into the mainstream. His voice and diverse genre penetration skills have continually evolved across movies like Darling, Carnage Park, and Psychopaths. Crooks, Keating’s eighth feature film, synthesizes some of the slickest tricks from his filmography as he immerses the audience in a crime-soaked city that makes Grand Theft Auto’s Vice City seem tame in comparison. Faye (Angela Trimbur) is an outlaw whose attempts to turn over a new leaf as a lounge club singer fall short when her checkered past catches up with her, and she’s pulled back into a harrowing heist.

Keating conjures an expressive, ultra-stylized pulp-genre tale that alternates between black-and-white flashbacks and heightened, saturated exaggerations in the present. It’s a hyperbolized style that’s consistent with Keating’s past genre works and, more than anything, reflects that Crooks is made by someone who just deeply, passionately loves film and wants to celebrate its magic artistry as often as possible, even if that’s every single second. Crooks really taps into what feels like a cross between gritty Don Siegel films and Robert Rodriguez pastiche. 

Crooks could have easily been an installment in Grindhouse, and it showcases visuals that feel very in line with Sin City, yet more rooted in the real world, even if it’s still radically over-the-top. It’s an important detail that helps ‘ story have weight and not just float away as some frivolous crime fantasy that’s been ripped out of a ’50s comic. It’s a film that’s very indebted to the past, yet pushes post-modern modernity at every turn. After Faye fires the umpteenth bullet into another random person’s head, it’s hard not to view all this as an absurdist parody of a genre that’s struggling to survive.