A little like Soderbergh’s relationship with his heist films, The Killing feels a little like Stanley Kubrick showing audiences that he could also wipe the floor with his contemporaries doing an incredibly beautiful version of the more formulaic stuff. A racetrack is the setting here for a positively aerodynamic heist tale, in which a career criminal goes for the age-old “one last job” before hitting the straight and narrow and marrying his fiancée. Said fiancée, however, has her own plans—and a gloriously rendered mess ensues. As with any Kubrick, it’s simply a series of images that are an absolute joy to look at, and for an extra special bonus, there’s a whole thrilling heist thing going on too!

1) Rififi (1955)

Somebody say jewel heist? Fresh out of prison, Tony gets pulled into a high-stakes robbery of some seriously high-value items. This leads to a sumptuously cinematic 33-minute, dialogue-free heist sequence, which has probably influenced every other film on this list. What follows is an artful, noir-laden exposition of the mess of interaction between erratic, highly-charged characters and the pressures of the situation they’ve put themselves in, with dramatic consequences for each of them. It doesn’t have the heightened everything-just-goes-right sheen of so many of the aforementioned films, but what it has instead is a meticulous attention to detail that allows you to both understand and feel part of what’s going on as if you’re there yourself, and also comprehend the very real drama and danger inherent to such criminal plotting. Simply a masterwork of heist filmmaking.