Falling Heists, Rising Grift: Filming Capital in the Already Long Twenty-First Century

Periodizing the historical heyday of the heist film at the turn of the twenty-first century and marking its supplanting by the grifter series inthe 2020s, this essay argues that circulation-forward, too-late capitalism can be mapped in the logistics-centric genre of the heist and the charisma-centric genre of the grift docudrama. While parallel in their allegorical function, these competing genres are unequal in their ideological operations, and in the changing Hollywood business models behind them.