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R | 1h 28m | Crime, Drama, Thriller | 2026
Nobody conveys the 1970s New York City vibe like actor John Turturro. Similar to card-sharp Joey Knish (Turturro’s character in 1998’s “Rounders”) the Italian Turturro here plays pickpocket Harry Lehman—yet another aging, Jewish, petty-thieving bottom-feeder.
Writer-director Noah Segan’s latest film, “The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” (the title of which was clearly pickpocketed from Simon & Garfunkel’s 1970 song, “The Only Living Boy in New York”) checks all the 1970s atmosphere boxes. There’s sparse 1970s porno-funk, a haunting, jazzy, Miles Davis trumpet wafting about, and NYC outer-borough building footage that captures how Manhattan looked back in the gritty, dangerous, 1970s.
It’s Hard Out Here for a Crook
Like “Rounders” Joey, Harry also makes the rounds. He hits all the New York boroughs: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and even Staten Island. These are Harry’s hunting grounds. Haunting the subways, Harry is a ring-wraith. He’s also a wallet, watch, pocketbook, and necklace-wraith. What he has no use for, he discards in the nearest trash can.
However, times have changed. Times Square in the 1970s was a wallet-goldmine. Now, wallets are cash-poor and often contain maxed-out credit cards, reminding one of Terrence Howard’s line from 2005’s “Hustle & Flow,” It’s hard out here for a pimp.”
Unfortunately, it’s the only life Harry knows: He’s a wily, analog pickpocket in a digital-wallet world; a street-hustling square peg in an increasingly round NYC, where Big Brother camera coverage has a slowly tightening stranglehold on his line of work. He’s the last of his breed, at the end of his era.
Other pickpockets still work the subways, naturally, but these young cyber-turks are digitally sophisticated, and the film’s running gag sees Harry and colleague and fence, Ben (Steve Buscemi), complaining about tech, and their inability to navigate its complexities.
Borough-Hopping
Using a penny to lock-pick a gleaming, restored 1967 Plymouth Barracuda, Harry scores a gym bag with lotsa cash—jackpot. However, he has no idea that the owner, a young, bratty kid named Dylan (Will Price), isn’t just a wealthy frat bro; he’s majorly mob-connected. And he’s well-aware of how to tighten the vice on any vendor in the vicinity refusing to let him view their video footage. Harry is caught on tape with his hand in Dylan’s cookie car.
Harry dropped Dylan’s 9mm pistol in the trash, but filched his USB-with-a-crypto-account key, not knowing what it was. He subsequently fenced it in Chinatown. But Dylan and his bodyguards track Harry down and hold his bedridden wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave) hostage at Harry’s apartment until he retrieves that very valuable bit of tech.
Harry’s harried mission to recover the USB becomes a outer-borough travelogue of sorts, with Harry riding trains extensively to obtain the next bit of information that will allow him to save his wife from a bad end.
This also gives Harry a chance to visit his estranged daughter, Kelly (Tatiana Maslany). Harry was the dad who was never there for her; a teary apology ensues. When her husband eventually checks on her, she dismisses Harry with the cold, cold line, “Sorry but we don’t need another vacuum cleaner.”
Gone With the Wind and Rudy Giuliani
The race against time is what keeps the film moving, and Turturro turns the sparse dialogue into one of his best roles in years. The juxtaposition of his devotion to his tragically incapacitated wife, with his seamy, grifter existence, makes for a bleak and bittersweet slice-of-life portrayal.
Turturro re-teams with “Do the Right Thing” cast member Giancarlo Esposito. Esposito’s nearly-retired detective Warren is Harry’s former-nemesis-turned-fond-acquaintance, and helps Harry solve some problems. This is Turturro’s sixth collaboration with Steve Buscemi, and he revives some of his “Disco Bean” character’s disco-dance moves from 1994’s “The Search For One-Eyed Jimmy” for his wife’s mute enjoyment.
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York” is a character study that doubles as a crime drama and triples as a snapshot in time for a vanishing New York City, and the vanishing lives of quiet desperation that were once prevalent.
People have no idea. Mayor Rudy Giuliani blessed NYC with a massive cleanup. I see hoards of happy tourists daily in the new Disney-fied Times Square. Families from Iowa would be shocked, if, while standing on the corner of 42nd and 8th, someone suddenly turned the clock back 50 years to the bicentennial. They’d see wall-to-wall pimps and prostitutes. They’d hear blaring boom-boxes. They’d see winos, junkies, con men, shoddy two-story, metal-gated, grafitti-riddled architecture, no pooper-scooper laws, and a red-light district extending, in every direction, as far as the eye could see.
And, their wallets would soon be missing. I’ve been pickpocketed twice in 30 years of Manhattan living, which is which my motorcycle wallet-chain does double-duty.
‘The Only Living Pickpocket in New York’
Director: Noah Segan
Starring: John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito, Jamie Lee Curtis
MPAA Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Release Date: Oct. 23, 2026
Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
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