There are few movie options in New York at the moment more thrilling than the Heist series at Film Forum. What’s great about the series is its dogged insistence on the heist's dynamic, old-school moralism. Unlike the new Ocean’s era, in which cool and charming heistmeisters succeed in their plots and walk away with the goods, the traditional heist film is ruled by bad luck and a backlash of greed. They’re noirs, after all, and we’ll never tire of noirs.

Quentin Tarantino is nothing if not old school in his tastes, and both Reservoir Dogs, which played last night, and Jackie Brown, playing at series’ end, are all about ferocious, doomed cascades of dominoes. Possibly alone among important young American directors for being thoroughly and outlandishly self-schooled in movie history, Tarantino knew his noir, and could probably recite the majority of the dialogue in the series’ films, going back to Richard Fleischer’s Armored Car Robbery (1950), an unsung policier.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) may be the genre’s defining work, a must-see wallow in despair involving an elaborate racetrack heist and exuding a gray sense of doom. Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, and the inimitable Timothy Carey head off a cast of soulless predators, and for that it’s something like the sociopathic twin brother to John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), which also starred Hayden but suffered from Hollywood polish (whereas Kubrick’s film reeked of grime).

The series gives screen time to many must-sees – including Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1948) and Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential (1952), but also to a raft of semi-forgotten hummers, including Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall (1957), a fast, cheap, and out-of-control sweat session in which the hulking yet quivering Aldo Ray hits the big city on the run from something very, very bad. He crosses paths with Anne Bancroft, a used-and-abused waif. Soon enough Brian Keith, as a blood-spilling, bank robbing anti-Aldo, emerges and pushes the action back to the great wide open of Wyoming, where an oil rig becomes an impromptu torture appliance.

The FF series opens the door wide to the French, who first saw noir for what it was and thought to transform the paradigm into a full-on dark night of existentialist tribulation. Trenchcoats became more than just outerwear. Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954) centers on Jean Gabin as a menopausal gangster living comfortably after a big heist, but who's sucked back into the world of crime thanks to his devoted partner (Rene Dary) and a goldbricking chorus girl (a positively dewy Jeanne Moreau). Forty years before Tarantino’s crooks-have-kitchens-too reawakening, Becker’s suave scofflaws wear pajamas, brush their teeth, and go to bed early. Fate, nevertheless, deals them the paradigmatic bad hand; no one can keep their mitts off the *grisbi.*

Jean-Pierre Melville was, however, the ultimate Franco-noiriste heist doomsayer, and his Bob le Flambeur (1956) and Le Cercle Rouge (1970) are moody, rich studies in noir’s evolution toward lyrics of modern alienation. The hapless gangsters in Melville’s films don’t know much except two things: their sense of honor is the only thing they can take with them to the grave, and that date with the grave is coming all too soon. The films shouldn’t be missed, and neither should a sentimental date with Jean-Luc Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), the epitome of an anti-heist heist film that, famously, brims with joyful movie-love – which by definition includes passion for women, pulp fiction, Paris, American movies, pop music, and Anna Karina. This perfect gem – from which fanboy Quentin Tarantino cribbed his production company’s name A Band Apart – climaxes with a (badly) plotted crime, but it’s really about hanging out and goofing off and being in love with Karina. As if to prove it, Godard revolves the film around the long central sequence of the three would-be crooks (Karina with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur) killing time, loitering in a café, flirting, drinking, waiting, and eventually performing an infectious syncopated-dance variation on the Madison. Heist? What heist?