Everyone loves a good heist movie, but sometimes the truth is more incredible than anything a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up, as these amazing documentaries prove.
Here are seven of the best heist documentaries to get your fix.
Stolen: Heist of the Century
Netflix shiniest (literally) new true crime documentary tells the fantastic tale of Europe’s biggest ever jewel robbery. It’s said that all of the world’s diamonds at some point pass through the Belgian port of Antwerp.
The city’s World Diamond Centre employs 32,000 people and had what many believed was the tightest security outside Fort Knox. But then, in 2003, thieves broke into a supposedly air-tight vault and escaped with over $100 million in gems and jewellery.
The robbers were members of the so-called School of Turin, an elite band of professional thieves from Italy who boasted nicknames straight out of Tinseltown: The Monster, Speedy, King of Keys. Stolen—produced by Steven Spielberg’s company Amblin and Raw—tells the story of the criminals and the Belgian detectives who chased them in fittingly sparkling fashion.
Blood Money: The Curse of the Brinks-Mat Gold
BBC’s The Gold starring Hugh Bonneville is one of the best British crime dramas of the past decade. The series is a fictionalised account of the theft of £26 million’s worth of bullion (worth around £111 million today) from a Heathrow airport warehouse in 1983 by six South London criminals.
Stealing the gold was just the start of the story, however. The thieves then had to find a way to dispose of the loot. The true—and often grisly—story of the robbers and those who helped them, is brilliantly told in this cracking Channel 5 film (available on Apple+ and Paramount Plus).
Filled with double-crosses, informers, and violent deaths, it brilliantly captures the grimly brutal world of professional crime. Danny Ocean, these men were not.
This is a Robbery: The World’s Greatest Art Heist
On St Patrick’s Day weekend in 1990, two crooks disguised as Boston law enforcement talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Once inside, they overpowered the security guards and, two hours later, walked out with thirteen works of art valued at $500 million.
Colin Barnicle’s riveting 2021 film (available on Netflix) tells the story of one of the most audacious and mysterious robberies in history, through interviews with museum staff, detectives, and art collectors.
Thirty-five years later, the paintings—by Vermeer, Degas, and Rembrandt amongst others—are still missing and nobody has ever been arrested for the crime.
Bank Robbers: The Last Great Heist
In 2006, in the sleepy Argentinean town of Acassuso, six thieves armed with fake guns stormed into the Banco Rio, took 23 staff and customers hostage and emptied safe deposit boxes of close to $20 million.
Matias Gueliburt’s 2022 documentary (Netflix) interviews the men behind the robbery, including the mastermind, Mario Vitette Sellanes (aka ‘The Man in the Grey Suit), and builds a compelling picture of what it takes to pull off a heist, which in this case was two years in the planning.
The Great American Heist
The 1978 Lufthansa Heist which saw armed robbers netting $6 million in a raid at JFK Airport, is best known to movie goers through the Martin Scorsese classic Goodfellas.
This 2022 documentary series (Amazon Prime) made by John Finley and Rob Monaco tells the bloody story of how mobbed-up thieves Jimmy ‘The Gent’ Burke, Henry Hill, and associates carried out the daring heist.
It also gives us the gruesome details of its aftermath, which saw Burke eliminating all witnesses, including many members of his own gang, in an act of ruthlessness that was savage even by mafia standards.
Vjeran Tomic: The Spider Man of Paris
Of all thieves the cat burglar is the one most associated with suave and gentlemanly glamour. Vjeran Tomic—the French-born son of Bosnian immigrants - was a real-life Arsene Lupin, clambering about the rooftops of the French capital in search of gold and jewellery.
Daring and bold - one robbery involved firing ropes across a gap using a crossbow - Tomic made a specialism of targeting high society figures, which naturally gave him a certain cache with the French public.
In 2010, the acrobatic Frenchman collected his biggest score when he broke into the Musée d’Art Moderne and made off with five paintings with a value of around $120 million.
Jamie Roberts’ Netflix documentary brings the story of this dashing lone burglar to life with the help of interviews with the man himself, currently serving a jail term in France (though he’s due out this year).
The Diamond Heist
British film director Guy Ritchie made his name with films like Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch - movies that feature ‘proper naughty’ South London criminals as they go about their nefarious business.
In this 2025 Netflix documentary series, Ritchie gets to interview some real-life colourful cockney characters, including the men who organised one of the flashiest, if ultimately unsuccessful, robberies in all of crime: the Millennium Dome Heist.
The aim of the gang was simple, to snatch the Millennium Star, a pear-shaped diamond valued at £350 million, and then escape up the River Thames on a speedboat while smoke bombs confused pursuing cops.
With input from the thieves and the police, Ritchie does a great job of piecing together the facts in what is a genuine ‘you couldn’t make it up’ tale.
Featured photos from “This is a Robbery,” “Stolen,” and “Vjeran Tomic” via Netflix
