Why Found-Again? For personal reasons too depressing to go into, I don’t watch this very often—which is, as you know if you’ve ever seen it, a total shame. 1999’s Thomas Crown Affair is a wonderful movie, and I don’t say that often enough.
The Premise: Bored gazillionaire businessman Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan) turns to art theft for a little excitement and gets more than he bargained for when the theft brings ruthless insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) into his life. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, if you’re the sort of person who thinks a cat and a mouse might hook up at a fancy-dress ball.
The Thomas Crown Affair—a quasi-remake of the 1960s heist film with Steve McQueen—is a mystery movie. It’s a heist movie. It’s a romance movie. It’s an art-museumgoer-geekery movie. It has an amazing soundtrack. It’s a worthy successor in wit and pace to The Thin Man, the movie that is my gold standard for non-supernatural films.* And more to the point, Crown is the other role Brosnan was born to play—after Remington Steele and that shooty guy with the short name.
This film is so. Much. Fun.
The Verdict: Sorry, I couldn’t hear you: I was too busy bouncing on my couch in joy as Nina Simone wailed on my television. Are you watching this yet? Why aren’t you watching this yet?
Watch this!
Might go well with: Champagne, the first season of Remington Steele, apples.
*I’m classifying sci-fi in the supernatural category for the purposes of this review, although there are lots of excellent arguments as to why I probably shouldn’t.
