Roofman (2025)

Roofman arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that has no interest in being important. Derek Cianfrance once specialized in marital devastation. Here he has made something shaggy and warm: a true-crime comedy about Jeffrey Manchester, an ex-Army Ranger who drilled through the roofs of more than forty McDonald's and later lived inside a Toys "R" Us for six months. Channing Tatum plays him as a man of enormous charm and modest ambition. The movie likes him. That is the entire thesis.

The ensemble is unusually multiracial, and the film never once mentions it. LaKeith Stanfield, Uzo Aduba, Melonie Diaz, Jimmy O. Yang and Peter Dinklage fill out the margins of a story about a white man's robbery spree, and race is simply not a subject the screenplay cares to raise. Kirsten Dunst's Leigh is a single mother with a job, a church, and enough spine to forgive a felon, while a female sergeant runs the manhunt. These are gestures toward female interiority, not a program. The film contains no queer presence, no climate anxiety, no body-positive messaging, and no interest in neurodivergence, which it frames instead as military training.

Where the picture flirts with social commentary, it does so in the register of farce. Jeffrey robs McDonald's and Toys "R" Us, and Mitch the store manager refuses to donate toys to a church drive. A stingy boss and a corporate target make for pleasant heist texture and nothing more. There is no eat-the-rich sermon here. The only genuinely political act in the film is a kindness, when Jeffrey hands his own coat to a frightened manager in a freezer. The picture adapts its true story with unusual fidelity, even trotting out the real arresting officer and the real Leigh in cameos, which is the opposite of historical revision. It would rather amuse than instruct. That is a choice we can respect.