Stolen (2006)
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Starring: Blythe Danner, Campbell Scott, Harold J. Smith
DVD Info
Release:
Nov 14, 2006
DVD Features:
- Keep Case
Audio:
- Dolby Digital (unspecified) - English
Additional Release Material:
- Deleted Scenes - 1. The Value of a Vermeer
- 2. The Psychic Detective
- 3. More with Turbo and Harold
- Production Interviews - 1. Rebecca Dreyfus - Director
- 2. Albert Maysles - Cameraman
- Trailers
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
An unusually thoughtful documentary about one of the modern era's most audacious art thefts.
The film is a bit rough around the edges, but it found an unforgettable character in a dogged 75-year-old art robbery sleuth named Harold Smith.
An entertaining, scattershot affair that promises more than it can deliver.
Stolen is ultimately too lightweight and indecisive -- ironic, for a film ostensibly about people in thrall to an all-consuming passion.
Even though there's no neat resolution, the entire ride is a pleasure.
In telling the story of an unsolved crime, they use every trick available to awaken and prolong suspense before a payoff that never comes.
Composer Peter Golub adds swooning suspense, while cinematographer Albert Maysles, who has documented many Christo projects, frames rendezvous with tipsters tempted by the $5 million reward.
Captures a great yearning among many different people across time, all affected by Gardner and her legacy, especially those parts now missing.
That it never quite reaches an 'Aha!' moment is the movie's chief flaw, as we have been set up to expect answers.
... a meandering survey of dead ends and colorful theories, interspersed with a dry history lesson that serves as little more than tasteful padding.
In the end, we're treated to an overture of possibilities rather than a satisfying film.
A spooky new documentary that you'll see for its central mystery (who stole those paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 16 years ago?), but you'll stay for the ghost story.
Whatever the outcome of all this hugger-mugger, as yet unresolved, Stolen gives us hints about a special sort of muscle.
What [Dreyfus] loses in modern day intrigue, she makes up for with history, art lessons and a detective straight out of Agatha Christie.
The meat of the film is [Dreyfus'] dauntless gumshoe, who plays his role to such eccentric perfection, he would have to have been invented had he not existed prior to that fateful March morning.
In the end, the question remains: who the heck did the theft and where are the paintings now?
[The film] spearheaded a new investigation that turned up an astonishing array of fiction-ready characters.
Rebecca Dreyfus's middling documentary recounts the efforts to retrieve masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.


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