Hold-upMovies like Hold-up
- Key Features:
- Bank robbery, Hostage situation, Clown, Criminal mastermind, Police investigation, Betrayal, Heist, Deception, Caper, Cat and mouse, Charismatic protagonist
- Tone:
- humorous, suspense-driven, witty
- Target Audience:
- Crime thriller enthusiasts, Heist movie fans, Caper movie fans
- Emotional Arc:
- Intrigue → Tension
Hold-up

Dressed as a clown, the clever rascal Grimm holds up the most secure bank of Montreal and takes 30 hostages. While confusing and ridiculing the police with his strange behavior, he calmly manages to rid the bank of a fortune. But then an unsatisfied companion arouses trouble...
Hold-up
With the aid of his girlfriend, Phyllis Potter, and best friend, Loomis, Grimm enters a Manhattan bank dressed as a clown, creates a hostage situation and executes a flawless robbery. The only thing left for the trio to do is make their getaway out of the city and to the airport. It sounds simple enough, but it seems that fate deserts them immediately after the bank heist. One mishap after another conspires to keep these robbers from reaching freedom.

After getting screwed over by life (again), two losers decide that enough is enough. Using stolen ski masks and stolen toy guns, they take hostages in their local bank, holding them for ransom. Things go well until the hostages learn what's going on, and demand a piece of the action for themselves.

From petty theft on the benches of Belleville to the over-publicised hold-ups of the large Parisian banks, this is the spectacular rise of Simon and his gang. They are capable of emptying a series of safes under the very nose of the police who are bewildered by the calm audacity shown by the group.

Louis just found the corpse of a man in front of his apartment building. Taken in for custody by Captain Buron, he finds himself on the wrong end of a surreal interrogation. But how can you prove you are innocent when the cops are crazy?

A detective, fresh out of the academy (lowest mark in class), gets the assignment to bodyguard a spoiled rich girl reporter. She's been interviewed on TV and has questioned the virility of a mobster who kidnaps her later.

Coming out from jail, Lucas has decided to change his life and behave like a good citizen. But when he is taken hostage in a bank by a hare-brained robber, no cops can believe he is not part of the action.

Expert conman Joe Thanks teams up with half-breed Bill and naive Lucy to steal $300,000 from the Indian-hating Major Cabot. Their elaborate plan is full of disguises, double-crosses, and chases, but Joe always seems to know what he's doing.

After the failure of his recent criminal exploits, international con artist Alexandre Dupré sets off for Venice to try to dupe some Japanese business men into buying a fake copy of a stolen Caneletto. On the aeroplane, a stranger asks him to look after his briefcase until after they have landed. Alexandre agrees, but the stranger is shot dead soon after and Alexandre himself becomes the target of enemy agents who are keen to recover the briefcase...

When they realize the times are changing, five crooks decide to switch from bank robberies to personality abductions.

A charming but ruthless criminal holds the family of a bank manager hostage as part of a cold-blooded plan to steal £90,000.

Bank clerk Stanley Ipkiss is transformed into a manic superhero when he wears a mysterious mask.

Max and Riton, 2 thieves make plan to steal money in a train station office. They will operate through the wall in the public toilets.

Charley Varrick robs a bank in a small town with his friends, but instead of obtaining a small amount of money, they discover they stole a very large amount of money belonging to the mob. Charley must now come up with a plan to not only evade the police but the mob as well.

The whole intrigue is centered around carte-blanche documents kept in a vault. Whoever fills in the blank becomes the owner of a revue. Big money is involved. The nephew of the owner of the vault is trying to cheat his uncle and have his name in the documents. Everything is even more complicated because the manager of the bank has a finger in the pie, too. Who but a humble bank-teller (Pierre Richard) will ruin the scheme?

In the middle of a performance of the play "Le Cocu", a bad boulevard comedy at a Parisian theatre, Yannick gets up and interrupts the show to take the evening back in hand.

After hiding his loot and getting thrown in jail, brooding outlaw Ruby befriends Quentin, a dim-witted and garrulous giant. After Quentin botches a solo escape attempt, they make a break together. Unable to shake the clumsy Quentin, Ruby is forced to take him along as he pursues his former partners in crime to avenge the death of the woman he loved and get to the money.

Victor Vautier is incorrigible: he's in constant motion, working several cons at once, using different names and changing disguises. He's charming and outrageous, incapable of uttering a sentence that isn't embellished or an outright lie. His life goal is to make enough money to build a sea wall to protect Mont-Saint-Michel. Charlotte, a parole officer, shows up: she's young and seems taken in by Victor. He discovers she lives above the Senlus Museum, where her parents are the curators. With two pals he decides to steal a priceless El Greco triptych and then ransom it back to the cultural ministry. What will Charlotte do when she realizes he's used her to make a fortune?

Roper, a hostage negotiator catches a murderous bank robber after a blown heist. The bank robber escapes and immediately goes after the man who put him behind bars.

Arthur and Anatole are two little robbers. They want to rob money, money that will travel in a special train from Paris to Bruxelles. They don't know that other people have planned to do the same thing.

Shopkeeper Victor Garnier has naively invested his family's life savings in an African mine, on his banker's recommendation. When the mine is nationalized, rendering the stock worthless, he considers himself shamelessly robbed by the bank; it seems only fair to him to return the 'favor' and rob the bank, teaming up with the whole family as they were all duped. Even for professionals such an enterprise -he decides to dig a tunnel- is quite demanding, but for simple commoners it's daunting, as they also have their personal downsides; thus Victor's wife has a most unwelcome tendency to blurt out the truth, even to the grumpy local copper: a crazy risk when you need to keep a criminal plan secret.

A deranged prison warden with a nasty habit of killing escapees forces the boyfriends of his teenage twin daughters into a shotgun wedding, after they claim to be pregnant. All hope seems lost, until the husbands hatch a madcap plan to rob a money train to freedom.

After a bank job goes badly wrong, three desperate criminals take a young woman and a father and child hostage - it's the beginning of a frantic and violent road trip that not all of them will survive.

When the local police inspector was found dead in a prostitute's house, police division commissioner Stan Borowitz is sent to investigate the situation. Posing as the prostitute's long-lost brother "Antonio Cerruti," he discovers a mare's nest of police corruption. In fact, in this comedy thriller the whole town is corrupt. If they were closely examined, Stan's methods for pursuing this investigation might embarrass the police. For instance, he drives into a criminal's house in a fancy, expensive race car. In another incident, he callously blows up a casino owned by Musard , one of the town's crime bosses. On that occasion, he first forces Musard to remove his clothes, and the poor criminal watches his casino explode from across the square while standing naked in a phone booth. Meanwhile, Stan seduces the lovely Edmonde.

Fred, Achille, Max and Belette form a good-for-nothing gang of crooks. Dismally failing their last raid, they decide to get back in the game, kidnapping Sophie Marceau.

A Romanian police officer teams up with a small crew of bank robbers to pull off a heist by convincing everyone at the scene of the crime that they are only filming a movie.

Cruchot's police office moves into a new building. They do not only get high tech equipment, but also four young female police officers to educate. All of them scramble to work with them -- and cause pure chaos while being distracted by the fine ladies. Then they get into real trouble when one after the other of their female colleagues is kidnapped.

Betty and Victor are a pair of scam artists. One day Betty brings in Maurice, a treasurer of a multinational company. Maurice is due to transfer 5 millions francs out of Switzerland, and Betty is convinced he plans to steal that money.

Fantômas is a man of many disguises. He uses maquillage as a weapon. He can impersonate anyone using an array of masks and can create endless confusion by constantly changing his appearance.

When political thugs murder an opponent's volunteer and also kill a cop, chief inspector Verjeat believes the politician who hired them is as guilty as the murderous goon. Verjeat's pursuit of the councilman, Lardatte, gets him a warning from his superiors. When he embarrasses Lardatte while disarming a hostage (the dead volunteer's father), Verjeat is told he's being transferred within a week. He speeds up his hunt for the goon and, with Lefévre, one of his young detectives, he engineers a complicated scheme to buy more time before the transfer. How should Verjeat play out his values of honor and duty?

Enigmatic gangster Silien may or may not be responsible for informing on Faugel, who was just released from prison and is already involved in what should be a simple heist. By the end of this brutal, twisting, and multilayered policier, who will be left to trust?

Caught in the middle of a bank robbery, a slacker and a bank employee become the ones who arbitrate the intense situation.

Willy and Tony have a brilliant idea for getting out of it financially: stealing a dog from the brigade des stups. But everything does not go as planned and the two accomplices will have to rely on the most corrupt of the cops.

A detective decides to go undercover and set up a group of robbers, but he may be getting too caught up in the task at hand.

An out-of-town heist becomes a nightmare for a crew of French burglars when they mistakenly rob the head of the Chicago mafia. Unaccustomed to the ways of the American underworld, it is not long before they have the mafia, the FBI and a couple of street gangs on their backs as they attempt to make their way back to Paris.

With gun-toting rivals on his tail, a daring bank robber takes refuge in the quiet residential street here he grew up and where his mother, Maniette, still lives. An unscrupulous property developer, Korazy, is buying up the neighborhood to turn it into a gleaming new banking district, but to her son's disgust Maniette leads the inhabitants resistance. Her ingenious methods provoke her boy's admiration, but he fights back with sneaky traps and underhand tricks when Maniette tries to force him to do the right thing just once in his life.

What Jake Vig doesn't know just might get him killed. A sharp and polished grifter, Jake has just swindled thousands of dollars from the unsuspecting Lionel Dolby with the help of his crew. It becomes clear that Lionel wasn't just any mark, he was an accountant for eccentric crime boss Winston King. Jake and his crew will have to stay one step ahead of both the criminals and the cops to finally settle their debt.

Three teenage brothers are terrorized by a trio of escaped mental patients disguised as clowns.

Ritchie Donovan is a professional thief whose luck has just run out. The only survivor from a heist that goes terribly wrong, Ritchie is forced to take the rap and is sent to Russia to steal a priceless antique cross locked in a safe on the penthouse floor of a Moscow skyscraper.

Unscrupulous boxing promoters, violent bookies, a Russian gangster, incompetent amateur robbers, and supposedly Jewish jewellers fight to track down a priceless stolen diamond.

A novice con man teams up with an acknowledged master to avenge the murder of a mutual friend by pulling off the ultimate big con and swindling a fortune from a big-time mobster.

What should have been a romantic getaway turns into one hilarious debacle after another when Michael's woman dumps him in the desert where he gets carjacked by a teenager and he is taken hostage in a stickup at the local Sip and Zip.

The funny clown Bratislav Metulskie is found dead in circus "Apollo". The retired commissioner 00 Schneider is asked to assume control of the case. Schneider and his aged sidekick Körschgen investigate to find the murderer.

When French criminal Corey gets released from prison, he resolves to never return. He is quickly pulled back into the underworld, however, after a chance encounter with escaped murderer Vogel. Along with former policeman and current alcoholic Jansen, they plot an intricate jewel heist. All the while, quirky Police Commissioner Mattei, who was the one to lose custody of Vogel, is determined to find him.

Lucien, 14, can’t understand why his father, a serious and respected teacher, makes a fool of himself by dressing up as a clown and giving a show. André, Lucien’s father’s best friend, feels for the teenager and decides to reveal something from their mutual past that will explain the reason for Lucien’s father’s strange behavior.

The lawyer is visiting a prison to meet with a violent criminal who has been condemned to death. During the visit, things turn bad, there is a riot where prisoners escape and the criminal escapes taking a lawyer hostage.

In order to make his little sick brother's dream come true, Leo and his best mates organize a fake score...but on the d day, they make a mistake and the fake score becomes a real hold up.Here starts the extraordinary adventure of PUBLIC Amis.

The Dynamic Duo faces four super-villains who plan to hold the world for ransom with the help of a secret invention that instantly dehydrates people.

Frank Valken, high-flying robber, has just made a final masterful break. At least that’s what he believes… Ideal suspects, Valken and his gang find themselves involved in a criminal case of thirty years. It seems that the crazy killers are back.

Two neurotics, working for a suicide hotline on the night of Christmas Eve, get caught up in a catastrophe when a pregnant woman, her abusive boyfriend, and a transvestite visit their office.

"Le Dabe" retired many years ago and now he lives in the Tropics where he owns stables and horses. He is a very rich man. He was the king of all money counterfeiters. He is contacted from Paris to organize a new job. He says no. But when he finds out the the currency that should be counterfeited is the Dutch florin, he accepts immediately. He retired after having counterfeited 100 florin notes just before the Queen Wilhelmina retired them from circulation. He flies to Paris. But the gang is not to be trusted, at least not all of them.

A man meets up with two "good guys" to recover what is unlawfully his, taking them on his whirlwind ride, doing things they never would have imagined, just to survive.

Between his tax problems and his legal battle with his wife for the custody of his daughter, these are hard times for the action movie star who finds that even Steven Seagal has pinched a role from him! This fictionalized version of Jean-Claude Van Damme returns to the country of his birth to seek the peace and tranquility he can no longer enjoy in the United States, but inadvertently gets involved in a bank robbery with hostages.

A bank security expert plots with a call girl to rob the safety deposit boxes of three very different criminals from a high-tech bank in Hamburg.

Sebastien Grenier, a former French spy, is working as a financial analyst in Zurich. However, his peaceful existence starts to disintegrate when he is recruited by a top French intelligence operative to discover how one of their own secret agents was found out and executed in broad daylight.

When a new detective is caught by a vicious psychopath and locked in a basement, he must use the knowledge he learned from some of the best detectives at Poker Night, then match wits against his captor.

Thomas Gardesse, a traveling alarm systems salesman, is arrested for a minor offense and sentenced to six months imprisonment. To win the respect of his fellow inmates, he claims he is "The Marquis," a brilliant robber whose identity has remained a mystery. Two weeks before his release, an armed robber named Quentin Tasseau helps him escape and takes him to Manila so he can take part in a robbery whose mastermind requires the talents of the Marquis.

The charismatic criminal Dobermann, who got his first gun when he was christened, leads a gang of brutal robbers. After a complex and brutal bank robbery, they are being hunted by the Paris police. The hunt is led by the sadistic cop Christini, who only has one goal: to catch Dobermann at any cost.

The accidental mix-up of four identical plaid overnight bags leads to a series of increasingly wild and wacky situations.

In 2006, a group of thieves performed what is considered one of the most famous and smart bank heists in the history of Argentina. How they robbed the Rio bank is as surprising as what happened afterwards. This is their story.

A rich industrialist is brutally kidnapped. While he physically and mentally degenerates in imprisonment, the kidnappers, police and the board of the company of which he is director negotiate about the ransom of 50 million euro.

Three criminals plan to break out of prison the day before their release in order to carry out a daring jewel robbery, intending to establish the perfect alibi by returning to jail afterwards. First however they must get out, a task made more difficult by a new, stricter prison officer.

An undertaker who hasn't had any 'customers' in a long time is forced to pay one year's back-rent. To get money he starts to kill people, which brings absurd results.

Two professional robbers, an illusionist, an expert make-up artist, a gadget expert and a hacker come together to steal Romanian gold ingots while it is in transit.

When Banker Till (Axel Stein) is kidnapped during a bank robbery, he has the time of his life...

Albert Spaggiari is arrested in Nice and brought to a judge's office for interrogation, but he escapes to South America where he meets a journalist who is investigating the event.

When the Bad Guys, a crew of criminal animals, are finally caught after years of heists and being the world’s most-wanted villains, Mr. Wolf brokers a deal to save them all from prison.

Unorthodox detective Jean Lavardin is called to a provincial French town after a prank turns deadly.

Grégoire Lecomte, the unlucky actor anxious to find a "real job", goes to take a screen test for a role of a killer, but gets to mafiosi by mistake. He takes their don for a producer, and they mistake him for a hitman with whom they had an appointment. Deluded Lecomte signs contract with them. He is supposed to kill gun dealer Otto Krampe at his birthday party in Saint-Tropez by piercing him with a cap of the umbrella with a built-in syringe with potassium cyanide. Lecomte is not aware that it has to be a real murder.

A thief expert with blowtorch is hired by a group of the Russian mob for a bank assault.

A criminal duo learns of Charlie Chaplin's death and decides to steal his coffin to hold for a ransom.

Léonard Monestier owns a large fortune, alas his wife Cynthia made a bad investment in a worthless oil concession. Far from letting this get him down, Léonard decides to find a sucker to buy this concession from him. Right on cue appears Antoine Brévin, a befuddled billionaire who is very interested in Léonard's beautiful daughter Patricia and would do anything to win her hand...

Carlo, a former mobster, is abducted by five privileged young men desperate to raise a $2 million ransom to save the sister of a friend. As Carlo plays mind games, however, his captors splinter -- each wondering whether one of their own had a hand in the crime.

Jacob, a bank manager haunted by a violent heist that took the life of a coworker, teams up with his ex-cop neighbor, James, to bring down the assailant. While the two men work together to figure out the thief’s next move, Gabriel, the highly-trained criminal, is one step ahead. When Gabriel kidnaps Jacob’s wife and daughter, Jacob barrels down a path of bloodshed that initiates an explosive counterattack and brings all three men to the breaking point.

A detective tries to track down a masked killer who reappears every Halloween to wreak bloody havoc.

After Regina Lampert falls for the dashing Peter Joshua on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, she discovers upon her return to Paris that her husband has been murdered. Soon, she and Peter are giving chase to three of her late husband's World War II cronies, Tex, Scobie and Gideon, who are after a quarter of a million dollars the quartet stole while behind enemy lines.

After escaping a Michigan prison, a charming career criminal assumes a new identity in Canada and goes on to rob a record 59 banks and jewellery stores while being hunted by a rogue task force. Based on the true story of The Flying Bandit.

Needing a new partner capable of intricate cons, Richard Gaddis, recruits Rodrigo, a crook with a perfect poker face. The two plan a big-time scam: selling a fake Silver Certificate to currency collector William Hannigan. Rodrigo distrusts his new associate, but needs money to help out his ill father. The situation becomes more complicated when Rodrigo falls for Gaddis' sister, Valerie, drawing another player into the game.

A gang of thieves calling themselves the Santa Claus Gang are wreaking havoc, and the police can't keep up. Police Captain Gilbert is distracted by a Chinese reporter writing a story on his squad, and taxi driver Daniel is in the midst of a relationship crisis. After a string of mistakes in which the thieves outsmart the police time and time again, Daniel and his super-taxi pitch in.

After losing their respective nest eggs thanks to a bumbling bank employee, three men use him to plot a bold and batty heist to get their money back.

Pontagnac, a married man, tries to seduce Victoire, the wife of his good friend. Little does he know, Victoire has plans of her own to punish her cheating husband. The would-be fling ignites a dizzying spell of complications as characters arrange trysts, attempt to expose each other’s deceits, and are ultimately forced to come clean.

Zed is an American vault-cracker who travels to Paris to meet up with his old friend Eric. Eric and his gang have planned to raid the only bank in the city which is open on Bastille day. After offering his services, Zed soon finds himself trapped in a situation beyond his control when heroin abuse, poor planning and a call-girl named Zoe all conspire to turn the robbery into a very bloody siege.

In Athens a collection of emeralds is successfully stolen by a team of robbers, led by safe-cracker Azad. Things go smoothly until they miss the ship by which they planned their escape; a police chief pursues Azad while he waits for the next ship to set off.

The sister of a famous, but as yet uncaught, criminal named "The Hexer" is murdered. Inspector Higgins of Scotland Yard believes that "The Hexer" will surface to take his revenge on his sister's killers, and plans to set a trap to finally capture him. However, soon bodies start piling up, and it looks as if "The Hexer" may get away yet again.

Four women were murdered, each was knifed and, though they had their clothes torn, they weren't molested. As the famed police inspector Jules Maigret pieces the clues together, he comes to realize that for the elusive man that he suspects to be unmasked, he has to set him a trap.

After being released from a mental hospital, a troubled young man tracks down an actress he once had sex with and forces her into captivity, determined to make her part of his life.

L'Alpagueur is a free-lance spy from the French secret agency. He's put on the investigation about L'epervier, a serial-killer who employs young boys to help him robbing banks before killing them.

Hoping to foil his own gold-digging wife's plan, a loathsome businessman arranges his own kidnapping, only to realize that there are plenty of other people interested in his wealth as well.

Cowboy and Indian's only wish was to come up with a brilliant idea for Mr Horse's birthday, but when their plan ends up in utter disaster, they'll need to travel the world and back to make things right again.

This film originated as a play in Paris. The story focuses on the one-day adventures of Bertrand Barnier played with a genius of French cinema, Louis de Funes. In the same morning he learns that his daughter is pregnant, an employee stole a large amount of money from his company, his maid is about to resign in order to marry a wealthy neighbor and his body builder is interested in marrying his daughter. The seemingly complicated story-line is full of comedy or errors and some of the most hilarious mime scenes of the French cinema.

October 1934. Poland. Famous bank robber Kwinto decided to quit his dangerous criminal job, but after his friend's death, he changed his mind and organized a burglary of famous and well protected bank which belonged to his former partner in crime, backstabbing and double-crossing Kramer. Kwinto designs a clever plan not to only rob the Kramer's bank but to make it look like Kramer himself did it.

With a flu epidemic running rife, three new bumbling recruits are assigned to Inspector Mills police station. With help from Special Constable Gorse, they manage to totally wreck operations of the police force and let plenty of criminals get away, even before they arrive at the station. They all have to prove themselves or else they'll be out of a job and Sgt. Wilkins will be transferred.

After escaping from prison, Joe and Terry go on a crime spree, robbing banks through Oregon and California in order to finance their scheme for a new life south of the border. Unfortunately, things get more complicated when they meet Kate, who runs into them with her car. She joins the bandits on their cross-country spree, and eventually she steals something, too: their hearts.

When Egon Olsen gets out of Vridlose State Prision once again, his friends Benny and Kjeld do not want to know about his new ingenious plan: they are actually WORKING in a shop! Thus, he has to think of something else to get his hands on the money of some international gangster.

While a diamond advocate attempts to steal a collection of diamonds, troubles arise when he realises he’s not the only one after the collection.

In a city infested with the LIVING-IMPAIRED aka non-cannibal zombies - three slackers after easy money must fight small-time crooks and an evil megacorporation to save their kidnapped grandma.

After a failed bank robbery, an ex-con, an ex-waitress and a few of their friends train a pack of doberman dogs to rob a bank for them.

An FBI agent and an Interpol detective track a team of illusionists who pull off bank heists during their performances and reward their audiences with the money.


