Noah Segan, John Turturro and Steve Buscemi attend the premiere of The Only Living Pickpocket in New York by Noah Segan, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. (© 2026 Sundance Institute | photo by Jemal Countess)
By Erik Adams
Noah Segan looks out from the lectern at the Eccles Theatre. “You really can go home again, huh?,” he says.
Twenty-one years ago, Segan came to the Sundance Film Festival with the cast and crew of Brick, a high-school-set neo-noir from a talented director making his feature debut. That director, Rian Johnson, is also here. He cast Segan in Star Wars: Episode VIII — The Last Jedi, Knives Out, Looper, and every other movie he’s made since Brick, and now he’s a producer on his friend’s Festival debut, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. While Segan speaks, Johnson snaps photos like a proud parent.
The family reunion vibes are strong. Brick and Looper star Joseph Gordon-Levitt stops by; when The Only Living Pickpocket in New York cast comes to the stage for the Q&A, actors John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, and Giancarlo Esposito reminisce about the other movies they’ve made with each other. Some of them took place in New York, too.
“I love New York stories,” says Buscemi. “I was in a movie called New York Stories.” As the audience laughs, he gestures toward Turturro. “I think that’’s where we met, actually, at that premiere.” Buscemi turns toward Esposito: “And then we did King of New York.”
“I had no idea about this, guys,” says Segan. “This is news to me.”
It’s fitting for Segan’s movie. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York longs for the Big Apple where Buscemi and Esposito made King of New York, and where Esposito and Turturro made Do the Right Thing. The city of that era was a little scuzzier and less inviting perhaps, but it was also one where the underground was dictated by codes like the ones small-time hustler Harry (Turturro) still lives by in the present day.
Turturro plays Harry as someone who’s lost some faith in his city and his fellow New Yorkers, but he still plies his trade with pride and panache. The same could be said of Detective Warren (Esposito) or pawn-shop operator Ben (Buscemi). They don’t call attention to themselves. They’re each just another guy on the subway, trying to get by.
Compare that to Dylan (Will Price), a cocky mobster’s kid who Harry rips off one fateful night. Dylan is the current face of crime in the city, one that’s much less discrete. This is the type of kid who flaunts his fancy wheels and flexes the academic vocabulary of a high-class education bought with generational wealth. He has no respect for old-timers like Harry, or the codes they hold so dear. When Harry accidentally swipes a small fortune in cryptocurrency from Dylan, Dylan violates all sorts of unspoken rules by threatening the life of the pickpocket’s ailing wife.
Those are some high stakes, but The Only Living Pickpocket is a crime caper that’s cool, low-key, and focused more on people than paydays and heroic efforts. At its center is a wild goose chase across the five boroughs to find Dylan’s crypto key, an object whose value Harry and Ben can’t comprehend without an explanation from the youngest member of their crew, Eve (Victoria Moroles). But even that stretch of the film makes time for Harry to show up on the doorstep of his estranged daughter, Kelly (Tatiana Maslany).
It’s a New York City movie through and through, with a score by a key thread in the city’s musical fabric, Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz. New York roots bond the director and his cast, but there are deep Festival connections running through the film as well. Esposito and Buscemi are both Sundance Labs alum; on stage, the latter recalls brining Reservoir Dogs to the Labs with Quenitn Tarantino, and then bringing that film and Grand Jury Prize winner In the Soup to the Festival in 1992. “Reservoir Dogs got nothing,” he says, adding in jest, “Not sure whatever happened with Quentin.”
All this reflection seems only natural. The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is, after all, about lamenting the passage of time and coming to terms with the present. And it’s the Festival’s final fiction film premiere at the Eccles ahead of its move to Boulder in 2027. There’s a lot of emotion in the building, which Esposito channels into a passionate address about how important the Institute, the Festival, and their founder, Robert Redford, are to him.
“This festival has changed my life,” he says. “To be around Robert Redford, who was so tremendous in his openness, and his ability to empower you — he said, ‘Tell your story. Keep going and tell your story.’ What was most important for him was to pass on an empowerment message, and to experiment. These Labs were all about experimentation. We didn’t come to sell a film to a big studio. We came to share our small movie with human beings that could really see themselves, as a mirror, on the screen.”
Applause breaks out. And then an increasingly emphatic Esposito brings it all home, giving the Eccles a send-off worthy of the Festival’s legendary run in Park City.
“This to me is priceless. It’s the gem that we all hope for. It’s the juice of why we live. It’s the connection of why this movie works. It’s the love of what we do. This will stick with me for the rest of my life. My interactions with this man who started this festival will always be a beacon of light in my creative process, because I will always come back to my origins. I will always remember, and I will always feel myself with the pull of the honest, truthful creativity of why I live and breathe.”
