Review: Roofman (2025)

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Kirsten Dunst’s sad, sweet smile can move mountains. In the Spider-Man movies her smile supercharges Spidey to save the day, but also conveys the weight of the sacrifice she must bear. In Roofman, it seems to inspire a clever robber and con artist to risk everything for the chance to experience this smile directed at himself.

Dunst is at the centre of this film’s appeal, giving a gentle, subtly emotional performance as a single mother trying to do best for her girls by working a poorly paying and frequently belittling job at Toys “R” Us. But director Derek Cianfrance, who splashed onto the scene over a decade ago with Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, knows how to use Dunst to give extra pathos to his film’s fascinating mishmash of tones and tensions.

Most streaming services categorize Roofman as a comedy, which might be stretching the definition. However, it’s also not a straightforward crime movie or relationship drama or even heist film, although it contains elements of all of these films. At its core, it’s an inspirational movie about a con artist, with all the accompanying charms and emotional pitfalls such a scenario might entail.

Its protagonist is Jeffrey Manchester, played by Channing Tatum at his best. It’s the late 1990s and Jeffrey is a former soldier and divorced dad who wants the best for his kids, so he moonlights as a robber breaking into McDonalds through their roofs. In the film’s opening scene, Jeffrey sticks up a McDonald’s in the early morning before it opens and shepherds the staff into the walk-in freezer, only to ensure they put on their jackets beforehand so they aren’t too cold. You can understand how such a personable detail—borrowed from the real life inspiration, mind you—lends the film and the character their charms.

Jeffrey is eventually arrested after making a name for himself as the Roofman, but he ingeniously breaks out of prison and lies low in a Toys “R” Us. Jeffrey ends up living in the Toys “R” Us for half a year. Leveraging the cleverness that helped him rob so many McDonald’s as well as break out of prison, he disables the recording of the store’s security cameras, installs his own baby monitors to watch its comings-and-goings, and builds a bedroom for himself in a blindspot located between the elevated walls of a bicycle display rack. Jeffrey is smart, and Roofman delights in showing us how smart he is in procedural detail. Roofman borrows this element from heist films, which delight in the step-by-step outlining of elaborate robbery plans. Jeffrey’s scheme might be less economically ambitious than robbing a diamond appraiser, for instance, but it’s certainly no less impressive, perhaps even more so for how he manages it through sheer ingenuity without any planning.

Tatum thrills at playing a smart character for once. He’s well cast too, as his good looks and charisma make him easy to root for, which explains how he is able to pull one over on so many people so many times. People like a friendly, handsome dude. They don’t realize he’s also using it for a cover. So Tatum is great as Jeffrey and Jeffrey constantly impresses us with his schemes and ability to improvise to avoid getting caught.

But Jeffrey also has a heart and as he watches the store through his baby monitors, he notices Dunst’s sad, sweet smile as Leigh, the single mom working the bad shifts to make ends meet for her and her girls. He notices how Peter Dinklage’s prickish manager dismisses her requests and how she tries to encourage a timid coworker, played by Emory Cohen, to stand up for himself when the manager bullies him. He grows to like her, and feels sad for her, and wants to meet her. So he takes a risk, shows up at her church (run by a shockingly gentle Ben Mendelsohn as the lead pastor), and eventually romances her. He makes up a story explaining why he can’t talk about his past. He lies about his job. He becomes essential to her, using thefts from the store as fuel for gifts to pamper her and her daughters.

The romance between the two is built on a lie, but it’s one we want to believe in, because Leigh could use a nice guy for once and because Jeffrey seems like he’s capable of playing the nice guy for real. The scene where she asks him out on a date is a genuinely charming meet cute, the sort you would actually believe happened to someone you know rather than being one written by Hollywood screenwriters. After a singles lunch at the church where Jeffrey charms a bunch of middle-aged women, Leigh asks if Jeffrey is gay. He laughs it off and explains that no, he was just trying to charm the women. She then asks if he wants to go out with her. The shift from joke to disarming, naked emotion captures what works so well about Roofman.

At times, the film treads a tricky line between an understated romance like you’d get in a Richard Linklater film and a sentimental high concept romance that’s like a bizarro riff on Mrs. Doubtfire. Cianfrance’s neat trick is that as Jeffrey is charmed by Leigh, we’re charmed by him, and we start to question whether Jeffrey really is such a good guy or whether he’s just good at playing a part to get what he wants. He’s a criminal and a con artist and even if he has real feelings for Leigh, he’s getting something out of their relationship and getting to escape his past life as a criminal as well as its consequences.

So in Roofman, we root for Jeffrey even if we have the sneaking suspicion in the back of our mind that he’s playing us too and that, like Leigh, we’ll end up burned by believing in a person who might not deserve it. None of this would be possible without Dunst’s sad, sweet smile, though. It takes a good director to realize what wonders you can do with nothing but the face of one of his leads, and the emotional understanding to leverage it.

8 out of 10

Roofman (2025, USA)

Directed by Derek Cianfrance; written by Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn; starring Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Ben Mendelsohn, LaKeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Uzo Aduba, Jimmy O. Yang, Emory Cohen, Peter Dinklage.

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