There was a stretch in the ’80s and ’90s when L.A. crime thrillers were a genre unto themselves. You’d walk into a theater on a Friday night, settle in, and let some combination of sunlight, corruption, and a killer cast do the rest. Heat. Collateral. To Live and Die in L.A.. Films that made you feel like you were riding shotgun through a city that looked gorgeous and rotten in equal measure. We don’t get many of those anymore, and I’d mostly stopped expecting them. Then Bart Layton’s Crime 101 showed up, and I’ll admit it: I didn’t think this was going to work.

The trailers had me worried. A stacked cast, sure, but it looked like everyone was going through the motions in a heist movie that ran a pulverizing 140 minutes. I was bracing for a slog. Instead, Layton (The Imposter) adapted Don Winslow’s novella into a propulsive, sharp-edged thriller that moves like it’s half that length. Set against the sun-bleached sprawl of Los Angeles, the film follows Davis (Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa), an elusive jewel thief whose string of heists along the 101 freeway have mystified police. When he eyes one final score, his path crosses with insurance broker Sharon (Halle Berry, Moonfall) and Det. Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight), an honest cop who believes he’s finally cracked the pattern.

Hemsworth is doing career-best dramatic work here. He plays Davis as coiled and precise, a thief with a code who treats every job like surgery. Ruffalo’s detective is the slow burn of the film, an arc that sneaks up and hits you somewhere around the third act when you realize how much you care about this guy. And Berry? This is her best performance in I don’t know how long. Layton gives her a monologue that I suspect will draw applause at every screening, and she earns every second of it. The Oscar winner looks younger now than she did making Strictly Business in 1991, and she acts like she’s got something to prove.  It’s a hungry performance, and a brillant one at that.

Ormon (Barry Keoghan, Saltburn) arrives as the wild card, a brutal counterpoint to Davis’s restraint, and Keoghan tears into it with the kind of unpredictable energy that makes every scene feel like it could detonate. Oscar-nominee Monica Barbaro (A Complete Unknown) brings warmth as a potential love interest for Davis, and their courtship feels believable and sweet in a film that could have easily skipped the tenderness.

The editing from Julian Hart and Jacob Secher Schulsinger deserves a special call-out. These two build sequences of rising tension that pay off in double and triple-cross reveals, and the film has several lethally excellent ones. There’s a moment where Ruffalo is getting dressed on one side of the city, buttoning his shirt, and the camera drifts from his mirror to his buttons and suddenly we’re watching Hemsworth doing the same, pulling on a suit jacket one arm at a time before the frame circles back to Ruffalo adjusting his cuff. It’s so cinema.

The score from Blanck Mass ups the stakes when called for and folds into the city’s natural rhythm when the film slows its roll. Layton pushed to shoot on location in Los Angeles instead of Australia, and it was the right call. Scott Dougan’s production design and Jenny Eagan’s easy-breezy costume work make the whole thing feel like it breathes real California air.

If I had to nitpick, Layton is better at introducing threads than tying them off. He fills the margins with terrific actors, but not all of them get the send-off they deserve. That said, in a landscape drowning in sequels, reboots, and IP-driven vanity projects, a mid-budget original thriller cast with this much firepower feels like an event. Crime 101 is well-made, well-acted, and keeps you breathless wondering what’s coming next. If this were a college course, I’d tell you it’s required. Enroll immediately, and whatever you do, don’t drop it.