Roofman review: BFI London Film Festival 2025

Channing Tatum plays a robber with a heart of gold in Roofman

Army veteran Jeff Manchester (Channing Tatum) is a nice guy, really. He’s kind and generous to the people around him, and trying desperately to be the best possible dad to his three young children. It’s just that Jeff is also really good at crime. Armed robbery to be precise. Well, until he’s not.

It’s 2004 and Jeff robs 45 branches of McDonalds by cutting a hole in their roofs and lowering himself in to stick up the employees and empty the safe – earning himself the nickname ‘Roofman’ in the local news. After a lucrative year of crime Jeff is caught and sent to prison, where he promptly uses his special set of skills to escape and try to get back to his family. With his face in every newspaper and every cop in town looking for him, he hides out in a local Toys ‘R’ Us store to evade recapture.

Quickly realising that there’s no chance of making it far while his escape is still headline news, he decides he needs to stay in the toy store until the heat dies down. This ends up being several months, and over time Jeff manages to fall in love with employee Leigh (Kirsten Dunst) become a de facto step father to her two daughters, a member of her church and a pillar of the local community. But Jeff is still a wanted man, and getting close to this many people risks blowing his hiding place and landing him back in prison. When he gets the chance to flee for good, he finds himself torn between freedom and the new life he has built for himself.

Roofman is a true story, written and directed by Derek Cianfrance who spent four years interviewing the real Jeff Manchester in prison in order to get the full story. While so much of this tale seems too insane to be true, if you stick around through the end credits there are a number of interviews with the real people involved, alongside archival news footage – and yes, Cianfrance seems to have got it spot on.

With Cianfrance’s previous work including Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines I have always thought of him to be the ‘master of misery,’ so naturally kept expecting for Roofman to take some sort of sudden turn in to tragedy, but this is a real tonal shift from the directors’ previous work – a genuine, sweet natured comedy that will be a natural crowd pleaser.

Roofman is career best work from Channing Tatum who really flexes his comedy muscles while also making Jeff a beautifully multilayered character, a genuinely earnest soul who may be making some awful mistakes but nearly always has good intentions. The ludicrous precariousness of his situation is always known to him, even if he may be in denial about his possible future. He and Dunst have great chemistry, and the supporting cast, including Peter Dinklage and Lakeith Stanfield all add solid laughs to this tall tale.

There are undoubtedly serious elements of this story that could have been explored to make a much darker and more nuanced picture, and the Roofman has received a Hollywood makeover to make his crimes seem saccharine sweet – but I can’t find it in me to be mad about it. A truly enjoyable 2 hours in the cinema that really took me by surprise, Roofman is an unlikely gem that is silly and serious in all the right places.  

Roofman is playing as part of the BFI London Film Festival. It is released in UK cinemas on 17th October 2025

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