There’s no attempt to romanticize the criminal life in Francisco Pérez-Dolz’s A tiro limpio (US: A Clean Shot), a tough and gritty story of four doomed, desperate men attempting to get a leg up in a Barcelona still under the Caudillo‘s thumb. Even as Franco’s economic reforms had produced around this time a burgeoning middle class (the “Spanish miracle”) and the world’s second fastest-growing economy, many Spaniards — like Román (José Suárez) and “El Picas” (Carlos Otero) — doubted the country’s free-market prospects and even embraced communist overtures as represented by Martín (Luis Peña) and Antoine (Joaquín Navales). With their motives blurring between politics and personal finance, these four men convene to rob a bank, but when the financial rewards prove insufficient, they split up to pull two heists simultaneously, one as a distraction. Unsurprisingly, greed, fear, and vengeance erode the gang’s unity until a final shootout in an abandoned building with police closing in. Tudó’s minimalist, occasionally jazzy score perfectly matches the neglected, grey, and under-populated Barcelona rendered by director Pérez-Dolz, who emphasizes the city’s industrial coldness and public restrooms over the delights of its Antonio Gaudi architecture. The beauty comes primarily in Marín’s cinematography, which boasts plenty of gorgeous compositions with low-key lighting up stairwells, on a boat, in a morgue; the opening sequence brilliantly uses a parking garage door as a visual framing device like a portal between light and dark, freedom and danger, as unwitting customers enter (or not) to be taken hostage.