The Grifters (1990)
Directed by Stephen Frears
A small-time conman has his loyalties torn between his estranged mother and his new girlfriend, both of whom are high-stakes grifters with their own angles to play.
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What critics compared The Grifters to
Rather, it’s a murky fusion of parent and peer reminiscent of Roy and Lilly Dillon in The Grifters.
This is a movie, an amusement, not some somber statement about the con game a la 1990’s The Grifters or any number of outside-the-law dramas.
While movies about conmen are nothing new, Focus takes a different approach than something like The Grifters or others since it’s built around the romantic chemistry between Smith and Robbie, both good-looking actors who have a substantial amount of charm.
When it comes to con flicks it's more Oceans Eleven without the famous ensemble cast than say The Grifters.
You have, in dozens of better movies, from "The Sting" to "The Grifters" to the "Ocean's Eleven" series and "American Hustle."
See “The Sting,” “House of Games,” “The Grifters.”
A romantic caper stocked with con artists, good looks but little sizzle, Focus is no Trouble in Paradise, House of Games or The Grifters.
There are as many betrayals, surprises and reversals in this gaudy, libidinous romp as in "The Grifters," "Bound" and "L.A. Confidential" combined.
Like the often-filmed Jim Thompson novels ("The Grifters," "The Getaway," "After Dark, My Sweet," among others) of which it is a knockoff, "U-Turn's" John Ridley script places a drifting stranger who thinks he's wised up in a situation that runs the gamut from garden-variety criminality to the purest evil.
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Think Casino meets The Grifters, shot through with a hefty dose of the off-kilter … and that’s American Hustle.
Carefully coiffed and almost always “on,” like the big con artists of The Grifters, but without the sexual release, enjoyment of the con, and ultimate mental breakdown.
Bound joins the list of excellent, violent and itelligent crime movies of the nineties that includes: The Grifters; After Dark, My Sweet; Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Miller's Crossing, Fargo, One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress.
When it comes to recent caper films (like The Grifters and Bound ), Jackie Brown is a second-tier effort.
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Based on Nick Hornby’s seriocomic odyssey through one man’s greatest splits, 2000’s “High Fidelity” reunited John Cusack with director Stephen Frears 10 years after con drama “The Grifters.”
While it's obvious that neither element is particularly novel, the way in which director Frears ("Dangerous Liaisons," an Oscar nominee for "The Grifters") and co-screenwriters Cusack, Scott Rosenberg ("Con Air," "Beautiful Girls") and D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink ("Grosse Pointe Blank") interweave them into the story works rather well.
"The Journey of Natty Gann," "Eight Men Out," "The Grifters," "Money for Nothing," "City Hall," "Con Air," "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," "Pushing Tin."
Especially when The Grifters, another adaptation of a cult novel featuring John Cusack, looked and felt like a humorless version of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy.
It isn’t enough that he’s been drinking from the fountain of youth since the last time he worked with British director Stephen Frears on "The Grifters" in 1990, with Annette Bening and Anjelica Huston, but the 34-year-old man/boy actor has cornered a cool piece of the film market with a confident brand of spry urban ingenuity.
These vignettes are staged with wonderful good humor by director Stephen Frears (who also worked with Cusack to great effect in "The Grifters"), and colored by comic voiceovers from Cusack, whose performance here is marked by the stylized, non-stop chatter that has made him the Woody Allen of the goyim.