Duplicity (2009)
Directed by Tony Gilroy
Two romantically involved government operatives Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval team up to manipulate a race between opposing corporations to corner the market on a medical innovation that will reap huge profits and allow them to lead an extravagant lifestyle together. They find themselves on opposing sides as corporate spies; however, as they each try to outdo the other, neither one can decide how far to trust the other in this high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse.
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What critics compared Duplicity to
The movie gives off something reminiscent of old caper romances like Charade, How to Steal a Million, A Fish Called Wanda, the Ocean’s movies, and the underrated Duplicity, in which Julia Roberts and Clive Owen keep their con going so long that what they’re left with is each other.
More recently, 2009's Duplicity, itself a terrific comedy-drama about corporate espionage starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, offered even more twists and as much excitement, though it remains criminally under seen.
It aspires to the likes of the grotesquely underrated Julia Roberts-Clive Owen-starring “Duplicity”: a con movie in which professional liars fall for each other and only wind up wondering if they really can love at all.
Smith and Robbie can’t hope to capture the warm antagonism of a couple like Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in the criminally underrated Duplicity, but Focus still fits in the pantheon of films featuring conning couples.
The first half grooves like a lounge and pops like a good bubble; the second half rolls patiently, lacking the consistent zip of something like Tony Gilroy's excellent take on potentially romantic deception, "Duplicity."
For every "Ocean's 11," there's an audience flop, such as "Duplicity" with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, that gets one too many steps ahead of the audience, while relying on the stars.
Unlike 2008's "Duplicity," this isn't a movie built on cleverness.
"Duplicity," some of you may recall, was a rather diabolically clever and highly complex romantic thriller starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen that rather famously flopped at the box office in 2009.
Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity,’’ with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, managed to pull off a similar version of this with great confidence and a lighter touch.
American audiences, I suspect, may have trouble warming to the film, since they tend to resist movies with any mentions of INTERPOL (why is that?), just as they resist twisty affairs with a predominantly facetious tone (such as "Duplicity," the one with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts ).
Smaller performances are just as notableproof how capable the cast and script arefrom Tom Wilkinson (2009's " Duplicity "), unforgettable in his subtle creepiness as Paul Emmett, a classmate from Lang's past at Cambridge; to Eli Wallach (2006's " The Holiday ") as an old-time resident of the Vineyard who offers sage advice to the Ghost; to Soogi Kang as Dep, the Langs' committed housekeeper and cook who may or may not know more than she lets on; to Marianne Graffam as a wearisome, period-garbed hotel clerk.
Last year's marquee attempt, Tony Gilroy's Duplicity , boasted the requisite intelligence but lacked the enlivening ebullience.
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Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (brother of Tony Gilroy, the auteur behind Michael Clayton and Duplicity), Nightcrawler pushes its cynicism about ratings-hungry news outlets so hard that it frequently crosses the line into overly blunt caricature.
Instead, this is the type of personal filmmaking we’ve only seen from the world’s most intelligent filmmakers when they chose to do something that challenges themselves as much as it does the viewer – a cross between Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain” and Tony Gilroy’s “Duplicity” immediately comes to mind in terms of the complexity of its storytelling.