Metrograph

Pulp writer Jim Thompson saw American life for the hustle that it was, and didn’t pull any punches in writing about it. Adapting one of Thompson’s most pungent novels, Frears gives us con artistry as another family business, with John Cusack’s Roy doing his best to make proud mother Lily, played by Anjelica Huston, one of the film’s four Academy Award nominees along with Annette Bening and, adapting Thompson, another crime fiction legend, Donald Westlake. “So good that one leaves the theater on a spellbound high.”—Vincent Canby, The New York Times.

Screens as a part of In the Year of the Grifter.