Nine Queens
There are times when a film is made that does not necessarily bring anything new to the genre, but it is so exceedingly well at going about itself that it becomes a classic nonetheless. Such is the case with Fabián Bielinsky's allegory on the Argentinian economic collapse in the early 2000s. The movie starts out deceptively simple. A young con-man pulls the classic small-con involving sleight of hand (and quick-talking) around getting a store clerk to make change for a large bill, and paying too much. But, when a second con-man, his various criminal contacts, and his sexy firecracker of a sister come into the picture, the tricks and one-upmanship begin to escalate from the small-con up to dizzying layers-within-layers of the big-con. In this case, it involves a rare set of German stamps (the source of the movies title), a rich buyer hiding from the international police (in town for only one day naturally), and an expensive hotel managed by the aforementioned sister. Things build up like a top which gets spinning so fast, you are never sure who is conning whom, and who is in on it and who is not. Nevertheless, Bielinsky manages to craft detailed characters who are fully fleshed, despite the fact that they exist in a world so full of deceit, it could fall down any second, like a house of cards. Ricardo Darín (the Humprey Bogart or Robert Mitchum of Argentinean cinema) is particularly good as the experienced and incorrigible scam artist who would take his own family for a ride. He has such a world-weary presence that you want the guys schemes to work, even though he is a world-class jerk. He's like a down-and-dirty Spanish counterpart to Joe Mantegna in David Mamet's House of Games, a film to which Nine Queens owes a lot. It is the fine performances and the vérité look of the film which prevent the elaborate story from ever riding off the rails. Like all good con flicks the conclusion is both inevitable and surprising.

Heist
- Speaking of Mamet, 2001s somewhat passed over and summarily written off Gene Hackman/Danny DeVito 'big score' flick is a heaven for working character actors and regular Mamet contributors. It is an early film for Sam Rockwell, who essays the sort of naive sleaze that you cannot help but want to see brought down by the grizzled pros. The opening and closing set-pieces are wonders of misdirection in terms of pulling off 'the job,' but it is the details of the team and the double-crossing in the mid-section of the film where it really sings. Not to mention some of the most quotable dialogue for this type of film, ever. "I hate to do anything as dramatic as count to three but one, two, three." "Then he hadn't ought to point a gun at me. It's insincere." "My motherfucker is so cool, when he goes to bed, sheep count him." And the infamous, "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money." There was the temptation to plop onto this list Mamet's even more ignored (and less literal) The Spanish Prisoner, but Heist is clearly the leaner, meaner film. It is actually the least obvious choice in David Mamet's ouvre, even though nearly all of his films are enamored with the confidence game and apply it to all sorts of different subgenres. With its pumping Taking of Pelham 1-2-3-esque score and rat-a-tat-tat exchanges between career criminals and swindlers, the performance, the final constrcution is the thing; as in any heist (or any great character actor), it can trump substance and smoothly get away with it.

Diggstown (aka Midnight Sting)
As delightful sleazeballs go (something intrinsic to the grifter flick) you simply cannot do much better than a movie which pits James Woods vs. Bruce Dern. It is a game of one-upmanship and the satisfaction of conning the con artist. Both actors bring their considerable talents to the forefront (not unlike Michael Caine and Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels) in a plot that spirals completely out of control, both on the side of Louis Gossett, Jr. here an over the hill heavyweight involved in the sting to beat out 10 younger boxers in a single session, thus playing on the titular towns (and its wealthiest man's) vanity. Played as high farce at times, but always an undercurrent of seriousness, the film is full of witty bon mots on the con: "Never try to hustle a hustler," or that a hustler always has to pull out of town before his marks get ahold of him, but a great con-man does not leave until he wants to. Diggstown has sort of fallen off the map as a piece of quality entertainment that makes ample use of its great cast (digging deeper you'll find Randal "Tex" Cobb, Oliver Platt and the always a hoot Marshall Bell).

Birthday Girl
This fine British import got completely ignored on this side of the pond, and the world is a sadder place for it. Playing on the mail-order bride from Russia and the lonely patsy (here a compelling Ben Chaplin), the film beat David Cronenberg to the punch by casting Frenchman extraordinaire Vincent Cassel as a Russian thug (and Birthday Girl brings along Cassel's La Haine director Mathieu Kassovitz as his partner in crime). Nicole Kidman, who reinvents her psychotic femme fatale in Gus Van Sant's To Die For as an enigmatic Russian sex-bomb, brings a great sense of menace, allure, and promise (all the accouterments of a good confidence scheme) to the table. The result is an unpredictable and dark little thriller (that has an equally dark sense of humour) that gives its own interesting interpretation on where the mark ultimately ends. Birthday Girl deserves a lot more love and attention.

Croupier
Clive Owen should throw out a hearty thank-you to director Mike Hodges (or perhaps vice versa). The Get Carter director was moving into fresh, yet still oddly familiar territory with this small, but very effective film that not only launched Owen's career, it forever planted the seed that he would be a fine 007, because, you know, the man can really wear a tuxedo. Using many of the noir-ish conventions as his 1971 masterpiece, Croupier weaves a story of a slimey ex-gambler who takes a job as a casino dealer to as a front and one-man research-lab to gather material for a book he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to write. The movie gives a great look into the main characters psyche, a very dispassionate one at that, and the lives he casually wrecks around him in order for him to simply observe the chaos that he has wrought. If there is a grift, at first seems to be Clive Owen against the world, it is a man and his own nature/naïveté. For a con-man flick this sort of reckoning is as mention above, both surprising and inevitable. Croupier is one of those films that has a great plot, but the spell of the film, the mix of characters with Hodges particular brand of style (dark, grim) and pacing (steady and tense) demand a double and triple dip. This is slow-burn filmmaking that goes down a dank rabbit hole (like London's second tier casinos), the soul of the low rent and anonymous shyster. The ending is perhaps more ambiguous than it ought to be, but the journey getting there never disappoints.