Powerful

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Lilly Dillon (Anjelica Huston) is working for mobster Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle) placing bets in horse races. Her estranged son Roy Dillon (John Cusack) does small cons. His girlfriend Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) uses sex. Roy gets caught and gets hit. Lilly takes him to the hospital and misses a job. Bobo punishes her. Myra wants Roy to invest in her scheme. It's the life of grift.These are three individual performances that are all powerful in their own way. Huston is simply incredible. She is so many different notes. Bening is using sex like pulling out her credit card. Cusack has his boyish charms but he's also so broken. These three characters are memorable.

In most films about "grifters", or "con artists", they are almost always the ones the audiences root for, such as the lovable characters in "The Sting", Gondorff and Hooker (Paul Newman and Robert Redford) whose only marks are those who deserve it. In reality, grifters mark anyone they think they can take. And the more the mark has, the more the grifter thinks he or she can take from them. A con artist (aka confidence man or woman) uses camaraderie and deception to convince a potential victim to willfully give them money. In the best con games, the mark doesn't realize he or she has been "taken".Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a small-con grifter who was taught by an older con artist and magician. He perpetrates small-time tricks, like switching bills at bars, and getting in with strangers to play rigged games of chance. But he's never enacted bigger cons. His mother Lilly Dillion is also a grifter who works for the mobs which own many of horse racing tracks in California. She's paid to bet on long shots to decrease the pay offs in case the long shot wins, using the mob's own money, even though the track itself doesn't know the mob is actually paying into its own betting pool. For example, if a horse had 50-1 odds to win, and Lilly adds money into the betting pool making the odds 40-1, if the horse wins, the mob only has to pay off $40 to every $1 bet instead of $50. But there's a small hitch. Lilly is skimming off the top, betting less money than the mob has given her, and she hides the extra in the trunk of her car.The wild card is a young female grifter name of Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) who was once in a big con game with a man name of Cole (J.T. Walsh). At the film's beginning we learn Roy is going with Myra, but he's not sure about her, and he doesn't know she's a grifter. After Roy unsuccessfully pulls one of his bate and switch the bills games on the wrong bartender which lands him a slug into the stomach, Lilly and Myra meet at hospital. From the get-go we know that Lilly and Myra are adversaries, both vying for the affections of Roy. Eventually, Roy and Myra leave on a road trip.During the trip, Myra recounts her days with Cole and how they swindled Texas millionaires out of thousands in cash. They set up a phony office when oil prices were down and convinced Texas magnates to invest thousands of dollars into a scheme. Cole and Myra would convince the mark they could defraud the stock or bonds market by placing orders depending upon a shift in the market, such as a stock, bond or currency, and then cash in on the profits. The trick was a 7-second delay in which if there was a significant move of a stock and/or commodity up or down on the Tokyo exchange, they could either buy or sell before the information reached New York. When the mark brought the money, and all that was needed was to make the actual transaction, a phony scenario was presented to the mark involving authorities, and the mark and his money would soon part company.But Roy has never tried anything so big before. And his mother Lilly wants Roy out of the con game, before he becomes like her, a loser who has sold her soul to the mob. She is physically punished by one of the mobsters for missing one of the high-stakes races when she takes Roy to hospital, and as luck would have it, one of the long-shots wins, forcing the mob to pay 70-1 odds. We know that this is a tug of war between these two women, the sexy upstart grifter Myra and the lonely loser old grifter Lilly.An excellent film which probably more accurately portrays the cut-throat world of con artists. In reality, some con artists are playing deadly games, not like the characters portrayed in "The Sting", "The Film-Flam Man" and "House of Games". A French nobleman who had invested with Bernie Madoff committed suicide when the fraud was revealed, and others have been killed by con artists. The world of Roy, Lilly and Myra portrays a much deadlier world. While a great and compelling film, I would have liked Myra and Roy to engage the "big con" which in the end they avoid.

An indie crime-drama fixes on a veiled Oedipus complex relationship between a mother and his son, which also involves another pivotal figure, the son's femme fatale girlfriend. One background consensus is that they are all grifters, while the mother is an old-hander, the girlfriend is a slutty self-seeker, they are pros, bar the son is just a small-time crook and being too righteous to go down with the swindle business, what's worse is that he has no sway in juggle with these two women, after the mother hoodwinks a handsome amount of cash from her ferocious boss, which ignites a series of cutthroat happenings which ends in a quite blatantly bold epilogue. The film was an Oscar dark horse in 1991, amassed 4 nominations including BEST DIRECTOR for Frears and BEST ACTRESS for Angelica Huston and BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS for Anette Bening (although I don't consider its script an ace one since there are many marked plot-holes buried inside despite of its Oscar nomination). These two ladies at the most time share an analog aspect (have been mistaken at least twice in the film), Anjelica holds a glaringly formidable aura and her and Cusack's near-incest impulse pushes the film to its culmination of wallowing in a state of indie-charisma. Bening, whose vixen seductiveness has been laid bare unreservedly, pre-empts that the future Ms. Beatty would not earn that title without any man- conquering expertise. John Cusack, top-billed in the film and delivers a marvelous performance as well, whose repeatedly undervalued acting career showed his dexterous prowness at the beginning, sadly, it never kick-started. (All the three performances and the director are among my top 10 ranking, the film barely missed my top 10 though). For director Stephen Frears, the film differs from his more prestigious works, say THE QUEEN (2006), it certainly has a more noir-ish tone in assembling the intensified thrills with an uneven script (just take one example, it never quite explained how the money being left in the car after the accident, so Lilly, Huston's character, has to steal the money from her son). But thanks to Frears, the film at the very least establishes itself as a progenitor of the crime genre in the 90s, where violence is always hidden somewhere and executed where you are unprepared.

Man, talk about a slow-burn. Going into The Grifters I was expecting a slick and quick-paced con thriller, but what I got was something much darker and much more absorbing. Director Stephen Frears, working off a script by Donald Westlake (adapted from the Jim Thompson novel) lets these characters get established before they start to bring us into the tangled web they are all weaving.Roy Dillon (John Cusack) is a con man pulling small jobs every day to slowly build up his savings, while his girlfriend Myra Langtry (Annette Bening) is doing anything she can to get by and his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) is working on a long play of her own. The tagline of "Who's conning who?" always makes me roll my eyes, but it's actually an accurate portrayal here, as these three play each other back and forth, while the film itself is pulling the veil over the audience.The Grifters is a brooding noir that throws back a lot to the '40s and it's Hitchcock roots, including some direct homages that feel appropriate for the story rather than cheap rip-offs. The film delves into some potentially melodramatic moments at times, but Frears is able to keep things in tune with it's seething roots as opposed to letting things get too theatrical.All three actors are working at top form here; Cusack was just starting to break out and this role should really be considered more among the best of his career, Huston steals the show in every scene and Bening (someone I've always despised) is seductive and very compelling. I thought that Bening was phoning it in a bit at first, but as more is revealed about the character you realize that she's conning herself as much as she is everyone else. Frears crafts this one with a great tone that the actors play into very well, with some powerful sexual undertones and a dynamite finale.