A jag via Roger Ebert's review from Romeo is Bleeding. Directed by Stephen Frears. Source novelist Jim Thompson had great form providing Kubrick with raw material (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and some less tasty stuff (The Killer Inside Me). Adapted by Donald E. Westlake.
Notionally this is a noir-adjacent small-scale con movie of a kind done so many times before and since (e.g., Matchstick Men). Boyish and not-too-smart John Cusack somehow makes bank by playing tricks on the unwary in L.A. (The ones we're shown are of the at-most-once variety and cannot yield the fat stacks he hides behind his clown pictures.) He somehow keeps Annette Bening interested, at least until his book-fixing mother Anjelica Huston arrives from the east coast and the long con(s) unwind. A lot of the plot makes little sense and amounts to little more than shuffling the characters around. I was waiting for a twist that just doesn't come.
Roger Ebert: four stars. A Critic's Pick by Vincent Canby. How much you enjoy this is probably determined by how much you enjoy an all-in Annette Bening.
