Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

one of my absolute favorites!

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

This is certainly a good movie ... but nominated for 4 Oscars and quite a number of other wins and awards and stuff? really? surely not the only not-so-Oscar-worthy movie i've ever seen that has been nominated for so many of such a highly praised prize ... but well ... dunno ... maybe 1990 was a special year for unlikely nominations after all ...

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.

A cinematic experience revolving around characters that are universally unlikable requires director prowess to bring us into a world which we either don't know very well or are curious about enough to buy into what little we know. What we find out leads us to have a new affinity for those able to survive in such a world (bevause grifting is all about survival) or at least a better understanding of the survival mind set. After watching "The Grifters" I have very little of either. This is a direct knock on Director Stephen Frears, whose other movie I've seen, "Dirty Pretty Things" taught us a bit of the survival mindset but didn't take us anywhere worthwhile as well. The premise that people want to experience something outside f their lives so they go to the theater t o be transplanted elsewhere is generally missed in this confusing personality crisis of three connected con artists, the worst played by Annette Bening. Love her elsewhere, but her character in never straight with us, we're not sure of her intentions, and when she gets naked, becomes some playfully doll thing that v=can't stop making up lines that other people would say when not naked and offering their body for some alternative form of payment. She was a very cute but naked mess. John Cusack falls short with his dialog out of a book and not able to inject either affection or sympathy. Why should we care for him and how did he get all that money? His bar scams were so small time they were laughably unbelievable that he was a small time con man. He was below that self described minimal success level of a con artist. That leaves us with Anjelica Huston, who was very believable but that white hair-do took away her power to be approaching middle age sexy. We hear of the big bad wolf, Bobo, and even meet him, but he's a bad guy for a comedy only, not a noir film. Same could be said about the grifting teacher from Roys' (John Cusack) past. It's hard not to like a crime story, but it was impossible to like The Grifters".

Despite all the talent involved -- Huston, Cusack, Bening, Frears and Scorcese -- I was neither engaged nor satisfied with "The Grifters." My wife and I have regularly enjoyed movies about elaborate con jobs. But there's nothing terribly clever about the ways that Huston, Cusak and Bening ply their cheating. Their characters are disagreeable individuals and what happens to them is off-putting and ultimately very bloody. Bening and, especially, Huston turn in pretty good performances but I've never much liked Cusack, and there's nothing in this film to improve his standing as far as I'm concerned. The three of us watching the film on streaming video uttered a collective "yccch" when it ended.