(Paul Giamatti, as Burns’s froggy right-hand man, is the saving grace). Confidence has a surface sheen, and a handful of good lines, but like the grifters who people the plot it’s unmistakably minor league.The spirit of Frank Capra is alive and middling in The Man Who Sued God, a whimsical Australian yarn about a little guy bucking the system. But the major presence that might have redeemed its shopworn look isn’t there: Burns is a lightweight actor with an inflated sense of his own cool, Rachel Weisz is a beautiful but marginal love interest and Hoffman is so mannered it’s an embarrassment to watch. It proceeds competently enough under James Foley’s direction, while night-time Los Angeles is moodily shot by Juan Ruiz-Anchia (who also lensed for Mamet on House of Games). The moneyman they gulled turns out to be an employee of vengeful gangster The King (Dustin Hoffman) – “This guy holds a grudge better than my ex-mother-in-law” – so Jake has to make amends by concocting an elaborate payback involving corporate loans, wire transfers and offshore accounts.Complicating matters are two bent cops (Luis Guzman and Donal Logue) who are in turn being squeezed by federal agent Butan (Andy Garcia) to put Jake away. That’s why the opening scene of Confidence, in which conman Jake Vig (Ed Burns) and his crew fleece an unsuspecting moneyman, just doesn’t play: if you’ve not seen it in The Sting, you’ll know it from the collected works of David Mamet.
The plot builds in layers, enclosed within a long flashback. Problem is, back in 1973 all those scams, shills, dupes and double-crosses were relatively fresh, and when a guy went down with a gunshot wound to the chest, you always assumed he was dead.

Thirty years later we know that blood from a wound could be a squib planted to fool someone, and that once the smoke clears, the corpse on the floor might stand up and order a drink. Do you rememberThe Sting? NYU Film School graduate Doug Jung certainly does – his debut script Confidence has everything but the Scott Joplin rags in it. The cold light of Saturday morning should lend a different perspective.. Denis and her photographer Agn?Godard get so close to the couple we can almost hear them breathing. Relying more on pauses and gestures than dialogue, this tale of hips that pass in the night is so intricately edited and finely acted that one might be seduced into thinking Vendredi Soir is a substantial piece of work. Fraught with unspoken feeling, the movie presents a study in contrasts, between the wintry climate and the warmth of a car interior, between urban solitariness and sudden intimacy. “Shall we have dinner?” she asks Jean (Vincent Lindon), who murmurs his assent, though before their Friday night is through they will have shared more than a pizza together.

The setting is Paris at night, where the mother of all traffic jams has brought the city to a standstill. Laure (Val?e Lemercier), about to move in with her boyfriend, glimpses a stranger from her stalled car and offers him a lift. Even with Rampling on form, Swimming Pool finds a talented director still treading water.By coincidence, Emmanu? Bernheim has co-written another of this week’s films, Vendredi Soir, Claire Denis’s elliptical account of a one-night stand. The twist that Ozon places at the conclusion is as subtle as a belly flop, and isn’t in any case going to cause a major rethink of the film’s meaning. How much of this narrative are we to take as “real”, and how much is happening inside Sarah’s head?The problem with this uncertainty, which underlines its difference from Under The Sand, is that it doesn’t seem to matter either way.

Even if you believe that a murder-mystery is underway, there’s no sense of shock, as there would be in, say, a Chabrol movie, or even in Dominik Moll’s psychodrama Harry, He’s Here to Help, where the protagonist, also a frustrated writer, may have dreamt a whole killing spree. On the one hand we are being invited to think that a murder has occurred; on the other we sense a shift on the writers’ part (Ozon co-wrote the script with Emmanu? Bernheim) towards abstraction. Next morning Franck has mysteriously vanished, and Julie appears with a black eye Ambiguity thrums in the air. Julie brings back a waiter, Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour) to the house, but in the course of an evening’s drinking and dancing it becomes evident that it’s Sarah he’s attracted to. She sports one of those slightly masculine haircuts that female crime writers (Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornwell) tend to favour, though the frumpy clothes that Sarah wears early on in the movie can’t conceal the fact that Rampling, at 58, still looks amazing.With the tension between the two women nicely poised, the film looks set to get a plot off the ground.