Director Sergio Corbucci’s 1976 Italian comedy crime thriller High Rollers [Bluff storia di truffe e di imbroglioni] stars Anthony Quinn as con artist Philip Bang, who gets out of prison with young trickster Felice ‘Félix’ Brianza (Adriano Celentano) in a con job jail break and the two link up to pit their wits against clever villainess Belle Duke (Capucine), who is seeking revenge on her former lover Philip Bang.

Once out, Bang and Brianza set out to swindle Belle so that Bang can get his revenge on her, but then Brianza falls in love with Bang’s daughter.

High Rollers [Bluff storia di truffe e di imbroglioni] is an ordinary but still enjoyable Italian caper thriller in The Sting manner, directed by Spaghetti Westerns man Corbucci, who can’t manage quite enough larky style but keeps...

American Pulitzer-prize winning playwright David Mamet makes a clever directorial début with his teasing 1987 thriller House of Games.

It stars his then wife Lindsay Crouse as control-freak psychiatrist Margaret Ford, who makes the mistake of deciding to help one of her patients, Billy Hahn (Steven Goldstein), get out of a life-threatening gambling debt. She is then sucked into helping a confidence racket at a bar where razor-sharp conman Mike (Joe Mantegna) runs poker games.

The performances of Crouse and Mantegna are commanding and extremely effective. But the main praise is for Mamet’s dazzlingly stylised dialogue and the camerawork of cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía.

With its stings and scams, and grifters and con men, Mamet’s labyrinthine The Sting-style thriller yarn ma...