The con-artist film is one of the most-structurally-distinctive American genres. The genre's foundational structural challenge is that the audience has to be both invested in the con's success and aware that the protagonists are deceiving someone (typically other people on screen, sometimes the audience itself). The working tension between these two viewing-positions is what produces the specific dramatic energy that the con-artist genre delivers. The twelve films below represent the canon's strongest entries across multiple decades.
The structural pattern across the canon is that the strongest con-artist films are those that engage the con as a character-revealing structural device rather than as pure plot-mechanism content. The audience has to care about the con artists as people for the working dramatic energy to operate; the films that treat the con as pure mechanism (without character investment in the perpetrators) typically fail to deliver the full dramatic substance the genre can produce. The twelve films above all engage their con artists as full characters rather than as pure functional units.
The major-studio heist film
- The Sting (1973) — George Roy Hill's Newman-and-Redford reunion after Butch Cassidy. Seven Oscars including Best Picture. The structural template for subsequent major-studio con-artist cinema.
- Ocean's Eleven (2001) — Steven Soderbergh's ensemble-heist remake. George Clooney leading an eleven-character casino heist. The film generated three subsequent sequels and substantially restored the major-studio ensemble-heist format.
- Heat (1995) — Michael Mann's Los Angeles crime epic. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Three-hour running time. The film operates as much as cops-and-robbers character study as as conventional heist film.
- Inside Man (2006) — Spike Lee's New York bank-heist thriller. Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster.
The con-artist character study
- Catch Me If You Can (2002) — Steven Spielberg's biographical drama about Frank Abagnale Jr., the teenage con artist whose multiple-identity schemes across the 1960s the film engages as both crime story and family-dysfunction character study.
- Paper Moon (1973) — Peter Bogdanovich's Depression-era con-artist comedy. Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal (real-life father-and-daughter pair). Tatum O'Neal Best Supporting Actress Oscar (still the youngest Oscar winner in any competitive acting category).
- The Grifters (1990) — Stephen Frears's adaptation of the Jim Thompson novel. Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Annette Bening. Four Oscar nominations.
- Matchstick Men (2003) — Ridley Scott's Nicolas Cage character study about a con-artist with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The Mamet-influenced con cinema
- House of Games (1987) — David Mamet's directorial debut. The film established the working template for subsequent Mamet-influenced con cinema. Lindsay Crouse as the psychiatrist drawn into a Chicago con-artist network.
- Nine Queens (2000) — Fabián Bielinsky's Argentine Spanish-language con-artist drama. The film is, by general consensus, the most-significant non-English-language entry in the canon.
The con-artist comedy
- Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) — Frank Oz's Steve Martin-and-Michael Caine comedy. The two as competing con artists working the French Riviera.
- American Hustle (2013) — David O. Russell's 1970s con-artist period drama. Ten Oscar nominations (zero wins). Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Jeremy Renner.