When Burns and Weisz go to talk to Hoffman, I realized that the movie was doing some of the things that Pulp Fiction (1994) failed to do: show us in face-to-face exchanges the competitive tensions between the head guy and his underlings before those tensions exploded. But then Pulp Fiction has in aces what you'll really miss in Confidence: a host of pungent, elliptical characterizations. Burns plays his conman as straight as an actor could. He has some of the rigidity of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but John Huston knew how to bring out the violence in that repression, in Spade's scenes with Joel Cairo and Wilmer the gunsel, and then at the end with Brigid O'Shaughnessy. I know people who use "heterosexual" as a pejorative term, meaning fearful of straying outside conventional boundaries; you can apply it in that sense to Burns and to Confidence overall.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is author of Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.