Certain commonwealth actors have come closer. The new Irish movie Intermission, for instance, begins with Colin Farrell apparently flirting with the countergirl in a coffee house; what he's actually doing, however, is beguiling her so she won't see his fist coming. He's a smash-and-grab petty thief with the gift of gab and you know you'd fall for it just like that poor girl did (at the frightening intersection of fantasy and reality). Especially when you see him run from the cops and in his flight grab up a workman's shovel, flip it through the air to his other hand, and then leap on the hood of a woman's car and demand she let him have it.

I don't think Farrell could "open up" a thug like this without violating the premise of the character; he's not someone who's going to spill his guts about why he is the way he is. When we see a sexy gorilla like him on the street, however, we may figure it's better to avoid his gaze, but with Farrell we get to watch from a safe remove the sociopathic poetry and ballet the tough guy embodies. (He's more convincing and interesting than sexy-taciturn Russell Crowe as the tamed musclebound beast in L.A. Confidential (1997).) We can't get inside Farrell's character, but we can become aware of what's inside us that responds to him. And Farrell has more skill at playing this kind of arousing goon than anyone since the very young James Cagney, that hale, bright-eyed, dancing-and-crowing little bantam of a psychopathic Irish-American gangster.

Intermission is all about bad boys, on both sides of the law, and of all ages, and how some of them find their way to a more settled, productive existence in the company of women, and some of them don't. It's character-filled and episodic, but also tightly conceived in a literary way. (A rock-throwing little boy is an effective symbol of the raging impulses all the men in the movie are prey to.) But maybe it's a tad too neat, finally, and too cute. More faint praise, I'm afraid--I enjoyed it but apart from what Colin Farrell brought to it, it represents what the moviemakers already knew rather than anything they discovered in the process of making the movie.

Finally, from the DVD bin: Ripley's Game (2002), directed by Liliana Cavani and starring John Malkovich as the same character played by Matt Damon in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) but later in life (both movies are adapted from books by Patricia Highsmith). Malkovich establishes from the very start Ripley's peculiar combination of narcissistic finickiness and indifference to common morality. His sense of himself functions in the place of scruples, but at the same time Ripley's identity is permanently unbalanced. His talent is to use his lack of balance as an advantage in unstable criminal situations. He's the ultimate improvisationalist who goes after what he wants regardless of the consequences, and then becomes what he has to become in order to turn the resulting fiascos into successes.