Focus (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, 2015)

When someone burgles a pensioner's house, they're scum. When someone has refined tastes and robs the rich, they're Robin Hood. This is the bedrock of the smart con or heist genre, and feeds on the desire of the audience to bring those who have more than them down to earth. Thus the Ocean's Eleven series and countless others, such as this smoothly-executed but generic piece with Will Smith a shoe-in as a super-con artist who inevitably gets taken down a peg by losing his emotional focus when he gets emotionally attached to a sexy protege (Margot Robbie). It rolls along as slickly as you'd expect, with decent moments of tension when the games are played out, but ultimately loses its own focus too when too many twists and turns, the genre equivalent of explosion overkill in today's action films, are tacked on for the sake of bamboozling the viewer (read: mark) into thinking they've seen something far more clever and gripping.

5/10