The Grifters · reception & legacy

1990 · Stephen Frears

How The Grifters has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A critical darling on release — four Oscar nominations including Best Director and a spot on many 1990 top-ten lists — it has since slipped into 'criminally underseen' territory, the neo-noir cinephiles keep telling each other to catch up with.

What's debated

The evergreen gripe is awards injustice: Anjelica Huston losing the 1990 Best Actress Oscar (to Kathy Bates for Misery) still gets relitigated as one of the great snubs.

Its footprint

It's remembered as Annette Bening's breakout — the performance that made Hollywood sit up — and as the movie that proved Jim Thompson's pitch-black pulp could work on screen, kicking open the door for the 90s neo-noir revival.

Where it stands

A 'trust me, you need to see this' pick — canonical among noir devotees, perpetually underrated to everyone else.

★ Did you know? Martin Scorsese produced the film — he'd wanted to adapt Jim Thompson's novel himself — and it was British director Stephen Frears' first American movie; crime novelist Donald E. Westlake wrote the script and earned an Oscar nomination for it.