"Matchstick Men" gambles that a movie about con artists, usually the cinematic equivalent of a highly strategic chess game, is elastic enough to focus on psychosomatic neuroses and a nascent father-daughter relationship blooming before our very eyes. Director Ridley Scott and writers Nicholas and Ted Griffin (working from a Eric Garcia novel) want us to concentrate on characters and not the con. The movie so successfully raises the emotional and psychological stakes in the first half that not all audiences may like the film's reversion to con-artist form in the second.

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