It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I love Redford in Three Days of the Condor and Sneakers, but this was a Redford I didn't much care for; a rude person. It gave me such bad vibes that I just had to turn it off.

It's always entertaining and I'll usually watch it if it's on. Redford and Newman have great chemistry. The supporting cast is full of TV and Movie veterans like Ray Walston and Harold Gould who round out a solid cast. The best is most certainly Robert Shaw as Lonnegan. He's a truly brutal main who only barely manages to maintain the cover of a legitimate businessman. You always feel he's about ten seconds away from killing someone.For fans of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, note this is not a Redford/Newman buddy picture. The character dynamic is that of mentor and student. Hooker is clearly the main character and in the bulk of the scenes, whereas outside the poker game, Newman doesn't have much in the way of character development and rarely appears without Redford. As I said, the chemistry is still great, there's just not as much of it and Redford interacts with more of the rest of the cast.I'd say the biggest problem is the ending. How the sting is actually played out. It really feels that they didn't have good idea and use a twist of language the NO ONE would ever use in the real world. The followup is arguably even worse and it presumes Shaw and Charles Durning's cop character won't read a newspaper the next day. That would be fine if they hadn't made a point that Lonnegan could never know he'd been conned. However, it does recover a bit with a final interaction between Redford and Newman. They really are a likeable pair with a natural chemistry.

Besides the bizarre honky-tonk piano ragging recognisable riffs that serve as the soundtrack and the odd painterly chapter-break frames - that both feel quite out of place to the point that they tend to clash with the tone and interrupt the flow of the piece (rather than emulate the movies of the 1930s as intended), 'The Sting (1973)' is a colourful and gleefully confident flick that takes joy in simply showing its characters getting one over on the bad guy using their sheer ingenuity and willpower alone. It's set up to play out much like the big con it portrays and, while its final reveal didn't sneak up on me the way it is intended to, it successfully manages to cleverly subvert expectation and consistently deliver devilishly fun solutions to its smart little problems. 7/10

Although impressed by the impeccable manner in which this story was crafted, plotted, dramatised and performed, what really struck me was the marked difference in cinemacting between the American and British players. Newman and Redford were glamorous stars: they spoke their lines convincingly, but their personalities didn't change. No doubt I haven't seen all their films, but enough to perceive them as somehow always the same. In a sense, type-cast. The British actor, on the other hand, here Robert Shaw, disappears into his role, in the tradition of innumerable actors of the same school: Alec Guinness, Peter Sellers, Anthony Hopkins, the incomparable Gary Oldman. Shaw was one of the best, as the variety of his many roles bears witness. Unforgettable as Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons, as Aston in The Caretaker. I learn that he was also a novelist, a playwright, and an alcoholic, dying early, at age 51. You follow ?