A forgotten crime thriller is stealing attention again, which feels appropriate for a movie entirely about people being extremely good at stealing attention. The 2015 crime thriller starring Will Smith (Men in Black, King Richard) and Margot Robbie(Barbie and I, Tonya) has returned to the streaming conversation more than a decade after its release, with the glossy con movie rising on streaming charts as viewers rediscover one of Robbie’s earlier star turns. It’s basically Ocean’s Eleven meets Dangerous Liaisons, if everyone involved had better sunglasses and worse impulse control. The comparison to the former is fitting considering Robbie is set to star in an upcoming Ocean’s Eleven prequel.
Focusfollows Nicky Spurgeon, a veteran con artist who takes novice grifter Jess under his wing before romance, betrayal, and professional paranoia make everything much more complicated. Three years later, Jess reappears on the other side of one of Nicky’s biggest jobs, because apparently even con artists can’t just have a clean breakup and move on like adults.
The cast includes Rodrigo Santoro (300, Westworld) as Garriga, Gerald McRaney (This Is Us, Deadwood) as Owens, BD Wong (Jurassic Park, Mr. Robot) as Liyuan, and Adrian Martinez (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Stumptown) as Farhad.
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Focus was a solid box office performer when it released, grossing around $159 million worldwide against a reported $50 million budget, meaning it made a little over three times its production cost globally. Domestically, it earned about $54 million, with the rest coming from international markets. It wasn’t a blockbuster on the level of Smith’s biggest hits, but it was far from a flop.
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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
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☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
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01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
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02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
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03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
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04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
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05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
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06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
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07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
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08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
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09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
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10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
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The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
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Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
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Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
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Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
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No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
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Is ‘Focus’ Worth Watching?
Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Crazy, Stupid, Love), Focus attempted to combine the charm of a heist film with the tension of a romantic drama. Sounds like it should work, right? Well, not quite. The film was met with mixed reviews from both critics and audiences, sitting at 56% positive from reviewers and 53% from ordinary moviegoers on Rotten Tomatoes. That being said, a divisive score is usually an indicator that something was good about it. Collider’s review of the film was damning, claiming that there is “no romance and no con,” two things which are vital in a movie starring a con artist caught up in a romance.
“At times it feels like a test of whether or not Smith can still charm an audience with a bashful smile, a load boast, and a sly look,” the review states. “He’s still got “it”, but not as much as he used to. However, it’s not enough for a conman movie to be charming; it has to be skillful, and that takes the intelligence and energy Focus sorely lacks. The film is smooth to the point of being insubstantial, and it’s more slimy than slippery as it brazenly cheats the audience.”
Focus is available to stream on Netflix in select territories.
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