The title The Usual Suspects primes us to expect routine melodrama with a snarky movie-movie edge, and that’s just what the opening promises. Five mugs are tossed into a police lineup, something to do with a holdup in the Bronx. When the lineup proves inconclusive, they’re placed in a holding cell and grilled separately. To pass the time in lockup, the motley crew—low-level hoods McManus (Stephen Baldwin) and Fenster (Benicio del Toro), stickup man Hockney (Kevin Pollak), disgraced former cop Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) and crippled grifter Verbal (Kevin Spacey)—banter, argue, and hatch the idea to join forces on a job. We know, both from the ominous hints in the narration and the conventions of the genre, that something will go terribly wrong. And that’s the last time we’re sure of anything in the entire movie.

The director, Bryan Singer, and his fiendishly inventive screenwriter, Christopher McQuarrie, have seen the same movies we have. They’re counting on it. When the five criminals start huddling around blueprints and exchanging bad-ass taunts, the filmmakers expect us to think of The Asphalt Jungle or The Killing; they want us to chortle at our own cleverness. The movie’s great joke, though, is that we don’t know anything. From the moment we hear what sounds like machine-gun fire on the soundtrack—only to discover the source is a paint-can shaker—The Usual Suspects uses our familiarity with crime-dramas against us. All the turns we expect the plot to take disappear down blind alleys; what develops is more horrible, and on a larger scale, than we ever expected.

Without giving anything away—and you should see the movie knowing as little as possible about it, so stop reading—The Usual Suspects plays like a parody of recent conspiracy-theory films like J.F.K.: The filmmakers unleash a deluge of information—facts, names, anecdotes, half-whispered allusions to shadowy events—certain that we’ll miss the real connections. Singer and McQuarrie have only one previous movie, the low-budget thriller Public Access, to their credit, but their command of cinematic sleight-of-hand is smashingly confident. When you replay the movie in your mind—and believe me, you will—even the slightest inflection or throwaway detail takes on a mysterious new cast.

The model for such crime movies is The Big Sleep, the Howard Hawks detective thriller that was so insanely convoluted that its own screenwriters had no idea who committed one of the murders. The plot may have left audiences utterly befuddled, but the red herrings were so much fun nobody cared. Red herrings soon became the main attraction, as evidenced in movies as diverse as Beat the Devil and . We’re so used to these fillips by now that we appreciate similar touches in The Usual Suspects merely as excess invention, like the outlandish names W.C. Fields used to scatter throughout his movies in passing. We don’t expect them to make sense. But the filmmakers use this expectation for a double whammy. When a minor fragment becomes a major plot point, we realize, like the gangsters themselves, that we’ve severely underestimated the proceedings.

For once, the actors are all in on the joke: Like their characters, they’ve all been chosen for their specialty—Gabriel Byrne for his snake-charming glower, Stephen Baldwin for macho volatility, Kevin Pollak for his hepcat insolence—and their delight in hoodwinking us is infectious. As the surly Fenster, Benicio del Toro gets laughs with some of the most crackpot line readings I’ve ever heard—imagine Roberto Benigni doing Brando—while that superb actor Kevin Spacey brings a note of grace and hooded sadness to his weakling’s role. Worthy of special mention are the editing and score by John Ottman, who gives the movie its perpetual undercurrent of jittery unease.

And then there’s the ending...but I’ll leave you to discover that unexpected pleasure on your own. The movie is pure contrivance, all right, but it’s lovingly constructed and dazzlingly intricate—a cathedral built of trick cards—and it comes by its dishonesty through the honest virtues of imagination and painstaking craft. The Usual Suspects—what a great title. It’s the only thing usual about the movie.—Jim Ridley

Laughter in the Dark

On a chilly beach in the decrepit British resort town of Blackpool, aging comedian George Fawkes stares sadly at his misfit son Tommy and explains, “There are two types of comedians. One funny. The other funny. And son,” he continues, choking on the words but (ever the performer) still delivering them with punch, “you’re neither.”

The line is both touching and telling, and it doesn’t hurt that the man delivering it, the man playing George Fawkes, is Jerry Lewis. Coming near the end of , an unusual film about the dark, twisted roots of comedy, the line speaks volumes about the elusiveness of laughter. “We didn’t need to act funny,” Lewis/Fawkes says of his generation of comics. “We had funny .”

is the most recent film by British filmmaker Peter Chelsom (best known here for ), whose movies explore the tangled relationships between the talented and the wanna-bes, and the promoters who package and sell them both to unsuspecting audiences. stars the fine young actor Oliver Platt as Tommy Fawkes, who recovers from a disastrous Las Vegas debut by retreating to Blackpool, where he spent the first years of his life. He’s there on a secret mission, rounding up any performer with an unusual act so he can buy it off them and return to America and make his reputation as an innovator. The problem is that Tommy, who has a scholarly appreciation of the funny, has a lousy sense of humor. His father has him pegged.

For better or worse, though, Tommy does know enough to spot the mad genius of a troubled young man named Jack Parker, the half-crazy son of some old vaudevillians. Jack’s obsessiveness with slapstick comedy timing masks a dark secret, one that involves Fawkes, his father, and the decline of Blackpool’s glory days.

drops subtle hints about the nature of its mystery, it’s a mesmerizing film, but one of its major flaws is that the wild threads of the story weave too neatly together, forming a larger picture that’s disappointingly mundane. And the one stretch of the film that never fits in—a plot to steal some strange eggs that contain a magic powder—threatens to overload the story and crush the whole project.

is perhaps better received as a series of brilliantly staged set pieces, each a tiny meditation on the nature of comedy and the combination of ego and terror that drives a person to live his life onstage. The opening two scenes alone deserve some kind of award. In the first, Jack is involved in a dangerous transaction that takes place between two ships on a tumultuous sea. This is shown over the opening credits, after which the movie jumps straight to Las Vegas for a deliciously excruciating look at Tommy’s horrifying show biz tumble. Both scenes are filled with a strange kind of tension—strange because, although we don’t yet know anything about either of these men, we still sense that something is about to go horribly wrong. Later, when the connection between the boys and their past is revealed, the scenes become an eerie reflection of each other—two sons flung into troubled waters by distracted parents.

There are other don’t-miss scenes as well, including a hilarious piece of farce at a morgue that has the audience thinking, “Wow, this would make a great comedy routine,” before we realize that it already is one. Then there’s the final scene in the film, a drawn-out act in a circus center ring that, because we think we know the motivations of the people involved, becomes almost unbearably suspenseful.

“This is funny?” we ask, horrified. “Maybe so,” Chelsom replies, “maybe so.” is one of the oddest films to be released this year, and yet, despite its inconsistencies, at times it’s one of the best, at once gripping and thought-provoking. And, yes, it’s funny—right down to its bones.—

Funny Bones plays Sept. 11-12 at the Sarratt Cinema.