Grade: B-

If you can get past its extremely farfetched premise and rather homely execution, the Australian film “The Bank” emerges as an amusing economic potboiler about corporate chicanery and personal revenge. You might call it a much slimmed-down financial version of “The Firm,” or– given the plot’s simultaneous dependence on the notion of mathematical genius and emphasis on fighting corruption from within–“A Beautiful Insider.” It’s hardly memorable, and on reflection the plot holes are likely to seem overwhelming, but while it’s unspooling the picture has a modest charm.

Director Robert Connolly’s script juxtaposes two complementary plots. The lesser of them has to do with Wayne and Diane Davis (Steve Rodgers and Mandy McElhinney), a lower-class couple whose angelic young son is accidentally killed while trying to evade a process server from Centabank, the impersonal conglomerate that’s seizing the family business as a result of their default on a loan they were unscrupulously advised to take out; seeking damages, the grieving parents join with an activist lawyer (Mitchell Butel) to bring suit against the bank, though they’re warned that the likelihood of success is slim. Meanwhile Simon O’Reily (Anthony LaPaglia), the arrogant CEO of Centabank who’s anxious to increase revenue at the behest of an insistent Board of Directors, gives a spot on his staff to Jim Doyle (David Wenham), a computer specialist who claims to be on the verge of perfecting a software program that will precisely predict the movements of the world’s financial markets; O’Reily supplies the apparently naive Doyle with the staff and resources needed to complete his work in hopes that the bank can profit handsomely by having foreknowledge of economic trends. Jim, meanwhile, becomes romantically involved with a bank employee (Sibylla Budd), though he’s not entirely certain that she isn’t O’Reily’s mole. Ultimately the two strands of the narrative coalesce. To prove his loyalty, Doyle must give false testimony that undermines the Davises’ case, leading Wayne to contemplate a more direct mode of revenge. Simultaneously, Jim completes his work and announces to O’Reily that a financial crash is imminent, which the firm can take enormous advantage of–provided that it’s willing to violate all sorts of banking laws and put its very existence at stake. Unknown to O’Reily, however, there are certain aspects of Doyle’s past which cast the young man’s motives in doubt.

It’s clear that Connolly is playing to viewers’ suspicions of corporate malfeasance and their delight in seeing it unmasked and punished; and to leave no doubt as to where audience sympathies will lie, he fashions O’Reily into a supremely odious villain–sleek, shark-like and utterly amoral. LaPaglia has great fun playing the devilish fellow–what actor, after all, could resist a role that includes lines like “I’m like God, but with a better suit”? No one else really matches him. Wenham, who appears as Faramir in “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” puts his blandly boyish good looks to decent use as Doyle, but he’s utterly outclassed, and as the little man on a mission Rodgers is only adequate. Nor is the picture technically much more than competent; Tristan Milani’s cinematography has a grainy, washed-out look, and the production design leaves something to be desired–the piles of computer equipment that are supposed to look so impressive, for instance, actually come across as amusingly chintzy.

But though “The Bank” is never remotely convincing and seems almost ridiculously small-scaled and visually constricted for its supposedly world-shaking plot, it succeeds as an implausible, manipulative but moderately enjoyable crowd-pleaser.

Grade: B

The French seem to have a way with cool, slightly perverse contemporary thrillers, and “Alias Betty” (in the original, “Betty Fisher et autres histoires”) shows that Claude Miller is a good practitioner of the skill. Based on a novel (“The Tree of Hands”) by Ruth Rendell, it’s basically about mothers and children, but hardly handles the subject in a conventional way. Betty Fisher (Sandrine Kiberlain) is a Parisian novelist with a successful book and a single mother with a quiet, frail young son (Arthur Setbon). As the story opens (following a bizarre prologue in which we see young girl, whom we later recognize as Betty, attacked by her mother on a speeding train), Betty is welcoming her garrulous, argumentative mother Margot (Nicole Garcia) to the city, where we learn the older, obviously psychologically troubled, woman is to undergo medical tests. But the tension between mother and daughter becomes insignificant when Joseph accidentally falls from his bedroom window and dies not longer afterward in the hospital. Betty’s collapse at the news is witnessed by Jose (Alexis Chatrian), a boy roughly Joseph’s age, and soon we’re also introduced to his mother Carole (Mathilde Seigner), a selfish, hard-bitten waitress and her live-in current boyfriend Francois (Luck Mervil). Also in her circle are Alex (Edouard Baer), a seedy con-man who may be Jose’s father but is now involved with a rich older woman, a bartender infatuated with Carole, and a Russian mobster who takes a lustful interest in her. The linkage between the two plot threads comes when Margot, trying to make crazy amends for her earlier failures as a parent, kidnaps Jose and presents him to Betty as a replacement for Joseph. The daughter’s initial horror is gradually transformed into a reluctance to give up the child. Meanwhile Carole’s interest in recovering the boy wanes while Francois falls under suspicion for his disappearance, Francois believes that Alex might be responsible, and Alex is involved in a scheme to sell his patroness’ house and abscond with the proceeds. Lurking in the background are the highly emotional bartender and a kindly doctor (Roschdy Zem) who’s attracted to Betty (as she is to him, despite the fact that he could disclose Jose’s imposture), and Joseph’s father (Stephanne Freiss)–a slick, unsavory fellow–shows up as well.

The complications and coincidences imbedded in the convoluted plot are legion, and, together with a denouement featuring multiple collisions and ironies, they would strain credulity on screen (as they’re less likely to do when spread luxuriously over a few hundred pages of text) were it not for Miller’s unforced, quietly expressive style and absolutely electrifying performances from Kiberlain, Garcia and Seigner (who deservedly shared the best actress award at the 2001 Montreal Film Festival). The supporting cast is strong down the line, too. The atmospheric cinematography of Christophe Pollock and the music score, which uses a melange of well-chosen classical pieces, add to the gently unsettling, unpredictable mood.

Like Claude Chabrol, whose “La ceremonie” (1995) was also based on a novel by Rendell, Miller not only recognizes good source material but has the knack for transmuting a very British original into a convincingly Gallic enterprise. Miller is twelve years younger than Chabrol and not quite so prolific, but on the basis of this sharp psychological thriller–whose French title is far more suitable than the meaningless English one–he’s not far behind the old master.