The Thomas Crown Affair

It was the movie that gave a whole new meaning to the chess term ‘Mate’: Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair, released in 1968, in which Steve McQueen played the millionaire art thief of the film’s title and Faye Dunaway - fresh from her career-launching triumph with Bonnie & Clyde - played the investigator who is determined to outwit him but ends up falling in love with him.Using split-screen and all kinds of other sixties visual trickery, the film climaxed (for once, exactly the right word) with the most famous chess game in Hollywood history, in which McQueen and Dunaway faced up across a chessboard in a game whose subtext - and, for most of the time, whose only text - could be summed up in three letters: S-E-X.

Thirty years on, Dunaway is back in a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair. But this time she plays a psychiatrist - that is exactly how she is billed: not with a name but simply as ‘The Psychiatrist’ - who is treating 1999’s Thomas Crown, played by James Bond star Pierce Brosnan. Moreover, it was Brosnan who developed the project, then took it to United Artists, the studio behind the Bond movies, under his own Irish DreamTime banner.

Thomas Crown is a self-made billionaire who can buy anything he wants and is irresistible to women. But there are some things that money can't buy. Thomas Crown has run out of challenges. When an alarm sounds at a world class museum and someone walks out with a priceless Monet, Crown is the last person the New York police suspect. But one person suspects him: Catherine Banning , the brilliant female investigator hired to retrieve the painting no matter what it takes. Catherine loves the chase as much as he does and she's on to his game. Crown has found his challenge. Two can play, but only one can win.

Rating: 4/5 (A Must See Movie)