Water Water Everywhere

When last we saw Daniel Ocean (George Clooney) and his ragged crew of petty-crime experts, they had penetrated the inaccessible vault of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas and parted fastidious casino boss Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) from $160 million of his fortune, not to mention his girlfriend Tess (Julia Roberts). Now they languish in miserable legitimacy, from which, in a puckish and very funny reversal of the opening scenes of Ocean’s Eleven, they’re sprung when Benedict dispatches his thugs to round them up and demand they give him back his money. Following a series of increasingly impossible heists around Europe, Daniel and his merry band find themselves pitted not only against high-tech security gizmos and the cops, spearheaded by art-crime specialist Catherine Zeta-Jones, but against the Continent’s premier playboy and thief, the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), who never saw a Fabergé egg he didn’t like.

Ocean’s Twelve’s many twists and turns are intricately fitted together and accessorized with nifty flashback and delirious pauses for nutty banter. The movie, which has a crisply witty screenplay by George Nolfi, pulls so many fast ones on both its characters and its audience that I can tell you little more about the story that wouldn’t ruin it for you. Suffice it to say that the movie starts off flitting between several American states and ends up racing between several trendy European capitals, that Roberts gets to impersonate a famous movie star, that other Soderbergh pals show up for gallant cameos, that Cherry Jones does something surprising for Matt Damon’s hilariously overambitious pickpocket, and that Zeta-Jones, gorgeous (despite a duck-bill hairdo) in black leather and red silks, discovers that the line between crime and crimefighting is finer than she’d thought. The heist scenes are as terrific as they are hilariously abortive. Ocean’s Twelve may be one of the most glamorous, goofy and heartfelt films about failure ever made, and as soon as I get out from under Oscar-qualifying weepies about incest, child-molesting and paralysis, I’m going to run out and see it again, just to cheer myself up.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU| Directed by WES ANDERSON | Written by ANDERSON and NOAH BAUMBACH Produced by ANDERSON, BARRY MENDEL and SCOTT RUDIN Released by Touchstone Pictures | At the Grove

OCEAN’S TWELVE| Directed by STEVEN SODERBERGH | Written by GEORGE NOLFI | Produced by JERRY WEINTRAUB | Released by Warner Bros. Pictures | Citywide