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'Flawless'

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BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

March 28, 2008

Caper films are supposed to be fun, and Demi Moore has seldom been described as that.

However, she can be as brittle as a late November morning and as such is just about perfectly cast as Laura Quinn, a pioneering striver who finds her head banging up against the glass/ice ceiling in the 1960s at the fictitious London Diamond. Moore has seldom had a part more suited to her charms, and for amusement value we get Michael Caine as Hobbs, the night cleaning man who proposes a scheme to Laura: Avenge her protofeminist self on the South African company by stealing an undetectable but priceless number of stones.

Where "Flawless" goes right is not by giving us a heist, but by giving the heist two twists. It's a chilly movie, accented by a lot of Bauhaus chrome and steel and director Michael Radford's occasionally icy paw. But watchable, certainly, and Caine is Caine. Screenplay by Edward A. Anderson.

FLAWLESS (PG-13). 1:45 (language). At Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington; Kew Gardens Cinemas; and Sunshine Cinema and 62nd & Broadway Cinema, Manhattan.