Review: Jennifer Lopez is a star reborn in ‘Hustlers,’ a smart, bracing tale of strippers turned grifters

The movies have rarely done right by Jennifer Lopez, but the brashly entertaining “Hustlers” isn’t just the exception that proves the rule; it reconfigures her cinematic image with such brazen intelligence and purpose that it seems determined to make up for lost time. You might recognize the song in the background as Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” whose opening lyrics cheekily sum up the premise and the allure of this feel-good-feel-bad movie. In one arresting early shot, the camera follows Destiny as she wobbles onto the club floor on a busy night: We can sense her excitement as well as her discomfort as she slinks past her more experienced rivals onstage, and also her eagerness to please when a client beckons her over with a “Hey, Lucy Liu!” In its you-are-there physicality, the tracking shot feels like a tip of the hat to Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” the granddaddy of all gleefully amoral rise-and-fall true-crime narratives. As Scafaria has noted in interviews, Scorsese was one of several filmmakers who passed on her “Hustlers” script before she was given a crack at directing it herself, a behind-the-scenes footnote that can’t help but play like a wry commentary on the movie’s own hard-luck parable of female ascendancy. They are and they aren’t, and it’s Scafaria’s clear-eyed grasp of that distinction that makes “Hustlers” more than just a girls-gone-wild cautionary tale, a peekaboo parade or a hypocritical amalgam of the two.