Duplicity (12A)

CLIVE Owen and Julia Roberts, who starred together in Closer, team up again for romantic espionage thriller DUPLICITY (12A), written and directed by Michael Clayton writer/director Tony Gilroy.

CIA officer Claire Stenwick and MI6 agent Ray Koval have left the world of government intelligence behind for a scheme to cash in on a highly profitable cold war raging between two rival multinational corporations.

Their mission? Secure for themselves the formula to a product that will bring a fortune to the company that patents it first.

For their employers - industry titan Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and buccaneer CEO Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti) - nothing is out of bounds.

When the stakes rise, no one knows who is playing whom, and the trickiest part for Claire and Ray becomes how they play each other. As they each try to stay one double-cross ahead, two career loners find their plan endangered by the only thing they can't cheat their way out of - love.

The idea for Duplicity started with Gilroy's fascination with the intricacies of industrial espionage. His years of research as the architect of the screenplays in the blockbuster Bourne franchise had introduced him to many people in the intelligence community, and he had noticed that many of them had recently gone into the private sector.

Gilroy crafted a nimble script set in this world that combined elements of the screwball comedy with the plot reversals of a classic caper.

He says: "The statistics of corporate theft are somewhere between $50 and $100 billion every year.

"There isn't a major corporation on the planet that doesn't have a competitive intelligence department with some form of either defensive or offensive intelligence gathering, which are basically spy units.