The Imposter

In 1997, a French-Algerian lowlife contrived to avoid prison in Spain by posing as a San Antonio teenager missing for three years, simply plucking the name from U.S. missing-children records; “returned” to Texas, he was embraced by the boy’s family as their lost son/brother, despite obvious discrepancies—French accent, wrong hair and eye color, looking his true age of 23, etc.—and an outlandish pack of lies to explain how he got from Texas to Spain. Director Bart Layton’s documentary plays like an extended true-crime segment of Dateline NBC, with the same mix of interviews and dramatic reenactments. It’s both interesting and repellent. Almost nobody comes off looking good: The imposter seems a heartless sociopath, the FBI a bunch of gullible rubes, the boy’s family pathetically deluded by optimism.