TWITCHING like a young gazelle in the blinding headlights of the Warner Brothers publicity juggernaut, American cinema’s reigning kooky princess is keen to stress her high intentions in a business that is often very lowbrow indeed. Her favourite word is “honourable”. It crops up every other sentence, mostly in reference to films and directors she admires.

And also, more hesitantly, about herself.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s latest film is a thoroughly honourable venture. Directed by Greg Jacobs and produced by Steven Soderbergh, Criminal is an intelligent US remake of Fabián Bielinsky’s highly regarded Argentine thriller Nine Queens. It stars John C. Reilly as a boorish conman, and Gyllenhaal as his long-suffering younger sister, Valerie.

In a hunched and soulweary performance the 27-year-old ingénue plays the victim to perfection, even if Valerie might just be a wolfish femme fatale in lamb’s clothing.

“She’s a bit of both,” says Gyllenhaal. “I don’t know if victimised is the right word, but she’s mistreated again and again. I think her intention is something really honourable, actually. She’s trying to communicate with her brother, and he is a liar. At a certain point she just says: OK, if you can’t talk to me like a human being then I’ll talk to you on your level.”

Criminal is a fine ensemble thriller and fits the remit of Soderbergh’s Warner-backed Section Eight stable to make films in the spirit of golden-age 1970s Hollywood. The kind of emotionally nuanced drama that Gyllenhaal favours, in fact, although she hints that this experience was less than fulfilling.

“When I said yes to this movie it was a new thing to me in terms of having choices,” she shrugs. “And since, I’ve become much clearer and more discerning about why I choose what I choose. When I chose this one I thought I could do something interesting with it. And it actually turned out to be a little bit hard because my instinct is to kind of push things open and see how far I can take them.”

It is worth remembering here that Gyllenhaal holds fairly idealistic views about making “progressive and transgressive” movies. Brought up by film-maker parents, both left-leaning liberals, she grew up surrounded by Hollywood’s literary intellectual set. She was already acting on stage and screen before beginning her English literature degree at Columbia University.

In her teens, she also spent a summer studying at RADA in London.

“It was a great experience,” she says. “I was really young, one of the youngest people in this group of students who had gone over. I was 18, I’d just finished my first year at Columbia. I was kind of wide-eyed and open to anything.”

But acting fame did not arrive overnight. Her earliest screen appearances were in low-profile films directed by her father, Stephen Gyllenhaal, and often scripted by her mother, Naomi Foner. Even in her breakthrough role in Richard Kelly’s cult hit Donnie Darko Maggie had only a few lines, while her younger brother Jake took the starring role.

Although she confessed to envious feelings in early interviews, Gyllenhaal insists there is no sibling rivalry now. “My brother and I, like any brother and sister, fight sometimes,” she shrugs. “But I think we’re both really committed to communicating.”

Nowadays, of course, big sister is no longer in little brother’s shadow. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s tipping point came in Steven Shainberg’s 2002 black comedy Secretary, playing an emotionally damaged young woman reborn through a sado-masochistic relationship with her boss.

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