Reviews
Croupier
A novelist takes a job dealing cards and starts writing about the people he deals to. The film's single best decision is made in the first ten minutes and never revisited: we are on the wrong side of the table.
From behind the table, gambling stops being a drama of hope and becomes a job with a shift pattern. The players arrive, do the same thing, and leave. The dealer's professional obligation is indifference, and the narration adopts the same tone, which gives the film its unusual coldness.
Narration that earns itself
Voice-over is normally a repair. Here it is the subject: a man narrating his own life in the third person as material, and slowly becoming a character in the book he is writing. The device would collapse in a warmer film. It works because nothing else in the picture asks for sympathy.
Where it goes wrong
The plot eventually requires a heist, and the heist is the least interesting part of the film — a concession to structure in a picture that had been managing without one. Everything at the table remains excellent.
Related: The casino sequence.