Alex Kingston

The 1998 British film Croupier, only now getting a limited American release, was made well before the recent Reindeer Games, but comparing them is too delicious an opportunity to bash Hollywood to let pass by. Both have the same conceit of their cores: a Christmas Eve casino heist. In Hollywood’s eyes, this is a chance to show us Santas with machine guns running amuck, and not much else. In the hands of legendary British director Mike Hodges, who made the 1971 classic Get Carter, and equally legendary screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, who wrote The Man Who Fell to Earth, it becomes a spare, seductive, almost novelistic suspense drama in which the biggest crime is its protagonist’s misunderstanding of himself.