The Gambler

Director: Karel Reisz

1974 / 111min / DCP

James Caan commands the screen as Axel Freed, the playing-to-lose son of upper middle-class Jewish New Yorkers who seems bound and determined to throw away every opportunity that his striver parents and grandparents sweated to provide him with, teaching Dostoevsky at a public university in between bouts of imitating the compulsive behavior of The Gambler’s protagonist—and getting in arrears with mob bookies in the process. “A cool, hard, perfectly cut gem of a movie, as brilliant and mysteriously deep as a fine diamond.”—Los Angeles Times