Croupier

Croupier (1998) is a Mike Hodges neo-noir thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Jack Manfred is a blocked writer who takes a casino job to pay the bills and discovers he's oddly suited to it: the same cold detachment he uses to observe gamblers is the one he's been using to narrate his own life. Clive Owen plays him as a man sealed off from the inside, and it works completely.

The casino starts bleeding into everything. A regular player pulls Jack into a robbery scheme — clean money, one night, no emotional strings. His girlfriend Marion (Gina McKee) grows more distant as his new world absorbs him, and a coworker, Belinda (Kate Hardie), complicates the neutrality he's been trying to maintain. All the while Jack continues his internal monologue as if dictating a novel about someone else. The film leans into that double perspective without blinking.

Croupier flopped in Britain on release and built its reputation almost by accident when it reached US screens a couple of years later. It holds up as one of the better British films of the nineties — lean, controlled, with an Owen performance that outranks most of what followed. Alex Kingston and Rona Mitra round out a quietly formidable cast. Stream Croupier (1998) online on iFILM.