Mississippi Grind - new gambling movie

Looks good :

IMBD review :

Movies like these simply don't come around too often. MISSISSIPPI GRIND follows in a long tradition of great gambling movies such as Altman's California SPLIT and Toback's THE GAMBLER, but easily stands up next to them as one of the finest examples of the genre. Ben Mendelsohn is at a career best level in this movie, approaching Pacino-in-the-70s heights at times. If you have followed his work since his breakout role in ANIMAL KINGDOM, his performance here will feel like a culmination of one hell of a run in the 2010's. Mendelsohn plays Gerry, a great poker player but a terrible gambler. His inability to know when to walk away from the table has put him deep into debt with some very unsavory characters, and even if he had the money to pay them back, he might just gamble it away anyways. This is the kind of self-destructive guy we're following here. He meets Curtis (Ryan Reynolds, the good version we also saw in ADVENTURELAND), a younger, seemingly more put together gambling enthusiast who clearly has issues of his own, and they form an unlikely but surprisingly endearing bond. Curtis agrees to stake Gerry a few grand and drive him down the Mississippi River, hitting a bunch of riverboat games on their way to a high stakes poker game in New Orleans. So the film also becomes a road movie, and a fantastic addition to that canon as well. The movie turns simply on watching these characters play out their fates, and the directing team of Boden & Fleck (who also made the great HALF NELSON and SUGAR) capture their lives with sensitivity and a good eye for emotions lurking just beneath the surface. We don't quite know what compels Curtis to help Gerry, nor do we know what compels Gerry to make some of the decisions he makes once they hit the road, but the filmmakers aren't interested in explaining flawed humanity to us. They are primarily interested in emotional truth, and boy do they find it in this story. Highly recommended for those who prefer finely tuned character dramas.