John Cassavetes engages with film noir in his own inimitable style with THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. Ben Gazzara brilliantly portrays a gentleman’s club owner, Cosmo Vitelli, desperately committed to maintaining a facade of suave gentility despite the seediness of his environment and his own unhealthy appetites. When he runs afoul of loan sharks, Cosmo must carry out a terrible crime or lose his way of life. Mesmerizing and idiosyncratic, the film is a provocative examination of masculine identity.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and screenwriter David Mamet sat in the director’s chair for the first time for this sly, merciless thriller. Lindsay Crouse stars as a best-selling author and therapist who wants to help a client by making restitution for the money he owes to a gambler. After she meets the attractive cardsharp (Joe Mantegna), her own compulsions take hold as he lures her into his world of high-stakes deception. Packed with razor-edged dialogue delivered with even-keeled precision by a cast of Mamet regulars, HOUSE OF GAMES is as psychologically acute as it is full of twists and turns, a rich character study told with the cold calculation of a career con artist targeting his next mark.

Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer (Corinne Marchand) set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

A true sleeper hit, this existential thriller from Mike Hodges made Clive Owen an international star. He brings a cool reserve to the role of aspiring writer Jack Manfred, who, struggling to make ends meet, takes a job as a croupier at a posh London casino. Gradually, Jack is drawn deeper into the establishment’s at once glamorous and sordid night world—and into a relationship with a regular gambler (Alex Kingston) who has a plan to take the house for all it’s worth.

James Caan delivers a brilliant performance in this gritty, unsparing portrait of a gambling addict caught in a relentless downward spiral. He stars as Axel Freed, a Harvard-educated New York City English professor who appears to be the picture of success, but whose compulsive gambling has left him in enormous debt to his girlfriend, his mother, and ruthless loan sharks. Now, with the mob determined to make him pay up, Axel embarks on a desperate last-ditch attempt to salvage his life.

Dreams die hard amid the boardwalks and casinos of the faded New Jersey gambling town where Sally (Susan Sarandon), a young waitress and aspiring blackjack dealer, meets Lou (Burt Lancaster), a washed-up former gangster living in the past. Drawn together by a drug deal gone bad, the two find themselves relying on each other in their mutual search for redemption. Featuring one of Lancaster’s greatest performances, this poignant drama from Louis Malle glows with a lovely, bittersweet human tenderness.

It’s got some gross stuff in it. It’s pretentious. It’s one of the most beautifully shot movies I’ve ever seen.

Robert Altman’s distinctive brand of loose-limbed naturalism reached sublime heights with this freewheeling buddy comedy. Elliott Gould and George Segal make for one of the most delightfully offbeat duos of the 1970s as Charlie Walters and Bill Denny, two compulsive gamblers with nothing in common except for incredibly bad luck. But after a chance meeting at an LA card parlor, these two losers find that together they make an unbeatable team. Embarking on a once-in-a-lifetime winning streak, Bill and Charlie bet their way from the tacky racetracks and bars of Los Angeles to the plush casino tables of Reno—but how long can their luck hold out?

Ingmar Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival of humiliation in Sawdust and Tinsel, one of the master’s most vivid early works and his first of many collaborations with the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist. The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-twentieth-century circus owner (Åke Grönberg) and his younger mistress (Harriet Andersson), a horseback rider in the traveling show, the film features dreamlike detours and twisted psychosexual power plays, making for a piercingly brilliant depiction of physical and spiritual degradation.

Agnès Varda turns her camera on an Oakland demonstration against the imprisonment of activist and Black Panthers cofounder Huey P. Newton. In addition to evincing Varda’s fascination with her adopted surroundings and her empathy, this perceptive short is also a powerful political statement.

Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata in association with Ciné-Tamaris and The Film Foundation. Restoration funding provided by the Annenberg Foundation, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Film Foundation.