Always Good Movies

Direction: Edward Berger
Country: USA

From Conclave’s Swiss-Austrian director Edward Berger, Ballad of a Small Player is an adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name. Not a groundbreaking work, this oddly psychological gambling drama oscillates between reality and fantasy, carrying a faint but persistent aura of supernatural eeriness.

Colin Farrell stars as Lord Doyle, a ruthless gambler with a battered conscience who heads to the gambling mecca of Macau in a desperate attempt to manage his mounting debts. The situation is increasingly dire, yet the stubbornly optimistic Doyle refuses to surrender, especially after meeting Dao Ming (Fala Chen), a lonely woman working at the casino where he plays. What he cannot escape, however, is Betty Grayson (Tilda Swinton), a private detective and debt collector who knows far too much about his murky past.

Berger is unafraid to take big swings, staging sharp contrasts between moments of crushing despair and others of intoxicating invincibility and ecstasy. Farrell embodies this compulsive risk-taker with such uncompromised honesty that his performance can only be called courageous. Still, some of Doyle’s actions remain deliberately opaque, leaving the viewer suspended in a state of ambiguity that is both intriguing and occasionally exasperating.

Drenched in saturated colors and striking, vivid imagery, and populated by a few characters that verge on the cartoonish, Ballad of a Small Player is far from Berger’s strongest effort. Alongside Conclave (2024), his filmography includes Jack (2014) and All Quiet on the Western Front (2022). Yet this film retains its share of compelling moments. Presented as a nightmarish, old-fashioned character study, it probes the tension-fueled psyche of addiction before drifting toward ideas of redemption and lost love. The film never quite coheres as a whole, and its twists are unlikely to astonish, but Farrell remains a constant source of fascination. Once you surrender to its rhythm, it’s a film that carries you along, unevenly but smoothly.

Direction: Ned Crowley
Country: USA

Killing Faith, a supernatural western written, directed, and co-produced by Ned Crowley (Middle Man, 2016), struggles to convince despite solid performances from Guy Pearce, DeWanda Wise, and Bill Pullman, as well as a moody, intriguing premise. It’s a difficult film to champion.

The story follows Dr. Bender (Pearce), an emotionally torn physician who agrees to escort Sarah Worthington (Wise)—a recently freed slave—and her allegedly possessed white daughter (Emily Ford) across the West to seek a reclusive faith healer (Pullman). Their journey is fraught with peril: outlaws, a bizarre family, and an inscrutable Native American chief all cross their path before the trio reaches their mysterious destination.

Sticking to a solid mainstream moviemaking, Crowley crafts his story with darkly comedic touches and a mild supernatural bend. Yet, the film’s eerie tone goes disastrously wrong, marred by a sluggish plot that promises more than it delivers.

Entering in psycho-religious mode but obliterating any potential nuances or characterization work in the process, Killing Faith’s intriguing concept dissolves into arrhythmic storytelling and monotonous execution. A frustrating case of a film working against its own best ideas.