It all starts with a mistake. The wealthy Polina finds a sleeping man in her hotel room, the business lawyer Friedrich. A mistake by the receptionist, he claims, and she believes him. He asks her to play for him in the casino. She is a lucky child. She plays and wins. Friedrich, who is accused of embezzlement, sees his mountain of debt melt away. But then his luck changes. Polina's losses soon threaten her own existence.
Hannelore Elsner
Polina Sieveking
Erwin Steinhauer
Friedrich Mühlbichler
Nina Petri
Claudia
Frank Giering
Dietrich Schröder
Gesine Cukrowski
Annegret Reuther
Michael Schönborn
Schweizer Zeuge
It all starts with a mistake. The wealthy Polina finds a sleeping man in her hotel room, the business lawyer Friedrich. A mistake by the receptionist, he claims, and she believes him. He asks her to play for him in the casino. She is a lucky child. She plays and wins. Friedrich, who is accused of embezzlement, sees his mountain of debt melt away. But then his luck changes. Polina's losses soon threaten her own existence.
Amid the glittering casinos of Macau, a gambler running from his past—and his debts—becomes fascinated by an enigmatic woman at the baccarat table.
Dan Mahowny was a rising star at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. At twenty-four he was assistant manager of a major branch in the heart of Toronto's financial district. To his colleagues he was a workaholic. To his customers, he was astute, decisive and helpful. To his friends, he was a quiet, but humorous man who enjoyed watching sports on television. To his girlfriend, he was shy but engaging. None of them knew the other side of Dan Mahowny--the side that executed the largest single-handed bank fraud in Canadian history, grossing over $10 million in eighteen months to feed his gambling obsession.
New York City English professor Axel Freed outwardly seems like an upstanding citizen. But privately Freed is in the clutches of a severe gambling addiction that threatens to destroy him.
Poker addict Mike McDermott knows the game inside out, but loses his money one night in a game to Russian-American gangster Teddy KGB. Promising his partner Jo he'll give up, he meets up with best friend Lester 'Worm' Murphy, just out of prison and owing lots of money to the wrong kind of people. McDermott becomes his co-guarantor and now there's only one way to raise the money, the pair have to get back into the game.
George Bird is a salesman of agricultural machinery who finds out that he hasn't long to live. On his doctor's advice, he goes to an exclusive seaside resort to spend his savings on one last holiday.
A boy, no bigger than a thumb, manages to outwit two thieves determined to make a fortune from him.
It's no accident when wealthy Charles falls for Jean. Jean is a con artist with her sights set on Charles' fortune. Matters complicate when Jean starts falling for her mark. When Charles suspects Jean is a gold digger, he dumps her. Jean, fixated on revenge and still pining for the millionaire, devises a plan to get back in Charles' life. With love and payback on her mind, she re-introduces herself to Charles, this time as an aristocrat named Lady Eve Sidwich.
In the 1950s, a seemingly sensible newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law undertake parallel journeys of risk, romance, and self-discovery.
Julie and Roger are a love-struck married couple who desperately want to have a child. Tragedy after tragedy gets in their way, as the two attempt to rise above their troubles and fulfill their dreams of parenthood.
Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.