Review: ‘Ballad of a Small Player’ — Enticing, Vivid Gambling Thriller

Up until this point, Edward Berger had failed to impress me as a director. His breakthrough remake of the anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front (based upon Erich Maria Remarque’s famous novel of the same name) released in 2022 felt to me timid and over-calculated, a film too precise to possibly capture any of the true intensity or horror of war and too stylistically flat to function as either entertainment or thoughtful, emotive cinematic art. Last year’s Conclave may have been an improvement, but it is a film that I am yet to see — the extreme, over the top melodrama, action and espionage of the trailer steered me away from it, though the positive reception it has since received, the multiple accounts I have read of the trailer being misleading and

’s excellent essay on the film and its architecture have since convinced me that it is worth my time at some point.

However, what was beginning to morph into a dismissive attitude towards Edward Berger was quickly reversed by the emergence of Netflix’s Ballad of a Small Player, a film starring Colin Farrell as a gambler trying to escape his debts and his murky past…