DOOMED : 'Croupier' & 'Winter Sleepers'.

Croupier begins with a black screen and an ominous cawing sound, like a mob of mad birds. In fact, it's the amplification of something any gambler will recognize--the sound a steel ball makes along the rim of a roulette wheel. Soon we're looking at slow-motion close-ups of casino patrons placing their bets, faces contorted with dread. In all of thirty seconds, Croupier lays bare the gambler's harsh thralldom to disaster. "They want to destroy everyone else," observes Jack, our narrator, "their families, their loved ones."

English director Mike Hodges has had a gambler's kind of resume, winning big with the 1971 gangster classic Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, then busting with such losers as Morons from Outer Space. In Croupier he introduces us to Jack Manfred (Clive Owen), a thirtyish London novelist whose career is going nowhere. Jack can't pay the rent, his fiancee exalts him as a noble failure, and his glib publisher, whose current bestseller is an ex-terrorist's "kill-and-tell book," advises him to write a soccer-and-sex novel. But Jack can't write trash for cash, and so when he hears about a job as dealer at a posh London casino, he applies for it.

As it turns out, our novelist knows his way around a blackjack table--from some years back, in a life Hodges and his screenwriter, Paul Mayersberg, keep shrouded in mystery. During his job tryout Jack sorts chips with machine-gun-like speed, and even as he accepts the position, we're aware that the gambling life holds a dark allure. "Welcome back, Jack," he muses in a deadpan voice-over, "to the house of addiction."

From here on, Croupier becomes a study in temptation. The casino teems with sexual intrigue and petty embezzlement, but Jack demurs: "I don't gamble," he insists. His colleagues take him for a moralistic prig, but we sense powerful appetites, and honesty that is less an emanation of virtue than a stay against chaos. Beneath his surface stoicism, Jack is reckoning his chances and choices. He's moral because it's too risky not to be; raise the stakes, and maybe he'll play. Croupier dishes out moral convolutions at every turn. "They want someone they can be sure of," Jack is told by a scout for a team of crooks casing a daring casino heist. "They want an honest dealer."

Hodges paints a film-noir ambiance of cigarettes and booze, shadowy scams and betrayals, and a femme fatale who shows up at Jack's blackjack table (Alex Kingston, from TV's "ER"). This is noir, moreover, with an added literary tilt. As Jack tells of his life at the casino, we realize we're getting his next novel, chapter by chapter; Jack becomes Jake, his real life blurring into that of a fictionalized doppelganger. Croupier gives us the writer as dealer, doling out fates with indecent vicariousness, reveling in his front-row seat at the parade of vices. "A wave of elation came over him," Jack narrates. "He was hooked again--watching people lose."

Such a conceit could have come off as thin or arty, but Croupier is saved by Clive Owen's subtly mesmerizing performance. The film's casino settings are James Bond-like, and Owen vaguely resembles a young Sean Connery. But Connery's tongue-in-cheek portrayal of irresistible male panache comes across in Owen as brooding handsomeness with a hint of restrained violence. Imagine the grungy, harsh existentialism of Mike Leigh's Naked, polished up and given a glamorous 007 setting, and you have something like Croupier's grim glitter. It's Bond with introspection. As Jack/Jake, Owen insists on prowling the darker side of human motives, his own included; and the pokerfaced stare he turns inward on himself elevates this small and sparkling film beyond mere genre into a true character study, reminding us that the only honest dealer is the one who faces down his own capacity to lie.

German director Tom Tykwer made a name for himself last year with Run Lola Run, his hyperthyroidal action tale of a neopunk Berlin girl given twenty minutes to raise a bagful of cash and save her boyfriend from murderous drug lords he owes the money to. Lola was a breathless cinematic workout: 360-degree camera swings, split-screen shots, slo-mo video footage, and R. Crumb-like cartoons, all set to a pounding techno beat through the streets of Berlin. The film replayed its heroine's day three times, with tiny variations creating a trio of outcomes--a hoary, forked-paths-of-fate idea which Tykwer, brazenly hitting the reset button, attacked with manic Gameboy verve. Lola felt like something new, its nonstop pyrotechnics informed less by movies than by MTV, video games, and interactive storytelling. If there was something ponderously late-adolescent in Tykwer's awed speculations about destiny, the upside was an irrepressible energy and an easy, astounding technical virtuosity. It was like watching a kid at a computer. God, what they can do!

At first glance, Tykwer's current film couldn't be more dissimilar. Far from the hustle and grit of Berlin, Winter Sleepers follows a quartet of young Germans lazing their lives away in a picturesque ski town in the Alps. Marco, the egotistical ski instructor and loutish womanizer; Rebecca, who translates Harlequin romances; Laura, a nurse and (dismal) amateur actress; Rene, a homely, shy film projectionist. Put them together in a house and see what happens.

This ensemble ennui seems Bergman-like, but Tykwer isn't actually much interested in inner lives. He has his eyes on another story, one that begins when Rene takes Marco's sport car for an impulsive joy ride. On a mountain road, Rene suffers a near-collision with a vehicle driven by a farmer, Theo. The sport car flies over an embankment into a field of snow, the farmer swerves, and the trailer in which he's bringing an ill horse to the vet jackknifes--gravely injuring his young daughter, stowed away on a lark inside. Grief and revenge lie ahead, along with further chance encounters and mistaken identities, as the characters are posted to their respective destinies. It's the same old game of fate after all.

Newly released here in the United States, Winter Sleepers in fact predates Run Lola Run, and it's interesting to watch Tykwer grope toward the dazzling, aerobic style of his later (and better) film. His motion shots have a seductive urgency all their own, set to "Tubular Bells"-style music as the Steadicam swoops over glaciers and snowbound glades. There's gorgeous color, too. A shimmering green bed sheet, a lacy red silk bra, the Mediterranean blue of the ski instructor's shirt: Tykwer and his cinematographer, Frank Griebe, strew glistening gems everywhere, setting these German yuppies against the white blankness of the Alps and the drab brown misery of the farmer's life.

Whenever Winter Sleepers turns to the foursome's self-involved, angst-ridden relationships, however, the film bogs down spectacularly. Tykwer is a director who needs to keep things moving--literally. Rather than character, it's dramatic irony that turns him on, our accidental collisions and hidden interactions in the larger scheme of things. To call Tykwer's style "kinetic" doesn't go far enough; motion--the capricious moves of doom--is actually his subject. If dialogue comes off as filler, that's because, according to Tykwer, it is: it's how we fill the time while fate decides its plan for us.

Winter Sleepers is an interesting failure, the flawed, even contradictory effort of a gifted young filmmaker discovering he doesn't really want to make the kind of film he grew up admiring. You can feel Tykwer hanging on to the idea of a movie with the suffering and humanistic soul of a Bergman or Antonioni, even as his talents pull him in another direction altogether; and thus the startling disjunction between his film's jazzed-up, chromatic style and its monotonous (and banal) content. Lola solved this problem by tossing out content altogether--is character a drag? Then get rid of it!--and finding a metaphysical conceit to serve as perfect vehicle for pure moviemaking skill.

What happens to a European filmmaker who discovers his gift is not for romance or tragedy or existential angst or the human comedy or the sorrows of war, but rather for plot twists and the thrill of technical feats, for what the machines can do, the zoom and the wow?

Look for Tykwer on this side of the Atlantic, soon.

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of The Last to Go and Big as Life.