Arbitrage

Between this cast and the conviction Jarecki brings to the table, the film feels incredibly accomplished for a first feature.

Amazingly, Gere keeps it all together, via a kind of seething anti-rage that speaks reams to the character's survival instincts.

Gere is being talked about as an Oscar contender - he's never been nominated. January is a long time off yet, but his name is certainly worth putting on the long list.

Gere is one of cinema's great walkers, graced with a suggestively predatory physical suppleness, and he slips through the movie like a panther. He's the film's most deluxe item.

Hitchcock called his most familiar subject "The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused." Jarecki pumps up the pressure here by giving us a Guilty Man Accurately Accused, and that's what makes the film so ingeniously involving.

Though it teeters at times on the edge between potboiler and melodrama, 'Arbitrage' benefits from a notable lack of sympathy for Gere's Gordon Gekko-like Miller. Rather than seeming pat, Jarecki's straightforward cynicism is pointed and purposeful.

A tense and chilling horror story for financially fraught times.

Nothing about the plot is novel, but the film easily maintains a low simmer that picks up in the final act.

The film doesn't turn its issues into a glorified essay, but it does use them to give the audience a vital emotional workout.

Between Gere matching wits with a police detective played by Tim Roth, and Gere having to explain himself to the steely Sarandon, Arbitrage is never dull.