Richard Gere's hedge fund magnate Robert Miller in Arbitrage is a studied personification of post-2008 "big finance" excess and moral turpitude. The movie is also a terse thriller with a very competent supporting cast including Susan Sarandon.

Miller might be a celebrated financial genius, but he is also a fraudster attempting to hide a $412m hole in his accounts until he can sell the family business and use the proceeds to cover his tracks. To complicate matters, he falls asleep drunk at the wheel of his artist mistress's car, killing her, and subsequently bails. Why doesn't he stay to face justice? Because there are "too many people relying on me" (i.e. too big to fail), bleats Miller to a young black acquaintance who he is hoping will take the fall (played by Nate Parker - who for his role was awarded a Best Supporting Actor from the 2012 African-American Film Critics' Association awards.)

The second half of the movie sees increasingly unhinged Miller forcing through the crooked deal while embroiled in a cat-and-mouse with scruffy but dogged detective Michael Breyer, played by Tim Roth and his comedy American accent. Roth is so sick of rich folks getting away with it all the time that he falsifies evidence in an attempt to force Miller's confession. But wily Gere, who in a moment of weakness actually considers doing the right thing and handing himself in, remembers that he is too smart and too connected to go to jail and figures out a way to get off scot-free.

Justice, family, immigrants, disempowered minorities - even art - all are secondary and vulnerable to the self-interests of the elite capitalist. Except his wife, who turns the tables in a semi-satisfying twist as the glasses clink at another schmaltzy gala dinner in Miller's honour right before the credits roll.

The movie's rather thickly laid-on point is a wearily familiar truism: there will be no justice for powerful rich people, regardless of the scale of their crimes. What debut director Nicholas Jarecki succeeds in accentuating - with the help of Gere's effective performance - is the role that charisma and intelligence, rather than just naked economic power, play in maintaining this depressingly destructive cycle.