Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★½ 4

  Weird that they left all the Abu Ghraib stuff out of the trailer. I assume this was accidental?

  Another Paul Schrader movie from Paul Schrader. You've got a man living an ascetic lifestyle writing a diary in a room, you've got the Pickpocket ending - all that good stuff you like and look forward to from our Uncle Paul. Almost every scene is set in a depressing hotel room, prison, or casino. I like that what draws Schrader to gambling is not the excitement/catharsis/adrenaline rush of winning, but rather the state of wearing a poker-face - which here becomes a metaphor for all the ways that we compartmentalize or cope with our sins.

  Schrader gets a lot of points from…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 9

  Rosenbaum once blisteringly critiqued the discrepancy between Schrader's interests in "transcendental cinema" as a critic and the often bullish, stylized and antic violence of his own moviemaking. Yet with First Reformed and now this he has really embraced his inner Bressonian to a degree heretofore unseen. Obviously occupying space along the same spectrum as his scripts for Taxi Driver and Bringing Out the Dead, The Card Counter is a film wracked with both rage and guilt, studiously avoiding giving a meaningful out beyond the possibility of a kind of grace you can't consciously obtain.

  Schrader's cantankerousness and willingness to ask impolite questions typically just gets him into trouble on Facebook, but here he puts that energy to great use by…

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  Review by k(arst)en ★★★

  typed out a lot of thoughts on this only for it to boil down to:

  if this was paul schrader’s first film, maybe even the first of his i’d seen, i’d like this a lot more. but he did this same thing in taxi driver, and obviously the same thing in first reformed. and if i wanna watch paul schrader do that Thing he always does, i’d rather watch those! that’s not to say he isn’t trying ANYTHING new here. it’s just that most (not all) of it is doing nothing i haven’t seen before.

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★½ 2

  Hold up…you’re telling me winning at poker WON’T alleviate my guilt about all those war crimes I did???

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 7

  "Is there a limit to punishment?"
  "The body remembers."

  By my calculations this Paul's 7th attempt writing and 4th attempt directing his Bressonian treatise on lonely, regretful, violent American men confined to the existential crisis of their austere rooms. That's either going to appeal to you or it's not, personally I go into each one of these ready to see how this man (both the character and Schrader) has changed as the years have gone by and this didn't disappoint. It occupies an almost perfect intersection of the mournful yearning of a wandering criminal in Light Sleeper (the neon surface NY nightlife of that film however pointedly replaced by the more mundane surroundings of anonymous casino floors, prisons, and motel…

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★ 7

  John Yoo is a tenured law professor at Berkeley. He teaches class, has office hours...just a thought I had after seeing this movie.

  U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 6

  80

  Let's just get this out of the way: it's pretty wild that a movie about the emotional fallout of personal responsibility involving war-crimes at Abu Ghraib was released on the 20th anniversary weekend of 9/11. Galaxy-brain maneuver. Paul Schrader is back as he digs deep into the contrast of Bressonian elegance and a capacity for violence that resides within his characters. Here we find an inevitable journey towards a self-imposed void, a sculpted existence that is merely a clean white sheet thrown over a mess of amorality. Unjustifiable actions, sanctioned and cleared. It's so refreshing to see a great artist returning to their idiosyncrasies, their obsessions and motifs, all while allowing the context to flourish with a modern lens. First Reformed felt like a crossroads between past and present, a digital manifestation of Protestant anguish and the horrors of climate change. The Card Counter plunges into colder, more punishing waters - a total lack of future.

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★½ 8

  There's a scene in this movie written by a (wonderful) 75-year-old man in which Tye Sheridan explains to Oscar Isaac what Google Maps is.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½

  “You get a job, you become the job.” That’s what a veteran cabbie named Wizard tells born-again hack Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” which Paul Schrader wrote just before he turned 30. “I envy you, your youth,” he goes on to say. “Go on, get laid. Get drunk. Do anything. You got no choice, anyway. I mean, we’re all fucked. More or less.” As Travis learns the hard way a few reels later, Schrader typically falls on the side of “more,” but not without any margin of error.

  Many of the films that Schrader went on to direct himself — especially the ones whose very titles enshrine a certain vocation — have revisited the “God’s lonely man” archetype…

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  Review by Brian Formo ★★ 16

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Incredibly flat and lacking tension; feels like two different movie ideas (the professional poker circuit and the commodification of military torture) jammed into one because Paul Schrader can use his main ending and wipe his hands clean, aha violent redemption! 

  Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish have good chemistry but it’s so still, stilted, and on the nose (the poker champ chanting USA at the table of a guy we know tortured people at Abu Ghraib). Isaac is measured and creates a seemingly better backstory than what Schrader gives us; held close to his vest. A performance that’s tenfold better than the film, which is a strange and misshapen disappointment. I write this in my diary with a glass of whiskey in front of me.

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  Review by Olivia Craighead ★★★ 6

  i love that paul schrader is like, an absolute nihilist but also the corniest motherfucker alive. yeah you can commit horrible atrocities that color the rest of your life and the lives of those around you in a way that can only lead to violent ends… but also love is real :)

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  Review by Jamelle Bouie ★★★★½ 3

  Oh man, I have a lot of thoughts on this one. Suffices to say that Schrader is revisiting many of the same themes as he did in First Reformed, chief among them, how do you live your life as a moral man, much less a decent one, while knowing that your life is built on a great crime.

  For Ethan Hawke’s Ernst Toller, the crime is humanity’s degradation of the earth, and the conflict concerns his willingness to do something about it. For Oscar Isaac’s William Tell, the crime is his past as a torturer at Abu Ghraib, and the conflict concerns the impact of his actions on a life that had nothing to do with them.

  The answer, insofar…