Popular reviews

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  Review by Joseph ★★

  (conversation between music supervisor and Paul Schrader)
  “Are you sure you only want to license *checks notes* 2 Bryan Ferry songs and a *checks notes again* Roxy Music remix?”
  “Yup. I have it on good authority that is what the gays listen to.”

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  Review by Brian Formo ★★★

  I ...

  ⚪ Am Straight
  ⚪ Am Gay
  🔘 Could listen to Woody Harrelson's Southern dandy describe his emotional state as "peachy" all day long.

  Paul Schrader's quasi-update of American Gigolo for the post-9/11 world switches Richard Gere's LA consumerist/cultural capitalist escort, who refuses to do anything homosexual, for Harrelson's Southern gentleman who escorts married DC women to their affairs/solo evenings, for alibi purposes, during the day, loves a paparazzi photojournalist by night. Unlike Gigolo, in which Gere lets it all hang out after sleeping with a woman, Schrader seems a little uncomfortable portraying Carter's homosexuality, putting a barrier between Woody and Moritz Bleibtreu's most vulnerable scene of loving words and eventual embrace. However, after spending 30 years defining the…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★ 1

  This doesn't get talked much, but very much belong to Schrader's recurring Bressonian obssesions. I didn't care for it much at the time, but it aged very well as a time capsule for the later days of Bush's government. It feels for Washington as this paranoid dog eat dog place is strong. The other strength is the acting which is first rate throughout (including some late career good parts for Lauren Bacall and Ned Beatty) and Harrelson makes for one of Schrader's strongest leads.

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  Review by Vincent Prince ★½

  Schrader’s purposeful update of American Gigolo to the Bush-era deems Julian Kaye’s padded-shoulder swagger obsolete, Harrelson’s own suits in the same silhouette said to look “medieval.” 

  While not without its minor pleasures (a recurring location of a Tom of Finland themed gay bar that keeps Bryan Ferry and Scorpio Rising on loop) and a heavily caricatured Harrelson performance that provides some laughs, its moral convictions are quite weak and the heavily telegraphed mystery makes its plodding pace and anti-climax near unforgivable. 

  3.9/10

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  Review by Christian Doig ★★★★

  In yet another accomplished metaphor of solitude, Paul Schrader's titular character (played with mastery by Woody Harrelson) is an Oscar Wilde acolyte who moves in the high spheres of Washington D.C. giving platonic solace to elder ladies --hence his name-- much like his virtual cousin Julian Kaye, the American Gigolo. (If you ever questioned Richard Gere's sexuality in that film, maybe this one holds some answers.) On the other hand, Harrelson shares a social and political awareness with the rather sociopathic Travis Bickle that surpasses all of the Taxi Driver's abilities regarding a basic trustworthy grasp on reality --or a lack thereof.

  On the surface and beneath its silky production, this movie is very much as its hero, Carter Page…

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  Review by Dante Izrael ★★★

  Rich white women are totally willing to throw gay men under the bus who is surprised

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  Review by Cody Workman ★★★

  Still love this, insanity

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  Review by Nick Newman

  Watching this in a theater (on Schrader’s personal print no less) brought forth the disturbing revelation that the mid-to-late-2000s have become something of an antiquated style.

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  Review by Wilson ★★★★ 4

  Paul Schrader's The Walker is a really underrated film, a spiritual sequel to American Gigolo (and Taxi Driver and Light Sleeper) with Schrader again focusing on the night workers that has intermittently obsessed him throughout his career. It is the last of the God's lonely men films he has yet made, another distillation of the nature of self-destruction, of finding a soul in a city, where crime happens on the edges of you consciousness. Schrader's man has risen from the streets, and in class, from the early films, where now he spends his time with rich women as a walker. Walking them from parties, card games and furniture shops, never a threat to their social standing due to his homosexuality…

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  Review by Andrew Miller ★★★½

  nobody’s favorite Schrader, and good luck finding it. That said, if his schtick is your bag, here it is uncut, all his “God’s Lonely Man” pet obsessions, crystallized and cranky as hell. And hey, if you really wanted to, you could make a case that Paul said all he had to say in 2007, and that all his more recent full blown masterpieces are just cover versions of this, a classic Calvinist-leaning parable in the Schrader mode, a reckoning with the unique depravity of the 21st century. For one, he rolls out Abu Ghraib as a plot point a decade or so before Card Counter, and goes straight for the third rail, showing it as kink, as po-mo art, as…

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  Review by ZubinShy ★★★

  "The Walker" is the final installment of Paul Schrader's "man in his room"-tetralogy which dealt with lonely drifters who look at society from the outside but don't have a life of their own. At first we had an angry taxi driver, then a narcissistic gigolo, then an anxious light sleeper and finally, a superficial walker. While "Light Sleeper" bookended "Taxi Driver", "The Walker" is the bookend to the iconic 1980 film "American Gigolo".

  The whole series contained occupational metaphors. The metaphor of the "walker" is another great metaphor chosen by Paul Schrader. A walker is a man who escorts rich society woman to events when their husbands are busy or uninterested in engaging such social activities. He walks them from…

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  Review by Shaun ★★★

  The Walker is, once again, a Schrader movie in Bresson mode, combined with a number of themes that never really congeal. Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) is the son of a respected politician, and spends his time entertaining mature women (by just playing cards, or more? I’m not sure, maybe I missed something). 

  He gets mixed up in a murder when one of his clients/friends, and wife of a senate minority leader, played by (Kristin Scott Thomas), leaves the scene of a crime. Moritz Bleibtreu, Lauren Bacall, Ned Beatty, and Willem Dafoe offer supporting roles. 

  Sometimes it focuses on being a thriller, other times a self-reflective drama. Harrelson does a decent job at being suave and sophisticated, and his relationship with his boyfriend,…