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Paul Schrader ’s 2017 “ First Reformed ” worked up such an apocalyptic fury and resolve that it seemed, in some way, like a Last Film. But the writer/director is neither dead nor apparently ready for retirement, so what is he going to do but continue making films? This one, “The Card Counter,” starring Oscar Isaac in the title role and featuring Tiffany Haddish and Tye Sheridan as characters who profoundly affect the man’s life, is neither a greatest hits package nor a restatement of purpose or principles, although it has elements of both.

For Schrader, French filmmaker Robert Bresson is the inexhaustible fount. He’s one of the three filmmakers treated in his thesis-turned-seminal-film-text Transcendental Style In Film: Dreyer, Ozu, Bresson  and the one Schrader cribs from almost obsessively. (I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing, honest.) Schrader calls “The Card Counter” one of his “a man sitting in a room” or “man at a table” films; that man originated with Bresson’s “ Diary of a Country Priest .” That priest was a diarist, and his writings were reinforced with the words read aloud in voiceover. Schrader made Travis Bickle a diarist, and specified the same kind of voiceover, which “ Taxi Driver ” director Martin Scorsese buttressed with some visual cues out of Godard, who was well influenced by Bresson himself.

In “The Card Counter” Isaac’s “William Tell,” who also goes by “Will Tell,” and whose name alludes to both the classic fable and every poker player’s Achilles’ heel (it’s a name he’s given himself) keeps a diary in a composition notebook in which he writes immaculate cursive script. He doesn’t start writing, though, until he’s turned whatever motel room he’s in white, with the help of sheets he puts on the furniture and bed. A touring poker player, Will is a man of discipline. He has much gambling wisdom to impart: “Red and black roulette is the only smart bet.” Because, he goes on, your odds of winning are almost 50 percent. “You win, you walk away. You lose, you walk away.”

Why does Will play? To hold himself together. His memories of the time he spent in Abu Ghraib as a U.S. Army torturer himself make him not want to live—he explicitly recalls that during his time in prison he goaded another inmate in the hope that man would kill him—but live he does anyway. He’s looking for a reason.

He finds two—Haddish’s La Linda, a kind poker tour bankroll rep with whom Will falls in love, and Sheridan’s Cirk (pronounced “Kirk” but spelled with a “C,” he tells everyone on introduction), the son of a military vet who served with Will and whose own guilt compelled him to kill himself. Cirk’s got a bright idea that he offers Will a piece of: to abduct the military contractor who trained the torturers and got off scot-free, and give him some of his own. The three characters are an odd trio, beautifully played. The exuberant Haddish underplays with brilliance, while Sheridan keeps Cirk earnestly appealing in spite of his homicidal intentions.

Will takes Cirk on the road with him, hoping to raise enough poker winnings to get Cirk out of debt, and to impart sufficient life experience to convince him to give up his murderous crusade. This has echoes of Travis Bickle’s self-appointed mission to save the teen prostitute Iris. But Will is mainly looking to redeem himself. His time at the table is accompanied by moody, almost keening songs by Robert Levon Been , former leader of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the son of Michael Been, whose similarly searching songs adorned Schrader’s lovely 1994 “ Light Sleeper .” (That film’s lead actor, Willem Dafoe , here plays that military contractor Cirk is after.)

So this is a movie that, of course, is about much more than poker. More to the point, it’s not really about poker at all. That is underscored by the moment Tell decides to walk away. The game is a thing Will does but he’s dismissive of all that’s attached to it. To that end, there’s a funny nickname joke early on and Isaac’s definitive line reading of “I hate celebrity gambling.” In a sense this disinterest provides a key difference between this and other Schrader “man at a table” movies. “ American Gigolo ” was somewhat invested in exploring male prostitution; the drug dealing and consumption of “Light Sleeper” was a key factor of the culture of New York City at the time. The environmental concerns of “First Reformed” are more burning than they were four years ago. 

With “The Card Counter,” Schrader has a sub-theme he can toss off like a light cloak, and when he does, the movie swerves into a semi-surreal realm not entirely unlike that of the climax of “First Reformed.” But then it swerves back into a variation on Bresson that constitutes one of the most brilliant shots of his career.

This review was filed with the Venice Film Festival. The film opens exclusively in theaters on September 10th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Card Counter (2021)

Rated R for some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality.

112 minutes

Oscar Isaac as William Tell

Tye Sheridan as Cirk

Willem Dafoe as Col. John Gordo

Tiffany Haddish as La Linda

Billy Slaughter as Fiddle

Amye Gousset as Judy Baufort

Joel Michaely as Ronnie

Ekaterina Baker as Sara

• Paul Schrader

Cinematographer

• Alexander Dynan
• Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
• Roberto Matus A.
• Giancarlo Vulcano

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‘The Card Counter’ Review: A Gambler’s Existential Solitaire

Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish and Willem Dafoe star in the latest head trip from Paul Schrader, a story about betting on life.

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By Manohla Dargis

A man sits writing in a room, alone in his head, alone in the world. We hear his words, his thoughts, in a voice-over that’s a portal to his reality. It’s an intimate, unmodulated voice, and what he says is often unremarkable to the point of banality. Yet something troubles the man which, in turn, troubles you. He may be a good man gone wrong or a bad one gone right; the only thing certain is that he jumped out of the head of Paul Schrader.

The solitary man in a room is Schrader’s most indelible authorial signature, a defining image and idea in one. That figure most famously appears in his script for “Taxi Driver,” in which Travis Bickle, the cabby turned killer, pours out his rancid and bland thoughts; and he is the fulcrum of movies that Schrader has directed, notably “Light Sleeper” and “First Reformed.” The solitary man returns in “The Card Counter,” a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.

A soldier turned professional card player, Tell — Oscar Isaac, a seductive force field — learned to count cards in prison, a talent he uses as he travels from casino to casino. Now, in anonymous, interchangeable gambling houses, he sits at blackjack and poker tables with strangers and sometimes other pros, counting, betting and often winning. He’s a disciplined player and a discreet gambler, winning just enough to avoid unwelcome attention. “The days move along with regularity, over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next,” to quote Travis Bickle. Every so often, Tell spins a roulette wheel.

It’s so good to be in Schrader’s world (and head) when the movie is as good as “The Card Counter.” One of the most enduring veterans of New Hollywood, Schrader is best known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, whose name prominently embellishes this new movie’s credits. At the same time, Schrader has produced his own distinctive directorial corpus that’s informed by classical Hollywood and by classic international art cinema, traditions he can put into productive tension like few others. It’s always interesting to see what he’s up to, even when he doesn’t have a firm hand on his material, hasn’t found its perfect (or near-enough) shape and style — which he’s done here.

Tell is on a slow, methodical roll when the movie opens. As the story shuffles between casino scenes and images of him in prison, Tell sketches in his background: “As a boy, I was afraid of confined space.” Detention changed him, he says, omitting exactly how he went from the military to Leavenworth. What matters is the now, the routine, and how Tell scans the room, sizes up the competition and keeps his distance. His life has shrunk to the dimensions of a gambling table, his current battlefield. I’d bet good money that Schrader knows Clausewitz’s claim that “war most closely resembles a game of cards.”

As with other Schrader characters, Tell opens the door to his head through his narration, bringing you into the shadowy room in which he — like the rest of us locked in existential solitary — struggles. In Tell’s case it is a desperate and troubled repository of horrors, a hellscape of memories that emerge in visually distorted flashbacks to Abu Ghraib. There are echoes of other Schrader’s movies here, too, like the lyrics from a song featured in “Light Sleeper” that are tattooed on Tell’s back: “I trust my life to providence/I trust my soul to grace.” And, if you have never seen Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket,” Schrader’s supreme cinematic influence, this would be an excellent time to watch it.

Schrader seems altogether at ease in “The Card Counter,” and has found an ideal conduit in the protean, velvet-voiced Isaac, who joins avatars like Willem Dafoe in “Light Sleeper” and Ethan Hawke in “First Reformed.” As with those characters, Tell’s unease is first telegraphed by the careful restraint you hear in his sepulchral narration, in the even tones he uses to deliver both dramatic and quotidian information. His voice scarcely changes whether he’s describing how to count cards in blackjack or recalling his time in prison. It’s as if these moments in time were effectively indistinguishable, a point underscored early by images of Tell alone in a prison cell and in a motel room.

The anonymity of these modest rooms suits Tell, who remodels them by methodically removing the wall decorations and, in an eccentric flourish reminiscent of Christo, wrapping up the furnishings — bed, chairs, the whole lot — in the light cloth he travels with in a suitcase. There’s something monastic about the result, as if Tell were re-creating his prison cell. In doing so, he seems to be trying to excise the mess and distractions of the material world, to keep it in check and under control, a ritual that serves the character and also a director who remains a kind of minimalist even at his pulpiest.

The story comes together piecemeal when Tell meets, in succession, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) and Cirk (Tye Sheridan), characters who pull him in different directions, radically affecting him and his trajectory. A manager of professional gamblers, La Linda offers Tell the chance to up his game by going on the poker circuit with lucrative financial backing. He demurs until some heavy complications arrive in the form of Cirk (pronounced Kirk), the teenage son of one of Tell’s military cohort. (A bit about the kid’s name gives the movie one of its periodic, productively unsettling laughs.) Both men had served under Maj. John Gordo (Dafoe, splendidly lurid and mustachioed), a gargoyle whose emergence affects Tell like an enemy invasion.

They’re memorable characters (a Schrader specialty), even when the performances waver, and bring alternately enigmatic and clarifying notes to the whole. Each helps shake Tell out of the stabilizing inertia — same cards, same faces, same garish rooms — that he’s sealed himself in, as if in a sarcophagus. Limits have worked for Tell, and they work for Schrader’s slow-burn storytelling. Time seems to stand still in casinos, with their absence of windows and clocks, an eternal present that suits Tell’s routine, his hushed conversations and his walkabouts through carpeted passages where he’s clocked by the gliding camera. It all flows and it keeps on flowing until the blood inevitably spills.

“The Card Counter” is being pushed as a thriller, a commercially expedient sales pitch. There are genre elements, as usual with Schrader, including moments of febrile tension and blasts of violence mingled in with the horror and the romance. Schrader likes playing with film form but he isn’t interested in conventional heroes and beats, and even when he hits familiar notes he does so with his own destabilizing rhythm and pressure. The only genre that he works in now is the one he’s been refining for decades, with its smooth and jagged edges, blessed and beautiful women, soulful meditations and eruptions of violence. Its voices and faces change, but the Paul Schrader Experience keeps raging.

The Card Counter Rated R for scenes of torture and other violence. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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A Disgraced Interrogator Gambles On Redemption In 'The Card Counter'

Justin Chang

Oscar Isaac plays a former military interrogator who is haunted by the past in Paul Schrader's The Card Counter. Focus Features hide caption

Oscar Isaac plays a former military interrogator who is haunted by the past in Paul Schrader's The Card Counter.

The signature Paul Schrader image is of a lonely middle-aged man nursing a glass of booze and writing in his diary, pouring out all his dark thoughts and guilty secrets. In the 1992 film Light Sleeper, it was a drug dealer having a midlife crisis. In the more recent First Reformed , it was a minister radicalized by the threat of climate change.

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Paul schrader and ethan hawke test their faith in 'first reformed'.

Schrader likes to burrow deep inside these men and their tortured souls, but there's an amusing randomness to the way he assigns his characters their respective issues. His absorbing new picture, The Card Counter , is no exception: It stars Oscar Isaac as a professional gambler who used to be a military man stationed at Abu Ghraib .

We don't know all this right at the start. Isaac's character goes by William Tell, a silly gambler's pseudonym. When we first meet William, he explains that he spent years in prison for some unspecified crime. It was behind bars that William learned how to count cards. Now he spends his days hopping from casino to casino, playing blackjack and poker and doing just well enough to beat the house without cleaning it out. At night he returns to his motel room, writes in his diary and tries to keep his demons at bay.

Early on, William meets a gambling agent named La Linda, played by a delightful Tiffany Haddish , who wants him to join the big leagues. Haddish and Isaac have a sly chemistry that goes from flirtatious to sizzling in no time, even though William initially rebuffs La Linda's professional overtures.

Eventually Schrader brings William's past to light, through a series of encounters that seem contrived at first but gradually bring the story's central conflict into focus. At a casino one night, William spies Maj. John Gordo, played by Willem Dafoe . Gordo was his former superior years ago at Abu Ghraib and taught him everything he knows about torturing and interrogating suspects. But while William was later court-martialed and went to prison, Gordo got away scot-free and now works as a private security contractor.

That same night, William meets a college dropout named Cirk, played by Tye Sheridan, whose dad was also trained by Gordo; he was dishonorably discharged and eventually killed himself. Now Cirk wants revenge against Gordo and asks William to help him.

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Schrader drops in a few harrowing flashbacks to Abu Ghraib, tearing a hole in the movie's calm, steady surface. We see prisoners being abused and interrogated in images filmed with a heavily distorting wide-angle lens — a visual abomination as well as a moral one. It's likely no coincidence that The Card Counter is being released so close to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Schrader can be bluntly didactic when it suits him, but here he's sincerely inviting the audience to reflect on the legacy of Sept. 11, including the crimes that Americans have committed in the name of justice.

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William, who's trying to distance himself from his past, wants no part of Cirk's plan and tries to dissuade him from following through. He takes the kid under his wing, letting him tag along on his casino tour. He also takes La Linda up on her invitation to join her stable, hoping to make enough on the poker circuit to help Cirk out financially and get him back in school. But that's easier said than done. As in so many of Schrader's films, dating back even to his script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver , a violent end seems inevitable, no matter how much our hero tries to avoid it.

This is a superb role for Isaac, who brings his usual sly, soulful magnetism to the role of a man who plots every move with suave precision. William is always crisply dressed in a shirt, tie and leather jacket. When he moves into a new motel room, he covers every piece of furniture with plain white sheets, as if he were trying to impose extreme order on the extreme disorder of his past. But in Isaac's dark, haunted gaze we see a history of trauma that can't be purged so easily. Once young Cirk enters the picture, William sees a chance to make further amends for his sins and do some good in the world.

That world seems awfully drab in The Card Counter , a nondescript suburban wasteland that time seems to have forgotten. The America that William gave so much of his life to serve doesn't look so beautiful. But there's one exception, when La Linda takes William out one night to visit the illuminated Missouri Botanical Garden, flooding the screen with vibrant colors that accentuate the actors' dazzling rapport. As grim as things can get in Schrader's movies, he's also a romantic at heart, someone who sees in love the possibility of both risk and redemption.

‘The Card Counter’ Plays the Hand Its Dealt in Paul Schrader’s Moral Universe

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

The first tell is that he calls himself William Tell — a name that sounds fake whether or not you’re an opera buff, a student of Swiss folklore or a kid who grew up pantomiming the heroics of The Lone Ranger and singing the theme song by heart . It’s a brisk, anonymous, poker-face of a name. It tells us almost nothing. 

But there is indeed much to be said about the man whose birth name is William Tillich — he now goes by Tell. He has his reasons for wanting to obscure that fact. The Card Counter , Paul Schrader’s new movie (in theaters now and streaming on demand starting October 1st), gives him plenty of headspace to self-examine, literalizing his psyche in the confines of multiple hotel rooms and, at other points in his life, jail cells — the only places (poker table notwithstanding) that he seems to know. The first thing we hear Tell, played by Oscar Isaac , say in voiceover is this: “I had never imagined myself as someone suited to a life of incarceration” — as if he’s rewriting the opening of Goodfellas. And here he is minutes later, in the post-prison present tense of the movie, pulling the cheap art prints off the walls of a cheap hotel bedroom, unplugging the phone and the lamp, covering every surface — bed, tables, chairs — in starched white cloth secured with twine, taking the most nondescript of spaces and scouring for whatever may have been remotely worthy of description. Maybe now is the time to reveal where that opening line eventually lands: “To my surprise, having been sentenced to ten years in prison, I found I adjusted quite well.”

As he confesses this, he’s somewhere writing it; as he writes it — as we hear it —  The Card Counter gives us a taste onscreen of what “adjusted” looks like. Tell in prison, poised and professional as he plays poker with other inmates. Tell in bed, reading (and informing us that before he went to jail, he’d never read a book before). Tell somewhere in his cell as a shot lingers on his prison cot, neatly made, with his slippers evenly lined up next to his bed. It’d be too easy to say that the fit of interior decorating we see in his hotel room is a way of getting back a bit of that prison monasticism. The enforced darkness of the hotel room, contra the bright openness of the prison — a prisoner must, after all, feel seen — makes for a stark difference. But it is all so sterile, in both cases, so controlled. It’s as if prison shaped Tell into the most viable version of himself for life afterward. Prison gave him a form; the poker circuit gave him a method. 

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That, in the broadest sense, is the movie. It doesn’t entirely work. The aesthetic procedures that Schrader and his collaborators have invented share screen time with fruitless chemistry between some of the actors, rickety mechanics in the plot, choices that limit its dramatic satisfactions even as its aesthetic rigor is full of spark. The extent to which that matters is a useful question — Schrader is by no means disinterested in keeping his audience on the hook and reeling us through the thicket of this man’s mind. But that mind in itself, not the scene-to-scene alchemy of the movie, is what emerges most thrillingly. Even without the the device of the diary to give us a titillating peephole into the man’s soul, we’d be drawn in by the rest of him, and that deliberate blankness he enforces around himself. This is the opposite of what he wants. But The Card Counter is not beholden to the vision of himself that William Tell wants. In the first place, he’s played by Oscar Isaac. This isn’t an actor you hire to play a post-human Stepford clone; he’s the guy whose failure to be reduced to that idea announces what it is that makes him human.

The Card Counter understands Isaac , and Isaac understands what the movie is offering him, as the line between public face and private fallacies only grows more apparent, and as the path Tell takes gradually arcs toward violence — an inevitability for this movie. It’s the newest a certain type of film that Schrader has been making since the start of his career, what the writer-director refers to as his “man in a room” movies. This informal sextet begin with his script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (which ended with a bloodbath that evoked My Lai and other Vietnam terrors) and, prior to his latest, culminated in 2018’s First Reformed (which climaxes with a minister strapping a suicide vest to his chest).  The men of these films are all the sum of what emerges from both their time alone, scribbling away their souls, and their time out in the world. The cabbie (Taxi Driver ), the coke slinger ( Light Sleeper ), the godless minister ( First Reformed ), the hustlers ( American Gigolo , The Walker ), and now the poker player. They all have their rounds to make, their diaries to write in, their demons to master. 

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Tell’s life on the road and in casinos is more than a matter of profession and not quite a matter of helpless obsession. It’s a limbo of his own making, in the way that everything about him is of his own making. His hair: a handsome silver, slicked back, styled but not stylish. His uniform: simple shirts with neat jackets, professional and well-kept as a sniper by way of Alain Delon — as if, perhaps, to evoke the unchanging attire of his prison years. All of it always adhering to a cool palette and a cooler demeanor, a proper analog to that air of a certain something hovering around him. Tell travels from place to place, two bags in tow, waging his bets modestly to thwart unwanted attention, sticking to those highway hotels with their unfussy interiors. Pattern or punishment? It’s not easy to suss out the difference. 

Suffice it to say that The Card Counter is not about poker, not really. It’s merely the game Tell masters in military prison. The question to ask is what landed him there. The answer — did you see this coming? — is Abu Ghraib. A chance meeting with a young man named Cirk (Tye Sheridan) is what stirs it awake. Tell unthinkingly, or maybe intuitively, strides into a police conference in one of those hotel casinos and witnesses a presentation given by a certain Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). He recognizes this man, just as Tell himself is recognized by Cirk. These are the sparks that land Tell’s past back in his lap and leave him no room to avert his eyes. 

Schrader fascinates because of swerves like these, which seem to tell us where we’re going only to leave us unprepared for what we see when we get there. The style of this movie, like First Reformed before it, is among the director’s most explicit nods to some of his cinematic forebears (Bresson, Ozu), with their transcendental style, their paring down of camera movement to a stillness belied by staggering emotional static, their way of mounting straight-shot images that nevertheless glisten with feelings and unknowns. Schrader has spoken of establishing visual rules — whether the camera moves, whether a character moves within a scene, the orderly procession of a shot-reverse shot sequence — and then, when it counts most, breaking them just so. Those rules and their breaking here sometimes make The Card Counter feel like you’re revisiting familiar ground, even as this new movie is wider-ranging in many ways. It has enough room for those huge casino interiors, the explosions of himbo jingoism courtesy of a dickwad poker player on the circuit, and the likable a personality of someone like Tiffany Haddish , who, as a broker named La Linda, shows up just in time to tempt Tell into a better life. An actual life . 

But: Abu Ghraib. There’s no room in the schema of a film like First Reformed for the living nightmare of torture, crimes that were unimaginable from the outset and only became more so once we saw evidence of them firsthand. Seeing was enough for belief; it still couldn’t make the atrocities real. In the first place, it’s because of his tight visual schemes that Schrader can make something so simple as an unmade bed register as psychic chaos. That image — sheets in disarray — is used both here and in First Reformed , and is effective every time I see it. Here, we get an additional look at someone else’s bedroom, that of another mind out of order — and never before has the ordinary sight of dirty laundry, tossed sheets, and potato chips in a bed hit with such worrisome symbolic static. 

Imagine, then, Schrader’s approach to Tell’s memories of an actual hellhole. What his time in the military meant for Tell is germane to the story that The Card Counter tells: what it felt like to be conscripted into torture, only to discover that you’re way too good at it. It’s a key to Tell’s psychological makeup. He elaborates accordingly, though his descriptions are outdone by the pure shock of Schrader’s head-spinning visual approach to Abu Ghraib’s corridors, which get funhouse-distorted onscreen through the use of utlra-wide-angle VR lenses. The movie takes what is already grotesque — the detainees covered in shit, physically and psychologically assaulted with sound, being beaten and terrorized by dogs — and rings it all into an ecstatically disorienting inversion of the ordinary, violating our own inner sense of what movies and other media have trained us to feel is “right,” aesthetically and ethically, about the composition of an image. It’s no wonder, given what we see — is this what it’s like inside his head? — that Tell becomes a man carrying a kit of white sheets and twine with him wherever he goes, tamping down all sense of visual noise in a room before he can sleep in it.

Schrader grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, raised by a pair of Calvinist parents who, as the Wall Street Journal has neatly summarized , “forbade him from going to the cinema, listening to rock music, dancing or working on the Sabbath.” Guilt was dominant; movies were a sinner’s game. This is an origin story that’s been rendered, over the years, into a hefty Rosetta Stone of answers and intentions, oft-recounted as a thesis on his work. In the case of The Card Counter , that early biographical bit, the part about movies being forbidden — about forbidden images — feels apt to remember. Because images play a distinguished role in the dispiriting moral universe of this movie, and not only the ones that Schrader and cinematographer Alexander Dynan dreamed up to tell this story. It’s the images of his involvement in torture, rather than the torture in itself, that lands Tell in military prison; images, in which his superiors were wise enough not to appear, that demarcate the difference between the fate of the soldiers carrying out the work of torture from the fates of the brass who gave the orders and trained soldiers like Tell in the brute processes of dehumanization. The torturers had proximity to the tortured: this much, Tell makes clear. 

This is not the same thing as an excuse. And forgiveness, as a problem and possibility, is not off the table here. I n fact, it proves crucial to understanding what Tell understands of himself, and makes Cirk and La Linda’s appearances in his life more poignant. But the more difficult, harrowing question Schrader raises is about not Tell, but Tillich: What was it that made him susceptible to these atrocities? How it is that this man’s efforts to rehabilitate himself are far less successful than he would have us believe? These are questions about the legacy of violence and what it does to a man. It’s as if there’s no end to it. Reverend Toller, of First Reformed , cannot stop a holy institution, even when it becomes a business, from playing a hand in the world’s destruction. What could Tell possibly do to put an end to totalizing violence, then having himself been destroyed by it? 

In one of those night-time diary purges of his , Teller sits shirtless at his table, beside a lamp muted by one of his white shrouds, and we see a tattoo on his back: “I trust my life to Providence / I trust my soul to grace.” It’s a lyric from a night-trawling, landscape-of-the-soul rock song by The Call’s Michael Been — the song we hear over the opening credits of Schrader’s Light Sleeper , that earlier iteration of the man in a room. (Been’s son, Robert Levon Been, wrote songs for Card Counter .) The lyric is printed in full, broken into two neat lines that stretch the full canvas of Tell’s back, just beneath his shoulders.

It is an aperture, not merely a reference. Light Sleeper was in part about a man left flailing by the question of his own luck — what would seem to be his word for “fate” — and by his sense that he has become a harbinger of doom, that more than merely having bad luck, he sucks it out of the fate of people he loves. 

Luck is something that William Tell believes he knows a thing or two about. Yet he, too, turns out to be a black hole of a man. The terrifying difference is that Tell believes he’s mastered the odds. That he still fails, and the ways in which he fails, gives The Card Counter a power that tempers its dramatic flaws, most of which are ephemeral in comparison. The movie has real moral terror at its center. It gets ugly: It gives that word fresh resonance. This is where it gets things right — what will, one hopes, make it worth remembering.

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The Card Counter Reviews

The Card Counter is a misstep that makes you want to just fold in your hand and leave the table for good.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Apr 4, 2024

Paul Schrader’s unique style is evident in “The Card Counter,” a film that can be seen as part of Paul Schrader’s lengthy inquiry into complex characters and their inner struggles.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2024

Forgiveness, guilt, revenge and redemption are some of the many themes approached by a slow-burning thriller that will have your full attention from start to end.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2023

The Card Counter may not earn its final destination, but it makes for one hell of a ride.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Oscar Isaac stays winning

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

The Card Counter is a fascinating character portrait with the trappings of a suspenseful revenge thriller, all wrapped up in a bloody American flag.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The Card Counter is a protagonist-driven narrative focused on a hauntingly captivating redemption arc intensely elevated by an exceptional lead performance from Oscar Isaac.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2023

The Card Counter is a brooding, watchful and downbeat film.

Full Review | Jun 26, 2023

The Card Counter doesn’t follow the regular structure for plot or characterization. Nevertheless, there’s an emotional gravitational pull that only grows with time. Characters are good, in their own sense, but considering which code?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 17, 2023

...fully rendered as a feat of mild physical endurance, a devotional gesture both odd and touching for the reverence it shows this ending and its faith in its enduring power, no matter how many times distilled and refracted.

Full Review | Nov 28, 2022

Schrader’s observations on moral depravity, the innate hollowness of just fucking getting by, and the lies we tell ourselves (or don’t) to try doing so have only felt more potent as the years wear on.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Sep 22, 2022

This is a powerful film. It is mature, in control, knows what it wants to say, and says it both in terms of script and visuals. Schrader has cemented himself as one of the giants of film.

Full Review | Aug 25, 2022

In the end it’s Oscar Isaac who drives the movie and he’s just the right fit for Schrader’s stern Bresson-like minimalism.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2022

Someone may tell Paul Schrader there are some rotten apples in a basket, but he knows the problem is in the container. The Card Counter ponders on the chances of overcoming this belief... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 8, 2022

At every moment, this blistering film is anchored by Isaac's phenomenal portrayal, which is quiet, slippery and weighty all at once.

Full Review | Jul 8, 2022

The film, like its protagonist, is slow, meticulous, obsessive, sober and cold. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 7, 2022

A blistering thrill of moral dilemma and a hell of a study on how hard it is to forgive yourself.

Full Review | Jul 6, 2022

Although the plot does seem to divert from the main story, the performances from the main cast steer it back to focus into a decent thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 1, 2022

This is tough, testing stuff that is not for everybody, but will handsomely reward those up to the challenge.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 30, 2022

Desolate, depraved and depressing drama....Deal me out!

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jun 17, 2022

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Oscar isaac in paul schrader’s ‘the card counter’: film review | venice 2021.

Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe also star in this brooding redemption drama about a former military interrogator turned professional gambler.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Paul Schrader has spent much of his career peering into the dark abyss of troubled men’s souls. He creates another subject eminently worthy of such examination in the title figure of The Card Counter , who goes by the assumed name of William Tell and is played by Oscar Isaac in an intense performance with the dangerous magnetism of Al Pacino in his early Michael Corleone days. A companion piece of sorts to First Reformed , this is another bruising character study of a solitary, burdened man who processes his most intimate thoughts in a journal, living with his guilt until he’s handed an unexpected opportunity for redemption.

From the cool retro font of its opening credits, displayed over the textured weave of baize card-table cloth in extreme close-up, this Focus release has an edgy 1970s throwback feel despite its contemporary setting. It finds writer-director Schrader once again in a reflective frame of mind, pondering the limits of punishment while blurring the line between expiation and self-destruction. That aspect is nicely countered here, however, by the jazzy vitality of the early scenes as Alexander Dynan’s camera slinks around the tables of various casinos and William explains the rules. Blackjack is his game of choice, but he’s no slouch at poker either.

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Venue : Venice Film Festival (Competition) Release date : Friday, Sept. 10 Cast : Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, Willem Dafoe Director-screenwriter : Paul Schrader

As in First Reformed , Schrader uses extensive voiceover not as the lazy storytelling fallback it so often becomes, but as a key to provide access to the mind of a protagonist who chooses to reveal little about himself. And to deliver quick primers on the rules of each game and the specific ways a skilled professional gambler can beat the house.

“I never imagined myself as someone suited to incarceration,” says William, explaining how he adapted to a long stint in Leavenworth, enjoying the unvaried routine and the reading time. It was there that he learned how to count cards. He moves from town to town, plays small casinos and keeps his wins modest enough to avoid undue attention. William is not playing to get rich, just to pass the time, even if the shadows dogging him suggest he’s anything but relaxed.

Gambling agent La Linda ( Tiffany Haddish ) spots him as a thoroughbred while she’s building a stable of poker tournament players bankrolled by an anonymous backer. William declines her offer to join at first, but changes his mind when he meets someone he can help, a lost young man to serve as his penance.

The visions in William’s sleep of torture and interrogation carried out by a U.S. military special ops unit in an Iraqi prison hint at his past. But it’s not until some way into the film that Schrader reveals William was one of the fall guys court-martialed after the Abu Ghraib scandal, while senior officers who engineered the human rights violations remained free to reinvent themselves in the private sector.

One such shady figure is the man now known as Major John Gordo (frequent Schrader collaborator Willem Dafoe in hard-as-nails form), whom William sees giving a talk at a security conference for correctional officers at a hotel-casino. A young man in the audience, Cirk “with a C” Baufort ( Tye Sheridan ), recognizes William from photographs as a former soldier from the same unit in which his late father served, both of them trained by the sadistic Gordo.

The disgrace for Cirk’s dad ended in suicide, and after dropping out of school and severing ties with his mother, the son now wants to settle the score. Cirk, who has a half-assed plan to make Gordo pay, tells William that when he saw him he thought, “Here’s a man who might want a piece of what I’m gonna start.”

As much as the moral weight of his actions in Iraq still plagues him, William tells the kid that he refuses to be consumed by thoughts of a past he can’t erase. Instead, he sees in Cirk a chance to do some good, providing mentorship and financial support to get him back on track. But this is a Paul Schrader film, so the path of good intentions inevitably is paved with violence.

The later plotting loses some tension as the focus is split among a gambling tournament, a low-flame romance between William and La Linda, and William’s graphic accounts to Cirk of what it was really like in Iraq. While the kid initially enjoys hanging out in hotels and casinos with play money provided by William, he soon starts to find the life repetitive: “I don’t know if it’s really going anywhere.” The same suspicion briefly creeps into the film. But Schrader regains the momentum as Cirk fails to hold up his end of their bargain, forcing William into a direct reckoning with his past.

Even with that hint of midsection story slackness, this is still a highly controlled piece of filmmaking with an unerring command of tone. In William, Schrader has created another anguished protagonist numbing his pain in an existential void, going from town to town and casino to casino, each one much like the last. There’s a sharp visual contrast between those bland interiors with their tacky carpets and outdated décor and the stark Iraqi prison brought to to nightmarish life in William’s descriptions of “the noise, the smell, the violence.”

Schrader disdains conventional payoffs, so while he sets up one peripheral character for humiliation — an obnoxious showboater who travels the gambling circuit with his own cheer squad — that doesn’t happen; and the promising emotional connection between William and La Linda hits a bump. Even the final tournament is abandoned before the winning hand is played as the movie veers off on a startling new curve. But William’s self-sacrificial road out of purgatory provides a kind of bloody deliverance, one that’s more in keeping with the writer-director’s defining themes while not extinguishing all hope. The specifically Christian notion of forgiveness is intrinsic to Schrader’s work, irrespective of the extreme lengths his lost souls go to in order to earn it.

The haunted quality of the central character, in limbo between sin and salvation, is effectively echoed in the original songs composed for the movie by Robert Levon Been, of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

It’s good to see Haddish expand her range in a dramatic role, playing against type as a driven yet cool customer in a field where reading people is an essential skill. In one scene that’s a visual stunner, La Linda coaxes William outside his ascetic routine of hotels, casinos and generic eateries to take a stroll in the illuminated Missouri Botanical Garden at night. She’s literally inviting him to consider the possibilities of beauty and vitality, and the chemistry between the two actors really clicks during their exchanges in this magical setting, so alien to the world the film otherwise inhabits.

Sheridan’s character is less satisfyingly developed, and while he conveys the simmering volatility of a young man set on revenge but lacking the wiles to orchestrate it, he struggles to assert much of a presence in scenes with William.

That’s also because Isaac is such a remarkably compelling force — even in the many scenes notable for the physical stillness of a man whose eyes clock everything. In one of the film’s strangest elements, its meaning left open to interpretation, William, on arrival at each new hotel, removes white drop cloths and string from his luggage and methodically wraps all the furnishings in his room. Dressed immaculately in what’s almost a uniform of a snug leather jacket over a shirt and tie, his dark hair slicked back and marked by a bolt of gray, this is a man who looks to create the outward impression of order and control. But the torment gnawing away at his insides is never in doubt.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, Willem Dafoe, Alexander Babara, Bobby C. King, Kat Baker, Bryan Truong Distributor: Focus Features Production companies: Saturn Streaming, Astrakan Film, Redline Entertainment, in association with LB Entertainment, Enriched Media Group, Grandave Capital, One Two Twenty Entertainment Director-screenwriter: Paul Schrader Producers: Braxton Pope, Lauren Mann, David Wulf Executive producers: Martin Scorsese, William Olsson, James Swarbrick, Anders Erdén, Santosh Govindaraju, Ruben Islas, Stanley Preschutti, Kathryn Moseley, Mitch Oliver, Ken & Liz Whitney, Lee Broda, Elton Tsang, Catherine Boily, Elsa Ramo, Tiffany Boyle, Joel Michaely, Kyle Stroud, Carte Blanche, Jason Rose, Jeff Rice, Philip H. Burgin, Patrick Hilber, Nadine Luque, Martin McCabe, Patrick Muldoon, Mick Southworth Director of photography: Alexander Dynan Production designer: Ashley Fenton Costume designer: Lisa Madonna Editor: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. Music: Robert Levon Been, Giancarlo Vulcano Songs and lyrics: Robert Levon Been Casting: Susan Shopmaker Sales: HanWay Films

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‘The Card Counter’ Review: Oscar Isaac Bets It All in Paul Schrader’s Transcendent Poker Drama

David ehrlich.

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“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 he received like communion from Robert Bresson, each of these implosive portraits cloaking their lead character’s private anguish underneath whatever profession they’ve chosen to wear like a costume. “You get a job, you become the job.” And that job allows these men to hide in plain sight as they wait for the chance to play their hand.

In that light, the most unexpected thing about “ The Card Counter ” is that it took Schrader this long to make a movie about a poker player. The premise is so perfect for him that the film around it almost sounds redundant; one look at the weirdos and wannabes sitting around the no-limit hold ‘em games that obscure cable networks like to air during the awful hours of the night and you’ll swear that Schrader deserves a writing credit on their lives.

They hunch around the felt and bare their souls out loud whenever the river gets wild, asking themselves the sort of rhetorical questions that Schrader’s characters tend to pose into a mirror or scribble into the diary they keep next to their drink. “Was he chasing a flush draw?” “You talkin’ to me?” “Will God forgive us?”

What’s riveting about “The Card Counter” — what makes it a fresh riff on Schrader’s usual formula, and broadly absolves it from lacking the transcendent power of a “ First Reformed ” — is that William Tell ( Oscar Isaac ) is actually trying to work out a clean answer. He’s trying to take expiation into his own hands and live to enjoy it. The math is more absolute with blackjack than hold ‘em, but a good poker player can look right through the cards, and William is nothing if not a good poker player. If he can see into someone else’s soul, maybe he can see into his own. And if he can see into his own soul, odds are that he might even be able to fix it from within the purgatory of his own existence before heaven and hell have to get involved.

The difference between “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter” is the difference between asking “Will God forgive us?” and “can we forgive ourselves?” It’s not a matter of potentiality, but rather a question of possibility. Schrader’s latest is still baptized in the same religious asceticism that runs through so many of his films, but its lonely man is only focused on the things he can control. “I never imagined myself as someone suited to incarceration,” William tells us at the top of the film’s laconic voiceover narration, but the decade he spent in military prison taught him to love a certain routine and lack of choice. Even in a jail cell, it can be freeing to know what you have the power to change and what you don’t.

William is pretty forthcoming with these pearls of wisdom for such a private man; he won’t tell us what draws him to the endless string of sad casinos where he bides his time in rooms without windows or clocks, but he’ll show us how to count cards without being asked. Some part of him likes teaching people how to turn the odds in their favor, not that anyone would ever confuse the guy for a friend. William’s look is sleek but unassuming — equal parts Melville and Mastroianni — and his black sunglasses feel like mirrors of the dark shadows that fall on either side of Isaac’s glowering face.

The actor’s samurai-like performance recalls the charismatic mobster he played in “A Most Violent Year,” and stakes the movie to whatever it needs during flat dialogue scenes and Bressonian stretches of physical behavior. William’s rituals (e.g. stretching bed sheets over every surface in his motel rooms in order to make each indistinguishable from the last) can make it tempting to mistake him for a serial killer, but his easy rapport with gambling agent La Linda ( Tiffany Haddish ) suggests there’s something human behind those shark eyes.

Then again, it might not be such a mistake to think of William as a serial killer after all. The particulars are kept vague until the bitter end, but we know that whatever he’s desperate to atone for took place at Abu Ghraib under the supervision of a mustached Willem Dafoe , a plot detail that finds Schrader returning to the sins of George W. Bush’s foreign policy (occasional flashbacks are marked by the warped look of watching a VR feed without goggles, a choice that creates a disembodying first-person effect).

And William isn’t the only one with skin in the game, as he’s approached by a kid named Cirk — yes, with a “C” —  whose abusive father trained with the same man before taking his own life. Cirk (a shaggy Tye Sheridan ) wants revenge, but William has other ideas. Maybe if he can teach this college drop-out to assume some responsibility for his future, William can achieve a measure of redemption for his past. It’s a gamble, but poker tournaments would never end if no one raised the ante.

If that premise invites comparisons to Scorsese’s “The Color of Money,” the film that Schrader has pried out of it is unsurprisingly less interested in taut suspense or big scores (“bet small win small” is one of William’s personal commandments). Anyone primed for some all-in poker action is bound to be disappointed by a story that’s more interested in the monk-like patience of waiting for a good hand than it is in the drama of playing it out. The same goes for anyone hoping to breathe in some of the smoky mystique of vintage casino movies, as Alexander Dynan’s stagnant digital cinematography  sanctifies the glow of half-empty card rooms with the same holy fervor that Janusz Kaminski shoots floods of heaven-sent window light.

“The Card Counter” won’t make you want to become a casino rat any more than “First Reformed” made you want to become a reverend; this is an anti-romantic glimpse into the most abyssal pockets of American nowhere, full of detritus left behind by all the Danny Oceans of the world. It’s about motels and strip malls and flashing lights that blink so fast they might let you forget where you are for a minute or two. For William, and for the movie that Schrader hangs around him, blackjack and poker aren’t the main event or even a means to an end — they’re a distraction from what everyone is really doing there. “The Card Counter” may not be quite as narcotized as a Nicolas Winding Refn movie, but the numb camera movements and the whiskey drone of Robert Levon Been’s original soundtrack leave you with a palpable understanding of how someone could get stuck in these places until the end of time.

Which is why — even in a film that seems opposed to forward movement, and in spite of Cirk’s doltish energy — it’s genuinely exciting when the kid shows William a way forward. Isaac lights up with a giddy enthusiasm, albeit one that never forgets the intensity of his character’s anguish; the movie’s best scene is as hopeful and discomforting as anything Schrader has ever written, as Isaac swirls William’s sin together with his possible salvation in order to remind Cirk of what’s at stake. It’s a scene powerful enough to make the ones between William and Haddish’s underplayed La Linda feel sluggish and tacked-on by comparison, a sense that 1. Isn’t helped by some egregious ADR, and 2. Is almost entirely negated by a self-referential final touch that seals the film’s place in Schrader’s body of work.

That “The Card Counter” shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm. Schrader’s film is perhaps too enamored by perdition to reach for the sublime — for all of its familiarity, even that ending is stuck in an unsettled emotional limbo — but poker is all about feeling around in the dark, and Schrader knows there’s no limit to what a man can do who’s capable of forgiving himself. It’s just like what Travis Bickle said to Wizard after his big “we’re all fucked” speech: “I don’t know. That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“The Card Counter” premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters on Friday, September 10.

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Review: Oscar Isaac gives a one-of-a-kind performance in Paul Schrader’s ‘The Card Counter’

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The nightmarish scenes of Abu Ghraib that punctuate “The Card Counter,” another long, dark night of the masculine soul from the writer-director Paul Schrader, look as warped as the images you might see in a funhouse mirror, minus the fun. Equipped with a disorienting wide-angle lens, the camera takes us on a tour of these hellish environs, drifting through grotty cells where naked prisoners crouch in helpless terror, caked with their own filth. At one point one of their American captors (played by Oscar Isaac) enters the frame, his figure so distorted that he appears to be cut off at the knees. Nothing else in the movie is shot like this; what we’re seeing is a visual aberration as well as a moral abomination.

These images are long-ago memories that continue to haunt Isaac’s character — he’s the card counter of the title, a professional gambler who calls himself William Tell. Years before he acquired that amusing pseudonym, he was a soldier stationed at Abu Ghraib, where he participated in the torture and interrogation of prisoners. Eventually he was court-martialed and incarcerated at Leavenworth, a rather nicer prison than his previous outpost; finding a strange comfort in life behind bars, he read books, broadened his mind and learned to count cards. Now back on the outside, William spends his days hopping from casino to casino, playing just skillfully enough to beat the house without cleaning it out. The routine suits him and keeps him busy. His demons have never left, but he’s holding them at bay.

Schrader, being Schrader, means to draw those demons back out into the open, to put his gravely conflicted antihero through his own intensely personal yet oddly familiar stations of the cross. Like some of the filmmaker’s other charismatically brooding sinners — Willem Dafoe’s crisis-ridden drug dealer in “Light Sleeper,” Ethan Hawke’s climate-conscious minister in “First Reformed” — William likes to sit alone in his room at night, nursing a glass of booze and pouring his dark thoughts into a handwritten diary from which he reads a few helpful expository excerpts. But for all these kindred spirits, William also stands apart, as does Isaac in one of his richest, subtlest performances.

Like any good card player, William is an astute observer of details, and Isaac’s coolly magnetic gaze has a way of heightening your own powers of concentration. You take in every detail of his appearance — the shocks of gray in his slick black hair, the crisp shirt-and-tie-and-leather-jacket ensembles — and are by turns seduced, intrigued and disturbed by the picture of self-imposed order that he projects. Whenever William checks into a new motel, he meticulously wraps every piece of furniture in a white sheet, draining the room of color. Is he trying to re-create the cold, comforting austerity of Leavenworth, or to literally blot out the messiness of his past? It’s not entirely clear.

What is clear is Schrader’s devotion to his own tropes, which will strike his critics as repetitive and his admirers as suitably ritualistic. But the filmmaker, coming off the remarkable career high of “First Reformed,” is skilled enough to find fresh emotional notes and subtle thematic variations in his template. There is something faintly amusing about the way Schrader assigns his characters their specific obsessions and neuroses, as if he were pulling topic cards at random out of a hat, but he gives those topics both dramatic weight and ethical consideration. He has a lot on his mind here — the history of the Hollywood gambling picture, the lingering moral taint of America’s post-9/11 war crimes — but he also wants to tell a good story, to leaven this harrowing odyssey with crackling moments of wit, levity and romance.

And in this he more than succeeds. The characters we meet along the way may fit archetypal slots, but they are inhabited with an intelligence and conviction that’s impossible not to take seriously. As William makes his way across the flat, depressing landscapes of America’s casino belt, he encounters two people who will change his life forever. One is a gambling agent, La Linda (a whip-smart Tiffany Haddish ), who’s impressed by William’s poker skills and tries to persuade him to join her generously (and anonymously) funded stable of players. From the way William and La Linda lock eyes and trade quips, it’s clear that their interest may go beyond the strictly professional, a dramatic chip that Schrader waits to cash in at just the right moment.

The other key figure is a recent college dropout, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), whose name is pronounced “Kirk” and whose mind is consumed with revenge. Cirk’s father, like William, was once stationed at Abu Ghraib, where both men were trained by a sadistic superior, Maj. John Gordo (Willem Dafoe, a frequent Schrader collaborator). While William went to prison and Cirk’s father ultimately killed himself, Gordo managed to slip away and reinvent himself as a private security contractor. Now Cirk wants William to help bring Gordo to justice, a scheme that the shrewd gambler sees for the terrible idea it is.

Tiffany Haddish and Oscar Isaac on sex scenes and COVID filming for ‘The Card Counter’

Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish have an electrifying chemistry in Paul Schrader’s dark drama ‘The Card Counter,’ which finished filming during the pandemic.

Sept. 2, 2021

Hoping to dissuade Cirk, William takes him under his wing and drags him along on his casino tour. He also accepts La Linda’s invitation to the big leagues, hoping that his winnings will help the kid get back on his feet. A friendship blossoms, nourished by Isaac and Sheridan’s winning rapport. For William, Cirk is a source of affection and mild exasperation, but also an opportunity to do some good in a world he’s made demonstrably worse. But Cirk is also the latest warning of many in Schrader’s long, erratic and never-uninteresting filmography — going as far back as “Hardcore” and his script for “Taxi Driver” — that there are few things more dangerous or crushing than a wayward young soul in need of rescue.

In tracing this idea to its grim conclusion, “The Card Counter” doesn’t escape a certain diagrammatic neatness. Schrader’s moral inquiry hinges, as usual, on a semi-successful emulsion of narrative contrivance and philosophical seriousness. Sometimes a line will land a little too emphatically, especially when it’s trying to seem off-the-cuff. Consider it all part of the movie’s buy-in; it’s worth it. Scene by scene, it pulls us into a world that coheres not just through plotting and dialogue, but through the sharp rhythms of Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.’s editing, the hard shimmer of Alexander Dynan’s images and the humdrum precision of Ashley Fenton’s production design. Schrader achieves a richly atmospheric portrait of the poker tournament circuit, where the whir of roulette tables is interrupted by the whoops and hollers accompanying some of the game’s more flamboyant celebrities.

If the casinos constitute William’s own ugly-carpeted purgatory, he seems no less trapped by an outdoor suburban wasteland of strip malls and motel swimming pools; the America in whose name he committed unspeakable crimes looks none too beautiful. But there is one exception, a sequence that stands out like a beacon, when La Linda takes William to the illuminated Missouri Botanical Garden, flooding the screen with dazzling, vibrant colors that seem to accentuate Isaac and Haddish’s irresistible interplay. It’s not the first time Schrader has reminded us that beneath his austere rhythms and fatalistic journeys beats the heart of a true romantic, someone who sees in love the possibility of risk and redemption.

COVID shut down his set. How Paul Schrader finished shooting ‘The Card Counter’ in 5 days

Director Paul Schrader needed five days to finish shooting “The Card Counter.” Plus a shave for Oscar Isaac, who stars with Tiffany Haddish. How he did it.

Sept. 11, 2020

‘The Card Counter’

Rating: R, for some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes Playing: Starts Sept. 10 in general release

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The Card Counter

William Tell is an ex-military interrogator living under the radar as a low-stakes gambler. When he encounters a young man looking to commit revenge against a mutual enemy, he takes him on t... Read all William Tell is an ex-military interrogator living under the radar as a low-stakes gambler. When he encounters a young man looking to commit revenge against a mutual enemy, he takes him on the casino circuit to set him on a new path. William Tell is an ex-military interrogator living under the radar as a low-stakes gambler. When he encounters a young man looking to commit revenge against a mutual enemy, he takes him on the casino circuit to set him on a new path.

• Paul Schrader
• Oscar Isaac
• Tiffany Haddish
• Tye Sheridan
• 510 User reviews
• 211 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 3 wins & 22 nominations

• William Tell

• Slippery Joe

• (as Kat Baker)

• Sergeant Hoskins

• (as Rachel Whitney)
• Civilian Translator

• (as Joseph Singletary III)

• Prison Guard

• Tournament Clerk

• Roger Baufort

• Judy Baufort
• (as Amye Bousset)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia For scheduling conflicts Shia LaBeouf dropped off the project, Nicolas Cage who is a close friend of Paul Schrader recommended Tye Sheridan to play Cirk as they previously collaborated on Joe (2013) .
• Goofs The discard tray to the dealer's right is a) too close to the 3rd-base player, and b) almost full even though there are at least two more decks in the shoe ahead of the cut card.

William Tell : He beat you.

Cirk : That's in the past.

William Tell : The body remembers. It stores it all.

• Connections Featured in Radio Dolin: Why is 2021 - The Year of Woman Film Directors? bonus: Tarantino and Yankovsky (2021)
• Soundtracks Eruptar Written by Robert Levon Been (as Robert Levon Been) Performed by Robert Levon Been (as Robert Levon Been) BMG (ASCAP)

User reviews 510

• Sep 11, 2021
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• September 10, 2021 (United States)
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• Máy Đếm Thẻ
• Gulfport Harbor Lights Winter Festival - 2269 Jones Park Dr, Gulfport, Mississippi, USA (Tell and La Linda walk into Garden Glow)
• Focus Features
• LB Entertainment
• Astrakan Film AB
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Sep 12, 2021

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 51 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• Dolby Digital

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“The Card Counter,” Reviewed: Paul Schrader’s Furious Vision of American Corruption

By Richard Brody

The writer and director Paul Schrader’s film “ First Reformed ,” from 2017, featured America’s war in Iraq as a crucial part of its backstory: the protagonist, a minister played by Ethan Hawke, is the father of a soldier who was killed there. In Schrader’s latest, “The Card Counter” (which opened Friday), the Iraq War is backstory that’s thrust dramatically into the foreground: the protagonist, played by Oscar Isaac, is a veteran of the war and both one of its wrongdoers and one of its victims, and in the course of the film this past surges destructively into the present tense. The two movies are animated by revulsion at the prevalent American ethos and an absolute existential despair over the possibility of any corrective or practical redress. Although “The Card Counter” is more tonally restrained than “First Reformed,” it expresses the same rage, and it dramatizes what the previous film only suggested—namely, that these pathologies in American life, exemplified in the immoral war, lead inevitably to political violence.

The protagonist—who was born William Tillich and now calls himself William Tell—is introduced, in his own voice-over, as a former convict who spent his eight and a half years in prison teaching himself to count cards. The crime for which he was sentenced was torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Now he’s free, but he continues to be tormented by guilt; he has no sense of having adequately paid for his crime. His version of freedom is a self-imposed routine of self-deadening self-punishment, a sort of living death in suspended animation: he travels obsessively from casino to casino, playing blackjack and poker for relatively low stakes (and winning relatively low sums), to avoid attention from security. He sleeps in motel rooms that he reduces to a prisonlike austerity, removing pictures from walls and wrapping the furniture in white sheets (which fill the suitcase that he drags from town to town). In his off-hours from cards, he writes in his diary, obsessively returning to the subject and the context of his crimes. At one casino, he meets a woman named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), the head of a stable of gamblers who play for high stakes, financed by private backers with whom she brokers deals.

La Linda tries to recruit William, but he demurs, refusing to be indebted to any backers. He likens gambling debt to guilt, calling both a “weight” that’s hard to bear—and, unlike debt, he says, a moral weight can never be lifted. Nonetheless, he tries at least to put his grim exertions to good use. At a security-industry conference taking place at a hotel where he’s gambling, William drops in on a speech by the retired Major John Gordo (Willem Dafoe), a private contractor who ran the torture regime at Abu Ghraib and trained him there; in the hall, William meets Cirk Balfort (Tye Sheridan), the son of another soldier whose life Gordo ruined. Cirk (whose name is pronounced “Kirk”) has made it his life’s mission to get revenge against Gordo, but William decides to rescue Cirk from this doomed mission, an effort that involves taking Cirk on the road with him and joining forces with La Linda, after all, in the hope of winning big enough to pay Cirk’s outstanding college loans, get him back into school, and help him reconcile with his estranged mother. Instead, William ends up drawn toward the looming figure of Gordo and into a vortex of violence.

Schrader has had a career-long obsession with the nature of obsession itself. He makes films about people who do whatever they do, however profane, with an absolute devotion that amounts essentially to religious, Christian inspiration. In the case of William, that devotion is a strange kind of asceticism, a stripping down of his life in order to fill the time that remains with a rote emptiness—eight to twelve hours a day, he says, six or seven days a week, playing cards in the sunless, cheerless, impersonal glare of casinos—which leaves him nothing to contemplate but his sense of guilt and the cold rage that goes with it, aimed at the insidious workings of the broken country of which he’s the ready-made agent and fall guy. But the possibility of human connection—which William has been scrupulously, fanatically, desperately avoiding—offers him both temptation and redemption. His attempt to pull Cirk back onto the track gives William’s self-scourging routine a sense of purpose that he thought he’d lost. From the start, his relationship with La Linda has the spark of a romantic connection, but William, in his self-denying isolation, won’t act on it—until he’s goaded by Cirk to do so, in a deal made under high pressure. The terms of that romantic bargain would seem absurd were they not dramatized with an intensity that shudders with high personal and political stakes.

What pulls “The Card Counter” back from the bounds of such absurdity is the passionate fury of its cinematic symbols. There are flashbacks to William’s time participating in torture at Abu Ghraib, which are filmed as expressionistic nightmares; fascinating extended riffs on strategies of gambling, which William delivers with the robotic chill of a technical manual; a horrific history lesson, by way of meditations in William’s diary, on the origins of the torture program. “The Card Counter” denounces more than a misguided war; it decries the inherently corrupting militarization of American society at large, and also the political hubris that goes with it. (The closest thing to a villain at the card table is a rival poker player in an American-flag T-shirt whose fans, with each hand he wins, leap up, chanting, “U.S.A.!”) Above all, the film decries the impunity that the war’s masterminds and the country’s leaders enjoyed while William and other frontline grunts took the blame.

It’s that notion of the prevailing order’s insidiously hermetic system of self-protection that gives “The Card Counter” its furious energy. Despite its tamped-down tone, the movie evinces enough despair and rage to nearly tear apart its sense of dramatic and aesthetic continuity; its sense of restraint keeps the movie from screaming. Schrader cuts from shot to shot and scene to scene as if tracing crudely covered wounds, the unhealed scars from the amputation of vital parts of the soul. Yet the movie isn’t only an accusation; it’s a self-accusation, a story of William as an all-too-apt candidate for the job he was given at Abu Ghraib. His guilt issues not only from what he did but also from who he is, from the recognition that his propensity for sadistic violence and indifference to suffering was already there, within him, merely awaiting activation. Whereas Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper” suggested that martial virtue is too precious to be squandered on an unnecessary war, “The Card Counter” goes further, implying that the sense of military pride and nationalistic principle that drove Americans such as William to enlist in the wake of 9/11 contained the seeds of the war’s crimes, and that the effort was bound to be perverted by the self-serving figures in power.

One of Schrader’s crucial symbolic gestures in “The Card Counter” involves his protagonist’s pseudonym: William Tell, of course, is the hero of Swiss legend who won his fame as an expert marksman not only for the intrepid feat of shooting an apple off his son’s head with an arrow but, above all, for killing the tyrannical official who’d cruelly forced him to do so. On the other hand, Tillich is the name of a celebrated Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich, an anti-Nazi German who, when Hitler came to power, emigrated to the United States. In effect, “The Card Counter” is the story of how a Tillich becomes a Tell—how a principled person endures in an indecent regime, how a person on a spiritual quest is compelled by circumstances to transform that passion into revolutionary violence. “The Card Counter” isn’t advocating any such thing; Schrader isn’t relying on his characters as mouthpieces. Rather, the violence is a metaphor that reveals a society-wide pathology in simplified and clarified form, and also the complicity in unspeakable acts that every American shares.

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By Louis Menand

By Inkoo Kang

By Andrew Marantz

A Film That Draws You Into a Frightening—And Compelling—Psyche

In The Card Counter , William Tell is a poker player living a carefully controlled life. He’s also tortured by memories of his past as a prison guard in Iraq.

In The Card Counter , William Tell (played by Oscar Isaac) keeps his emotions under strict control. He’s a poker player, and the slightest facial expression could give away his hand. William’s life is equally circumscribed: He travels around the country from casino to casino, subsisting on low-stakes games and doing nothing to draw attention to himself. Every time he checks into an anonymous motel, he wraps each piece of furniture in white sheets, imposing additional invisibility on his already bland surroundings. In short, William is a complete mystery—except for when he writes in his diary every night.

The film is written and directed by Paul Schrader, the great chronicler of American antiheroes who wrestle with their dark thoughts, typically in journals. He used this storytelling device in his previous film, the electrifying First Reformed , which starred Ethan Hawke as a priest struggling to reconcile his faith with the existential threat of climate change. Perhaps Schrader’s most famous protagonist, Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver (which Schrader wrote and Martin Scorsese directed), also kept a journal of disturbing thoughts. The motif is specific, but the filmmaker deploys it to great effect: slowly drawing the audience into the psyche of a man who grows more frightening—and more compelling—the more you learn about him.

The Card Counter is an impressive character study, which Isaac surely relished after his recent work in franchises such as Star Wars and X-Men . But much as with First Reformed , Schrader uses Isaac’s character to examine broader horrors—this time, the cruel legacies of the War on Terror. William, it’s revealed, served as a prison guard and interrogator at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq. His ascetic life is an attempt to impose order on the painful messiness of his memories.

The first glimpse of Abu Ghraib comes fairly early, after Schrader has introduced William’s meticulous routine on the road. The ultrawide fish-eye lens used to film the flashbacks makes the prison’s walls look like they stretch on to infinity. Visually, these memories are chaotic. The acts of brutal torture that William was forced to commit are presented as warped nightmares, suggesting a total loss of control—and making the stakes of maintaining composure in his new life even higher. Although his poker-playing persona is often chilly, his quiet skill at the game is the strongest psychological defense he has against his prior sins overwhelming him.

That sense of order is eventually shattered: Two different characters threaten to divert him from his narrow existence. First he’s approached by the canny, bubbly La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), who wants to turn William into a star on the gambling circuit. Then Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a scraggly haired youth in shorts and flip-flops, claims he’s the son of one of William’s compatriots at Abu Ghraib, and beseeches him to plot revenge against one of the prison’s evil administrators, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe).

William is literally offered two paths—one to legitimacy and another to vengeance. Schrader wrangles real tension out of which route he’ll take, if he takes one at all. The Card Counter is hardly action-filled; it doesn’t need to be. The fascination lies in unpacking the psyche of its main character, who is ashamed by the hurt he caused but also knows the perils of trying to assuage his guilt by retaliating. La Linda represents the temptation of normalcy, a chance to reemerge with a clean slate. Meanwhile, William becomes a father figure to Cirk, trying to steer the boy away from repeating his mistakes.

William’s hope for his own salvation, however, is tempered. Schrader has never been an optimistic storyteller, and The Card Counter is a mostly tragic tale, though it is tinged with hopeful notes throughout. And Haddish’s excellent supporting performance offers some necessary (and acidic) humor in an otherwise self-serious narrative. William is a strong character on his own, but he is also a metaphor for America’s struggle to overcome its grimmest failures and to break free from cycles of violence. Schrader understands that those are nigh-impossible tasks; still, he shows the value in trying nonetheless.

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Tiffany Haddish and Oscar Isaac Are So Off-Kilter Hot Together in The Card Counter

The first time images from Abu Ghraib appear in The Card Counter , it’s as though the screen has ruptured and something terrible it had been holding back has spilled out. The Card Counter is a film about professional gambling, which is to say that it’s a film that takes place almost entirely in regionless anyplaces like the floors of casinos, the interiors of roadside eateries, and the anonymous motel rooms its protagonist, who goes by the name William Tell (Oscar Isaac), prefers for the night. William has secrets, of course — one of the first things we’re told about him is that he learned to count cards during a ten-year incarceration — but being aware of that doesn’t prepare you for the full-on sensory assault of his memories of his time committing atrocities in that Iraq prison. They spew out in sequences shot with an extreme wide-angle lens that makes whatever horror is directly in front of the camera lurch forward while turning the world into a maze. Heavy metal, the soundtrack of “enhanced interrogation,” blares, a technique that works on its afflicters as well as the afflicted. When Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a kid William takes under his wing, tunes the car radio to something guitar-heavy, William shuts the music off, telling him, “If you’ve actually ever been there, you’d never want to hear that shit again.”

The Card Counter , a compact thriller (of sorts), is the new film from Paul Schrader, a writer and director whose interest in tormented, solitary men extends back to his screenplay for Taxi Driver . William’s particular brand of solitary torment places him somewhere between First Reformed ’s Ernst Toller, the moody minister with whom he shares a whiskey-and-journaling habit, and Alain Delon in Le Samouraï , with whom he shares an austere cool. What makes The Card Counter so delicious, aside from the Mad Libs quality of the way it connects card playing and government-sanctioned torture, is that the movie undermines the Spartan swagger of William’s half-existence as often as it basks in it. When William sees the mess Cirk has made of the hotel room he’s been staying in, he asks, “You live like this?” Later, when Cirk gets a look at how William habitually covers and wraps everything in the rooms he rents with white throw cloths, as though camping out in a house that’s been closed for the season, he returns the question.

La Linda, played by Tiffany Haddish, finds financial backers for players on the pro circuit who need to be staked, and even she finds William’s commitment excessive, teasing him about how he should go out to a park once in a while. Haddish, who doesn’t have many non-comedic roles under her belt, is given a femme fatale’s entrance that doesn’t suit her, and the first salvos between her and Isaac (“That’s what you do, you run a stable?” “I’m always looking for a good thoroughbred”) are unpromisingly awkward. Haddish is too implicitly warm a screen presence to match the severity Isaac comes into the film exuding, and she labors with some of the stylized banter she’s given. But the two actors have an affinity for one another that’s impossible to ignore, and their characters’ flirtations are hot in a wonderfully off-kilter way. Rather than become an accessory to William’s guilt-ridden itinerancy, La Linda makes it look like it’s as much an affectation as his nemesis on the poker circuit, a Ukrainian player who wears the stars and stripes and chants “U-S-A! U-S-A!” whenever he knocks someone out at the table. She forces William to break character, and in doing so, to acknowledge the element of kayfabe in the subsistence he’s chosen for himself.

William’s guilt and rage are real, but if his memories of the military are a hellscape, his card playing is a purgatory in which he can avoid dealing with his past. La Linda and Cirk, in different ways, require him to start engaging again — La Linda because she represents the promise of a real life, and Cirk because he reminds William of himself. Cirk is a college dropout who’s become fixated on killing John Gordo (Willem Dafoe, dripping menacing smarm), the major turned private contractor who trained his father, and who trained William, at Abu Ghraib. While William was jailed for what he did, Cirk’s father was dishonorably discharged and went on to become an abusive alcoholic who killed himself. Cirk’s drive for revenge is clearly born out of a desire to identify a single source of his pain — a vaguely thought-out plan to install grandeur and purpose into a life going nowhere. William recognizes the puerility of Cirk’s dead-end mission, and without acknowledging the degree it’s also his, dedicates himself to helping the young man move on. The Card Counter takes place in a punishing world of windowless casinos, hotel ballrooms, and highways devoid of scenery — a vision of the America used to justify the actions that now so traumatize William, that is intentionally bereft of poetry until La Linda takes William to a park illuminated by Christmas lights. If it’s not a country worth losing your soul for, it’s also not one that will pay any mind to a life spent wallowing in angst over it, either.

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The Card Counter Review

05 Nov 2021

The Card Counter

Aptly enough,  The Card Counter  is a film that keeps its cards close to its chest. What is this slow-burn study of a soldier-turned-gambler really about? Being a movie by revered writer-director Paul Schrader , it unsurprisingly centres on a solitary male loner who diarises their existence from an empty room: Oscar Isaac ’s enigmatic protagonist here falls into a tradition that stretches from troubled pastor Ernst Toller in 2017’s  First Reformed , all the way back to Travis Bickle in the Schrader-written  Taxi Driver . At first glance, it looks like a new entry in the forgotten genre of gambling dramas: there are shades of Robert Altman’s  California Split  here, with Isaac decked out in a jacket straight off the shoulders of Steve McQueen in  The Cincinnati Kid . But  The Card Counter ’s set-up turns out to be a sublime sleight of hand. The closer it gets to its pulsating conclusion, the clearer it is that this is a movie less about betting it all on black, and more about the black moral heart of America’s war machine.

Isaac is engrossing as William Tell, a former army officer trained in “advanced interrogation” (aka torture). We meet him with that life seemingly long behind him: as the film inches forward, we learn that he served jail time for posing for a photograph while humiliating a prisoner in a Guantanamo-like facility, emerging the other side a professional poker player. But clues soon emerge of a man marked by regret and a simmering lust for revenge. It was a private contractor named John Gordo ( Willem Dafoe ) who put him on a path towards violence but went unpunished himself, to Tell’s despair. One day, Tell meets a young college dropout called Cirk Baufort, played by  Ready Player One ’s Tye Sheridan . Baufort is on a mission to kidnap Gordo, and requests help from Tell. Instead, Tell attempts to put the youngster on the straight and narrow, inviting him on the road.

Reaffirms Schrader as a master of stories involving morally ambiguous men concealing ready-to-erupt inner lives

What ensues is a tense plot littered with stomach-churning flashbacks to Tell’s military days. Schrader directs with a confidence equal to Card Counter executive producer Martin Scorsese , sprinkling in evocative imagery, such as Tell covering every appliance in his motel rooms in paper (a quirk that’s never explained). He also expertly layers in subtext: one of Tell’s poker rivals is a stars-and-stripes-wearing patriot, whose chants of, “USA! USA!” echo frequently in the back of scenes, underlining this story as a treatise on American vulgarity.

The film has a few more blemishes than the near-flawless  First Reformed . Tiffany Haddish has a somewhat thin role as Tell’s love interest, with the pair’s chemistry never quite igniting. But as a challenging inquiry into the degree to which we can absolve ourselves of our past sins, it reaffirms Schrader as a master-crafter of stories involving morally ambiguous men concealing ready-to-erupt inner lives. In 2002, Spike Lee released  25th Hour  — since championed as one of the defining movies of the September 11 attacks, despite being on the surface a film about something else entirely.  The Card Counter  might just be the Iraq War’s equivalent — capturing the guilt and ugliness of that conflict, if not the events themselves.

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Movies | 27 07 2021

The Card Counter Deals a Clever Hand With Killer Performances

Directed and written by Paul Schrader, The Card Counter is a high-intensity film about guilt and redemption with stellar cast performances.

Written and directed by Paul Schrader ( First Reformed ),  The Card Counter is a deceptively deep film that uses the traditional trappings of poker/gambling films to explore bigger questions around guilt, trauma, and the choices we make to contend with both. Bolstered by a small and impressive cast, and anchored by an impressive performance from Star Wars star Oscar Isaac,  The Card Counter is a dark but ultimately engaging film to experience.

The Card Counter focuses on William Tell ( Oscar Isaac ), a gambler who lives a modest life traveling and playing low-stakes games of cards. Moving from casino to casino, state to state, entirely by choice, Tell is a quiet and unassuming man. Still reeling from his own trauma and guilt over his criminal past, Tell finds himself with an unlikely chance to, in his eyes, earn redemption when he discovers Cirk (Tye Sheridan) -- a young man full of anger who shares an unlikely connection with him and a former associate, John Gordo (Willem Dafoe). To that end, Tell travels across the country with Cirk as he earns them money in higher-stakes tournaments, thanks to the help of a poker player-manager, La Linda ( Tiffany Hadish ).

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There's a lot about  The Card Counter that's worth unpacking and exploring, but to reveal too much removes much of the tension and discovery at the heart of the film. Tell is a compelling creation, caught between wanting to open up and shut himself away from the world. Grounded by a tremendous performance by Isaac, what could have been forgettable minor moments are elevated by his portrayal of a fearful man wanting to atone. The film is largely focused on him, with Sheridan and Haddish playing well off of Isaac's natural intensity and charm. Sheridan's performance is the perfect blend of youthful and haunted, while Haddish elevates a relatively one-note character with a frequently entertaining performance.

As with Schrader's Academy Award-nominated  First Reformed , Schrader's writing is at its best when it focuses on smaller character beats and their resulting interactions. While the poker mechanics and overall narrative are well-constructed, the sequences where the two performers face-off and showcase their talents are marvelous. Some of the scenes between Isaac and Sheridan showcase just how quickly Isaac can alternate between terrifying and tragic. The film is also directed with some genuine panache by Schrader, who spices up smaller scenes with long takes, camera tricks, and a late-film light show that's marvelous.

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The Card Counter isn't a film that pulls any punches. It confronts dark topics and explores them with real attention to the growth of William Tell as a character. Tell becomes a cipher meant for the audience to come to terms with some  very heavy events in real life. Notably, while it does take a defined stance on those real-life inspirations, the film isn't necessarily about them so much as the question of whether or not it's possible for someone to make up for the choices and actions of the past. This choice is a far more compelling and impressive take.

Since it's such an introspective film by nature, it's not necessarily the most high-stakes narrative in the world. But the script is so keenly focused on the ways we confront our past and how we can try to affect our futures -- for the better or the worse -- that it remains interesting and engaging throughout its runtime.  The Card Counter is a well-made, dark film that's elevated by a phenomenal cast that benefits from its hyper-focused story-telling.

The Card Counter, written and directed by Paul Schrader, comes to theaters on Sept. 10

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The card counter, common sense media reviewers.

Powerful, intensely personal drama has strong violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Clear theme of going above and beyond to help othe

Will Tell is a fascinating character, and some of

One of the three main characters is a Black woman

Fairly brief but unrelentingly intense images of t

Two characters have sex; kissing shown, but no exp

Strong language includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "

Alcoholic drinks are ordered by brand name: Tanque

Many scenes of drinking (hard liquor), mostly at h

Parents need to know that The Card Counter is an intense, rigid, fiercely personal drama about revenge by filmmaker Paul Schrader ( First Reformed ). It includes nightmarish images/memories of torture in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, with injuries, humiliation, full-frontal male nudity (not in any way…

Positive Messages

Clear theme of going above and beyond to help others, but in the end movie is mainly about revenge, mistakes made, and lives gone too far off track.

Positive Role Models

Will Tell is a fascinating character, and some of his lessons about gambling could apply to real life. He decides to use his skills to help another person, to raise money to pay off debts and get him into college, turning him away from a path that would lead to revenge and violence. Unfortunately, Will's good intentions don't pay off; he winds up on a road to violence and revenge himself.

Diverse Representations

One of the three main characters is a Black woman with agency and her own story. She has made a success of herself in her field, which involves gambling. She is part of a tender, loving interracial romance.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Fairly brief but unrelentingly intense images of torture involving naked men, beating/kicking, attack dogs, people being tied up and/or forced to stay in uncomfortable positions, loud/violent music, humiliation, etc. A character is beaten and bloodied, with fingers broken, etc. A character kills another in the name of revenge. During a fight in a prison, one man punches another in the face several times; bloody teeth, injured eye. Guns shown. News report of character shot and killed. House on fire. Sounds of torture, beating, screaming. Threats. Verbal descriptions of horrors witnessed. Disturbing newsreel footage.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two characters have sex; kissing shown, but no explicit nudity. Sex-related dialogue. Brief, full-frontal nonsexual male nudity during torture sequences.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "motherf----r," "a--hole," "p---y," "bitch," "d--k," "pr--k," "piss," "balls," "farts."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Alcoholic drinks are ordered by brand name: Tanqueray, Johnnie Walker, etc.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Many scenes of drinking (hard liquor), mostly at hotel bars and in social settings. Main character drinks a glass of whiskey alone in a hotel room, never appears drunk. Cigarette smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Card Counter is an intense, rigid, fiercely personal drama about revenge by filmmaker Paul Schrader ( First Reformed ). It includes nightmarish images/memories of torture in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, with injuries, humiliation, full-frontal male nudity (not in any way sexualized), loud and violent music, etc. Characters are killed, beaten, and bloodied, with broken fingers, etc. Guns are shown, and characters are killed. There are also violent sounds and upsetting verbal descriptions of violence. Language includes many uses of "f--k," "s--t," "a--hole," and more. Two characters kiss and have sex, but nothing explicit is shown; there's also some sex-related dialogue. Characters drink frequently and casually at hotel bars and alone; some also smoke cigarettes. The movie certainly won't be for everyone, but its artistry and depth make it highly recommended for mature viewers. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (3)

Based on 3 parent reviews

Mesmerizing performances

Moral ambiguity narrative, what's the story.

In THE CARD COUNTER, Will Tell ( Oscar Isaac ) is a meticulous, immaculate gambler who travels from one casino to another, covering everything in his hotel rooms with white sheets and winning just enough money to live on without calling attention to himself. He does all this, perhaps, to escape the memories of working as a torturer at Abu Ghraib prison. A woman named La Linda ( Tiffany Haddish ) offers to bring him into a "stable," where he'll work with backers and earn more money. At another hotel, Will meets a young man named Cirk ( Tye Sheridan ). He learns that Cirk is the son of a man who also worked at Abu Ghraib and whose life was ruined because of it; Cirk wants revenge on the former commanding officer ( Willem Dafoe ). But Will decides to take La Linda up on her offer and raise money to get Cirk's life back on track.

Is It Any Good?

Writer-director Paul Schrader has made an intense, rigid, fiercely personal drama that may seem out of place to some modern moviegoers but reaffirms the artistry of cinema. Certainly, The Card Counter (like Schrader's previous First Reformed ) will be a hard sell, especially to viewers who aren't familiar with the director's hero, French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901–1999), whom he's emulating here. In films like A Man Escaped and Pickpocket , Bresson used an austere style with very little animation in his cast's performances (he referred to actors as "models") as a way to uncover deeper meanings in his images. Schrader succeeds beautifully in ahdering to this method, even if, for some, his work will be hard to decipher. It may not always make emotional sense for the characters to do what they're doing, for example, but it works symbolically.

In addition to The Card Counter 's many strikingly considered and composed shots of hotels and gambling rooms, Schrader creates other haunting images that are carefully layered in. There's the hotel room eerily covered in white sheets, the garden of lights that Will and La Linda wander through one night, the red-white-and-blue-clad gambler who chants "U.S.A.!" every time he wins, and especially the horrific, deliberately nightmarish scenes of Abu Ghraib, shot with a special lens that makes everything feel rolling and off-kilter. The final image in The Card Counter , both uncomfortable and beautiful, will send viewers out into the world knowing that they've really seen something.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Card Counter 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

What is the movie's message? What does it have to say about the use of torture during war? How does gambling tie in?

How does the film use techniques like camera angles, lighting, and music to provoke emotion?

How is sex depicted? Is it respectful? Loving? What values are imparted?

How is drinking depicted? Is it glamorized, as part of the whole atmosphere of gambling? Does anyone ever appear to drink too much? Are there consequences for drinking? Why does that matter?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 10, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : September 30, 2021
• Cast : Oscar Isaac , Tye Sheridan , Tiffany Haddish
• Director : Paul Schrader
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 109 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, language and brief sexuality
• Last updated : September 17, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

First Reformed

Zero Dark Thirty

The Gambler

Mississippi Grind

Molly's Game

Indie films, cult classics.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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The Card Counter review – don’t bet on it

Oscar Isaac’s fine performance as an enigmatic gambler is wasted in Paul Schrader’s somewhat sloppy drama

W ith its troubled loner protagonist prowling a sleazy nocturnal underworld, this grimy tale of an ex-con turned professional gambler is archetypal Paul Schrader material. And in Oscar Isaac ’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

Isaac’s character – he calls himself “Bill”, but the anonymous name, like everything else about him, is designed not to leave a trace – is a man of habit. Constantly on the move, he operates at the low-stakes end of the gambling circuit. But despite his under the radar approach, two people notice him. La Linda (Tiffany Haddish, miscast and ill at ease in the role) sees his potential and attempts to recruit him to her stable of gamblers. And Cirk (Tye Sheridan), a rootless kid with a half-formed plan, hopes to persuade him to seek revenge on a mutual enemy. Instead, Bill invites Cirk to join him on the casino circuit.

That the film leaves us with questions is not, in itself, a bad thing. But scenes that go nowhere – an abortive visit to a character in prison, for example – together with devices that are clearly included for their visual impact rather than the credibility of Bill’s character ultimately undermine the integrity of the storytelling.

• Drama films
• The Observer
• Paul Schrader
• Oscar Isaac
• Tiffany Haddish

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Card Counter’ on HBO Max, Starring Oscar Isaac as a Tall, Dark, Handsome and Deeply Disturbed Gambler

Where to stream:.

• The Card Counter
• Oscar Isaac

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Are we amidst Paul Schrader’s creative renaissance? After 2017’s masterful First Reformed , the writer/director appears to be back in the graces of Hollywood prestige, following a period marked by lost, forgotten and/or undervalued features (and nutty Lindsay Lohan vehicle The Canyons ). His latest is The Card Counter — now on HBO Max — in which Oscar Isaac plays a career gambler whose austere facade shelters a few demons. Of course it hides a few demons — this is a Paul Schrader film, after all. It’s just a matter of which shade of darkness he’s plumbing this time around.

THE CARD COUNTER : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: His name is William Tell (Isaac), but he has no tells. In voiceover, he explains how he learned to count cards while he was in prison. Once, he yearned to roam free, but he adjusted just fine to the confinements of incarceration. (Curious.) He’s out now, a man without a permanent home, traveling the country, visiting casinos to play blackjack and poker. This is his living. We meet him as he takes a modest $750 in winnings. He’s OK with low-stakes games, because he knows casinos are OK with card counters who don’t win too big. He doesn’t say much. He wears a sleek suit jacket and pants and an impenetrable glower, eschewing the hoodies, sunglasses or goofy outsized personae of other pro gamblers. Those are just distractions — he’s a purist, it seems. What are his tells? Does he have any? He may not have any.

William checks into a motel room, takes the pictures off the wall, unplugs the clock and phone, and meticulously wraps all the furniture in white sheets and twine. Interesting. Peculiar. Only adds to his pod-person vibes. But probably not a bad idea when you’re staying at the $65-a-night Super 8. He writes in his journal and sips whisky and goes to sleep and has distorted fisheye-lens nightmares about a military torture prison where inmates clamber naked through human feces and crouch in excruciatingly painful positions while excoriating heavy metal blares. Does that explain it? William’s idiosyncrasies? Perhaps. Is anything ever so easily explained? After a few hands, he sees a familiar face: La Linda (Tiffany Haddish). She’s been around the tables. She runs a “stable” for pro gamblers; her backers put up the dough and he gets a cut of the winnings. He’s not interested. She asks him why he gambles. “It passes the time,” he says.

William’s next stop is a casino where a law-enforcement conference is taking place. He drops into a seminar fronted by Gordo (Willem Dafoe), listens to a spiel. Cirk (Tye Sheridan), pronounced “Kirk,” recognizes William as the guy who took the fall for Gordo when Gordo was shouting orders at his underlings at Abu Ghraib. (Aha!) Cirk spells it out to William: He carries a major grudge. He wants Gordo dead. The situation inspires — awakens? — something in William. He changes his loner-life tack and not only invites Cirk to travel along with him from casino to casino, but agrees to La Linda’s proposal. Why the change of heart? He wants to earn some dough to help Cirk straighten his life out, he tells La Linda. There also may be a romantic spark between this charming woman and mysterious man. This mysterious man whose motives are so difficult to ascertain.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: “It passes the time,” William says. “I drive,” Ryan Gosling says in Drive . “Someday a rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets,” Robert De Niro says in Taxi Driver .

Performance Worth Watching: Isaac’s on full simmer here. He plays a pressure cooker of a human being, darkness within, deeply conflicted, scary-handsome, handsomely scary, terrifyingly charismatic, charismatically terrifying.

Memorable Dialogue: “You just go around and around ’til you work things out.” — William

Sex and Skin: One tastefully rendered sex scene; male nudity during a scene of torture.

Our Take: The Card Counter is not a typical gambling movie. Of course it’s not. Schrader shows no interest in the usual poker-table dramatics; his protagonist is a mathematician, and I imagine watching him play is akin to looking over the shoulder of someone working out quadratic equations. What he does in casinos is barely even gambling, and frankly, lousy quasi-noir movie fodder. Far more engaging is spending time with a man who has no permanent address and drives from one place to the next, following a borderline-deranged personal regimen, trying to strike a balance between the piece of him that’s capable of torturing people, and the piece that cares about his fellow humans.

Schrader directs the film with exacting control, its visual rigor contrasting his protagonist, seemingly concocted to inspire inferences. Why the name William Tell (as in the overture, and shooting an apple off a child’s head)? Why does he keep a handwritten journal? Why the sheets and the twine? Why is he celibate? Why does he feel the need to take an aimless slob of a college-age kid under his wing? Amusingly, he strikes a deal with Cirk: If the kid calls his estranged mother, he promises to get laid. William’s demeanor finds common ground between earnest concern for Cirk, and a crepuscular shadow of the soul inspiring a queasy feeling, leaving us to wonder if this is how Dahmer groomed the poor souls who ended up in his freezer. The film is a character study and a collection of provocations spinning out myriad interpretations, one of which sure seems to be how America creates damaged men like William — and Taxi Driver ’s Vietnam vet Travis Bickle — by drawing out their most despicable tendencies.

So we spend much of the film trying to put our thumb on a character who’s coated with petroleum jelly, but it’s an endeavor that’s far more fascinating than frustrating. William Tell is right in line with Schrader’s broken loners like Travis Bickle and First Reformed ’s Rev. Toller, desperate men searching for a place for themselves in the world. Schrader takes the subject matter seriously, but also stands at enough of an emotional remove to acknowledge the absurdity not just of the scenario, but existence itself, in the movie and in reality. It’s a harrowing drama and a sly comedy, the narrative progressing with equal amounts of uncertainty and inevitability, through moments of beauty and brutality, and concluding with a final (and dare I say transcendent?) shot held suspended in time. This isn’t just provocation for its own sake, it’s provocation with intent.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Card Counter doesn’t offer much resembling traditional dramatic resolution, and if you’re expecting otherwise, then you haven’t seen a movie by Schrader, who routinely sets his characters on crazy, unsettling paths to redemption.

Will you stream or skip Paul Schrader's #TheCardCounter on VOD? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) November 15, 2021

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

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‘Tarot’ Review: A Cursed Card Game Leaves No Horror Cliché Unturned

Co-directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg deliver a 'Final Destination' knockoff neutered of its intensity — and its creativity.

By Todd Gilchrist

Todd Gilchrist

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Set in a world where every door creaks and there isn’t a single well-lit location, “ Tarot ” is little more than a clearinghouse of horror clichés.

Popular on Variety

Grief-stricken, the remaining survivors gather to make sense of the loss, but after a second friend passes away, Haley, Paxton and the rest begin to suspect that the deaths aren’t pure coincidence. When they cross-reference the events that led their friends to their doom, Haley identifies that the tarot readings she gave directly delineated their fates — which tells her that the rest of them will also die in the near future. As they attempt to decode the cryptic sequences she described, ghostly figures begin to appear, threatening and chasing them into life-threatening situations. They eventually enlist the help of an occult expert, Ms. Astryn (Olwen Fouéré), who informs the quickly-shrinking group that they must find a way to break the curse that’s been placed on them.

The explanation for the cursed deck, and for these teens to fall victim to it, makes basic (if cinematic) sense: an astrologer (Suncica Milanovic) exacts revenge for a personal betrayal over centuries, and the present-day kids are too young and dumb not to pay attention to an actual warning sign. But other than “the Catskills” as the site of the haunted mansion, where do these college students live? Not only are their supposed dorms completely empty of other people (roommates are spoken about but never seen, and background extras are nonexistent), but they’re all creaky, dark and run-down.

The traditional visual language of horror movies has long since become boilerplate, but what the better of the genre’s filmmakers know, or hopefully learn, is that creating an uninterrupted dour and “scary” atmosphere exerts a flattening effect on the audience. Here, there’s no relief from the ambient menace of supernatural forces, and as a result, watching these characters walk yet again into a shadow-filled hallway becomes not increasingly suspenseful but tedious.

The other particularly overused tool in Cohen and Halberg’s arsenal is the extremely loud and sudden noise — about half of the most intense moments in the film pay off because the audience is startled, not frightened. Jump scares can be effective if they’re deployed sparingly, but here, they feel too often like a Band-Aid for lackluster storytelling or camera angles, the latter of which too frequently feature mysterious figures rushing around in the space between the characters and the camera.

It would be easy to blame the film’s teen-friendly rating for its underwhelming impact, especially when each character’s death feels neutered of viscera; even hit by a subway train or sawed into pieces, the blood and violence is always disembodied. But last year’s “The Boogeyman” was also PG-13, and even if it didn’t quite have the oomph of some of its more grown-up counterparts, it never made viewers feel like the film was wearing training wheels.

Despite the film’s stylistic limitations, a freshly scrubbed young adult cast sells more of its ideas than would otherwise work. Playing the film’s resident astrology aficionado, Slater is saddled with some truly howl-worthy dialogue, but she almost makes viewers believe that Haley is as haunted as her loss-filled backstory suggests. And Adain Bradley, playing Haley’s recent ex-boyfriend Grant, makes a meal out of his character’s hunky, well-meaning obliviousness. Batalon, meanwhile, probably needs to find a role a bit further away from his “Spider-Man” sidekick Ned Leeds (maybe something non-comedic) than the motor-mouthed nerd, Paxton, but he exudes a similar charm as the film’s provider of comic relief.

Reviewed at Sony Pictures Studios, Los Angeles, May 2, 2024. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 92 MIN.

• Production: A Screen Gems release and presentation of an Alloy Entertainment production, in association with Ground Control. Producers: Leslie Morgenstein, Elysa Koplovitz Dutton, Scott Glassgold. Executive producers: Andrew Pfeffer, Scott Strauss, Anna Halberg, Spenser Cohen
• Crew: Directors: Spenser Cohen, Anna Halburg. Screenplay: Spenser Cohen, Anna Halburg, based on "Horrorscope" by Nicholas Adams. Camera: Elie Smolkin. Editor: Tom Elkins. Music: Joseph Bishara.
• With: Harriet Slater, Adain Bradley, Avantika, Wolfgang Novogratz, Humberly González, Larsen Thompson, Jacob Batalon.
• Music By: Joseph Bishara

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