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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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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.

Movie Interviews

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.

'It Was Torture': An Abu Ghraib Interrogator Acknowledges 'Horrible Mistakes'

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.

How Movies Have Shaped The Perception Of 9/11

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’ Review: In Paul Schrader’s Card-Sharp Noir, Oscar Isaac Is a Gambler Grappling with America’s Guilt

Like Schrader's "First Reformed," it tucks a topical firecracker into a pulp version of Robert Bresson.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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I’m a sucker for card-sharp movies, and I’m not alone. The allure of films like “The Cincinnati Kid” or “California Split” or “Rounders” is that the poker games have the quality of athletic showdowns: the kind of hand-to-hand, eyeball-to-eyeball aggression we associate with a contest taking place in a gladiatorial arena. But in a card movie, it’s all done sitting in chairs, with mental acuity (and fate!) as the only weapon. Great poker scenes, in their slyly civilized cards-close-to-the-vest way, formalize the desire to destroy your opponent, but they’re also layered with a drive to psych him out that most combat scenes don’t have. To me, the single greatest movie card sequence is the Texas hold ’em tournament at the center of “Casino Royale.” It’s a little movie unto itself, and the currents of strategy and malevolence and sheer nimble play that pass between Daniel Craig and Mads Mikkelsen make the sequence an epic of existential suspense.

In “ The Card Counter ,” the writer-director Paul Schrader moves into this genre with consummate ease and skill. A great poker sequence makes you feel like you’re seated at the table, at the heady center of the action, and “The Card Counter” gives you that sensation. The central character, who goes by the poker-faced pseudonym of William Tell (there’s a good reason he’s hiding his real name), is played with slicked-back silver-black hair and svelte control by Oscar Isaac . He’s a lonely-man drifter who spends his life driving from one casino to the next, ordering his double whiskeys neat and slipping in and out of the card tables with barely conspicuous purpose. He’ll drop by a gambling palace in A.C. (Atlantic City), but mostly he takes advantage of the gaming-ization of Middle America, moving through the desultory, high-ceilinged spaces of anonymous suburban fun parlors with names like the Golden Nugget.

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Tell essentially makes his living as a blackjack player, and at the beginning he explains to the audience how card-counting works: how the house has the advantage in blackjack, but that if you’re able to categorize the cards by value and count every one of them, you can flip the advantage to yourself. No one ever points out that the rules against card-counting in blackjack aren’t just unconstitutional — they’re patently absurd. Because, of course, card-counting is at the heart of how you win at all card games. (That’s certainly true of poker.) Card-counting isn’t cheating — it’s basic strategy.

That said, Tell, who’s a master card counter, not only has a foolproof system for winning. He has figured out how to fly under the radar. As he tells one character, the house doesn’t really care if you count cards and win. It just doesn’t want you winning too much . So Tell wins just enough to stay out of sight, walking away with a modest profit. He doesn’t stay at the casino hotels; he rents bargain-basement motel rooms nearby, so the casino can’t track his movements or anything else about him. It’s a life that sustains him; it’s one he likes. (He’s like George Clooney in “Up in the Air” as a moody noir antihero.) But it’s also an existence he uses like a drug, to numb himself to what’s really going on.

“The Card Counter” starts off as a pretty good poker movie — but, of course, it’s not really a poker movie. It’s a Paul Schrader movie, which means that it’s got much more on its mind than watching a straight flush beat a full house. At first, the film seems very different from his last major feature, “First Reformed,” though it’s actually a companion piece to it. “First Reformed” won Schrader some of the best reviews of his career (along with his first Oscar nomination), so it’s no surprise to see that, consciously or not, he has used it as a kind of template for what he does here. Where “First Reformed” was a gripping (and knowing) pastiche, casting Ethan Hawke as a contempo cross between the heroes of “Winter Light” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” the movie had a topical firecracker at its center. It was a spiritual investigation into environmental catastrophe — not the usual Hollywood lecture on climate change but a drama that asked, “What is our collective downplaying of this issue doing to us?” Schrader seduced a new generation of cinephiles by detonating that issue, turning it into moral dynamite (quite literally in the final scene).

In “The Card Counter,” too, Schrader sets up a heady thriller framework and embeds it with a topical issue that’s like an open wound, a scar on our national psyche. In this case, the issue is that of state-sanctioned torture in the period after 9/11. Tell, as it turns out, is a former military man who participated in the enhanced-interrogation-technique torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He was photographed in “joke” shots he took with the prisoners (like the grinning, thumbs-up images of Lynndie England), and when the photos came to light, he was made a fall guy for America’s torture policy, treated as a “bad apple” who needed to be punished. He was sent to the penitentiary at Leavenworth for eight-and-a-half years, which is where he learned to play cards.

Schrader flashes back to scenes of torture at Abu Ghraib, and they’re some of the most scaldingly powerful to be put on film. The director shoots them with an extreme wide-angle lens (almost a fisheye), sending his camera rolling through the prison corridors, and though we’ve seen a number of serious — and very effective — movie dramas that have confronted the reality of American torture policy (like “The Report” and last year’s “The Mauritanian”), Schrader evokes the horror of it in a frightening new way, dunking our senses in the heat and the scum, the bodily fluids, the death-metal relentlessness that turned a place like Abu Ghraib into a fetid version of hell. He depicts America’s post-9/11 torture policy the way that “Son of Saul” depicted the Holocaust: as the grotesque moral and physical horror it was. In his scuzzy motel rooms, Tell wraps every piece of furniture — the lamps, the desks, the bed ­— in white cloths. Is this a form of OCD? In a way. But it’s ethical OCD. He’s trying to cleanse the memory of the slime inferno.

At this point you may ask: “The Card Counter” is a poker movie…and a torture movie? How do those two things fit together? Schrader draws them together by staging a right-wing hotel-expo encounter between Tell and his former overseer at Abu Ghraib, Major John Gordo, played by Willem Dafoe as a skeevy opportunist with a mustache like a giant sardine. At the same expo, Tell meets Kirk-with-a-C (Tye Sheridan), the twentysomething son of another torturer, and winds up taking him under his wing. The two drive around together on the casino racket, in a way that may remind you, at times, of Paul Newman and Tom Cruise in “The Color of Money.” Except that in this case I didn’t totally buy Tell’s motivation. He wants to help the kid; he wants to pay off his loans; he wants him to be a better version of himself. It’s hardly unheard of for a movie character to behave in a benevolent way, but what Tell is up to can be explained only in abstract “Bressonian” terms. He’s trying to Expiate His Guilt (which is really America’s guilt). He’s living on autopilot until he confronts what he’s been repressing.

Tiffany Haddish plays La Linda, the poker matchmaker who represents wealthy investors who will back Tell in high-stakes games, and Haddish, with a playfully cynical warm sparkle, brings a note of ironic hope to the movie it can use. She and Isaac have a sexy, noodgy chemistry; La Linda gives Tell something to live for. But I wish that Dafoe’s Gordo were a grander antagonist, and that he was dealt with in a more explosively charged, less symbolic way. Gordo, of course, is just a stooge who represents something larger: the corrupt superstructure that allowed America, in the wake of 9/11, to trash its own values. Tell, likewise, represents our collective desire for absolution. But part of the beauty of poker is that it doesn’t represent anything. It’s just a game. “The Card Counter” is a good game that forgets it’s a game by working so hard to be a statement.

Reviewed at Park Ave. Screening Room (Venice Film Festival), Aug. 26, 2021. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 119 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Saturn Streaming, Astrakan Film AB, Redline Entertainment production, in association with LB Entertainment, Enriched Media Group Limited and Grandave Capital, One Two Twenty Entertainment. 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.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Paul Schrader. Camera: Alexander Dynan. Editor: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. Music: Robert Levon Been, Giancarlo Vulcano.
• With: Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan, Willem Dafoe, Alexander Babara, Bobby C. King, Kat Baker, Bryan Truong, Dylan Flashner.

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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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‘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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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
• 511 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)

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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)

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• September 10, 2021 (United States)
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• Gulfport Harbor Lights Winter Festival - 2269 Jones Park Dr, Gulfport, Mississippi, USA (Tell and La Linda walk into Garden Glow)
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• Sep 12, 2021

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• Runtime 1 hour 51 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
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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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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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,” 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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The Card Counter review – Paul Schrader’s slow-burn revenge noir ticks all his boxes

Oscar Isaac is a blank-eyed poker player with a past in Schrader’s latest gathering of lost, tormented souls

P aul Schrader makes films about lost souls in torment and unachievable goals, the sort of bleak existential purgatories that speak to our own uglier moments. Ahead of the Venice press screening of his latest production, an impromptu security cordon makes more than 100 guests late, after which they are only allowed into the cinema in small dribs and drabs - a tense, shuffling progress that extends throughout the film’s opening half-hour. The critics are in uproar; the ushers get lairy. Wherever he is, I imagine that Schrader himself would approve of the show.

On screen, The Card Counter provides another stylish, slow-burning account of Schrader’s lonesome samurai, a figure who can crop up in all walks of life: as a taxi driver, an escort, a drug dealer, a priest. On this occasion he’s embodied by a blank-eyed Oscar Isaac , who wears his scuffed leather jacket like a bulletproof vest. William Tell (formerly Tillich) is a veteran of Abu Ghraib and served eight years for his crimes. He now earns a living at the card tables and roulette wheels of middle America. The film has him driving the strip malls at night or prowling the stygian bowels of interchangeable casinos, with their patterned carpets and heavy black drapes. These joints have lights blazing everywhere and yet always appear cloaked in shadow. The gamblers, one worries, bring the darkness in with them.

Tell has an agent, La Linda (played by comedian Tiffany Haddish) who wants to find him a backer and put him in the world series, but that’s too much commitment, he’d rather go it alone. “Poker,” he tells us, “is all about waiting. Hours pass. Days pass. And then something happens.”

One night, in the hotel bar, Tell meets excitable young Cirk (Tye Sheridan). Cirk’s on the trail of Major John Gordon (Willem Dafoe), a one-time private contractor at Abu Ghraib who has since made a fortune flogging security software. Gordon, we discover, beat the rap for his crime and let the little guys take the fall. Cirk wants revenge. He thinks that maybe Tell does as well.

Schrader directs with the unhurried air of a man who has told some variation of this story many times before. The central relationships can be a little schematic, while the plot slaloms in and out of plausibility. Still, the cast keeps it honest and there is much to relish in the film’s moody, meditative intensity. At its best, The Card Counter is wonderfully retro, like an old-fashioned noir. In an earlier era, with a few narrative tweaks, the role of William Tell could have been played by a growling Humphrey Bogart or a glacial Alain Delon.

It almost goes without saying that Cirk and Tell’s plan is ludicrously far-fetched. It involves a tranquilliser gun and poisoned darts bought online. But then Schrader’s heroes are rarely geared for success. They ignore common sense and avoid the exit ramps in their path, proceeding slowly, inexorably toward the cliff edge. The director lines them up and lets them go, like a malign professor seeing off his latest class of graduates. He’s done this before and he’ll do it again. His supply of damned fools appears all but inexhaustible.

• Venice film festival 2021
• Paul Schrader
• Oscar Isaac
• Tiffany Haddish
• Drama films

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‘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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With ‘The Card Counter,’ Paul Schrader has, once again, crafted a haunting portrait of alienation

Paul Schrader has created one of the most compelling and enduring careers in Hollywood by continually returning to his cardinal character: “God’s lonely man,” traversing an alienated and sometimes hostile world in search of expiation for his own sins, and the redemption of the world’s.

Fans of “Taxi Driver,” which Schrader wrote, as well as any number of films he directed, including “American Gigolo,” “Light Sleeper” and, most recently, “First Reformed,” will recognize the vibe. The lone gunslingers, assassins or itinerant loners of movies past become, in Schrader’s hands, a traumatized cabbie, prostitute, a drug dealer or a disillusioned pastor. In “The Card Counter,” Oscar Isaac delivers a mesmerizing portrayal of the latest iteration of Schrader’s favorite cinematic avatar: a professional poker player grappling with a harrowing and guilt-ridden past.

As the movie opens, Isaac’s character, William Tell, explains how he came to learn his trade: in military prison, where he’s been serving a sentence that only later comes fully into focus. After his release, he’s been traveling the gambling circuit in a hermetically sealed bubble of isolation and ascetic self-discipline: When he checks into a motel in whatever anonymous town he happens to fetch up in, he systematically removes every piece of art from the walls and wraps every piece of furniture in shroud-like white fabric. He craves solitude, routine and sensory underload.

As one of Schrader’s lonely men, Tell shares obvious DNA with “Taxi Driver’s” Travis Bickle and Ethan Hawke’s tortured Rev. Toller in “First Reformed.” (Willem Dafoe, who has appeared in more than a dozen of Schrader’s variations on this theme, shows up in a crucial cameo role.) The degree to which viewers will find “The Card Counter” a rewarding elaboration on an American auteur’s life’s work or a mere iteration of a played-out shtick will depend on how far they’re willing to let Schrader lead them on what threatens to be a desultory and occasionally perfunctory journey.

On his travels, Tell reunites with LaLinda (Tiffany Haddish), a charismatic manager who asks him to join her stable of reliable players. He demurs, but reconsiders after bumping into an angry young man named Cirk (pronounced “Kirk”), played with bruised intensity by Tye Sheridan. The three eventually form an unlikely team in “The Card Counter,” by way of scenes that feel schematic and strangely frictionless. The boredom isn’t helped by Tell’s periodic narrated tutorials on the finer points of poker, in which he tediously explains everything from percentages and probabilities to flops, rivers, buttons and blinds.

“The Card Counter” can be a dull movie to watch: It lacks the crisp visual clarity of “First Reformed,” perhaps because Schrader wanted to capture the featureless, permanent-twilight world that Tell inhabits (the movie was shot mostly in Biloxi, Miss.). Although all the main actors are outstanding, they never mesh into an entirely convincing whole. Haddish is particularly refreshing in moments of what seem to be unrehearsed humor and spontaneous energy, and viewers may find themselves grasping for more of those respites from “The Card Counter’s” lugubrious tone of hard-boiled gloom.

Still, “The Card Counter” manages to perform a sleight of hand worthy of Tell’s own talents: Isaac exudes a wary, controlled energy that exerts a sense of coiled stillness and quiet command, making it easy for viewers to go wherever he leads, even if it’s into an airless, stiflingly tedious card room of a banal exurban casino. Even if audiences find the final moments of “The Card Counter” unpersuasive, the film’s meditation on larger ideas — having to do with culpability, redemption, accountability and the search for truth on a national scale — is eerily timely. In some Hollywood circles, “You did it again” is a backhanded compliment. With “The Card Counter,” Schrader has reverted to form, but he’s remade it anew at the same time. He’s done it again, with crafty, haunting power.

R.  At area theaters. Contains some disturbing violence, graphic nudity, coarse language and brief sexuality. 111 minutes.

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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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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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• Stream It Or Skip It

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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

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Molly's Game

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Card Counter, The (United States/United Kingdom, 2021)

The Card Counter feels like it’s about two-thirds of a good movie. Despite solid performances from lead actor Oscar Isaac (at his steely-eyed, slow-burn best) and the supporting cast (which includes Willem Dafoe, Tye Sheridan, and an underused Tiffany Haddish in a purely dramatic role), not all elements of the movie gel. Not only do there appear to be missing scenes (transitions are often abrupt and plot threads are left dangling) but two of the most important sequences (one on-screen, the other off-screen) strain credulity. Although The Card Counter is grounded in reality at the outset, it goes off the rails by the time it reaches its climax (not unlike one of Schrader’s earliest films, Hardcore , which starred the aforementioned Scott).

Just like Raging Bull was about a boxer without being a boxing movie, so The Card Counter is about a gambler without being a gambling movie. Schrader has no interest whatsoever in going the sports-movie route of developing tension by exploring each match in loving detail. To the extent that he’s interested in the games, it’s only about how the wins and losses impact the characters. In the voiceover, he gives us a primer about how to card count but that’s more in the nature of colorful background than a major plot point.

The title character, played by Oscar Isaac, has the loaded name of William Tell. His background, which is gradually revealed through flashbacks, is murky and gut-churning, and has a connection with the character played by Willem Dafoe. He travels the country going from casino to casino, wining small amounts before moving on. His philosophy: he’s a card counter and the casinos know it, but they don’t care unless he wins big. So if he keeps his takings small, he can gradually build a fortune. He connects with a woman named La Linda (Tiffany Haddish) and develops a mentor/pupil relationship with a young man, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), whose father might have met William when they both served in Abu Ghraib. Cirk is at loose ends – his father killed himself, he’s estranged from his mother, and he’s adrift. William decides that in Cirk might be found the elusive path to redemption – something he sorely needs (as we gradually become aware).

If every gambler has a “tell,” the same can be said of every director. Schrader’s are evident in The Card Counter : the heavy, relentless atmosphere; the obtuse main character; the sense of impending doom. As a mood piece, the film works well. As a chance for Isaac to re-familiarize viewers with his serious side after spending three films in a galaxy far, far away, it’s effective. But as a character study, it’s flawed and as a narrative, it’s erratic. There are too few high cards in the movie’s deck for it to be considered a winning hand.

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New Horror Movie With 21% RT Score Nearly Triples Budget At The Box Office In Just 10 Days

• Tarot has grossed a cumulative $20 million worldwide in its second weekend.
• This has more than tripled the horror movie's $8 million budget.
• Despite a 21% Rotten Tomatoes score, Tarot is likely already turning a profit.

Tarot has accomplished a huge box office feat despite a cavalcade of negative reviews. The new horror movie, which stars Harriet Slater, Avantika, and Jacob Batalon , is based on the 1992 Nicholas Adams novel Horrorscope and follows a group of college students who play with a cursed deck of tarot cards that dooms them to die in twisted ways based on the cards that were pulled in their readings. The movie has earned a thoroughly Rotten 21% score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, a number that is based on 43 different critics' reviews.

Per Variety , the Tarot release is projected to earn an additional $3.4 million at the domestic box office by the end of its second weekend in theaters. Combined with its second-weekend international grosses, this will bring its cumulative global box office total to $20 million . Considering the fact that the movie only cost $8 million to make, this nearly triples the horror title's production budget in just 10 days.

Why Are Tarots Reviews So Bad?

Critics call out tarot for its lazy storytelling.

Despite the box office milestone, Tarot ’s poor reviews tell a starkly different story. With a 21% on Rotten Tomatoes, Tarot can easily be considered a critical flop . Though audiences are seeing the movie, their perception has not been fantastic either, giving the film only a 57% approval rating.

Critics are knocking Tarot for its weak characters, who lack personality and connection in the horror film. As Matthew Jackson of The AV Club wrote, Tarot “ ends up feeling flimsy, empty, and again, very, very frustrating .” Others called the storytelling weak and found it to be a lazy genre film that lacked depth and cultural value. While there were a couple critics who liked Tarot , those were few and far between against the highly-critical overall reception.

Is Tarot A Box Office Hit?

The horror movie may have hit its break-even point.

At the time of writing, Tarot is the sixth highest-grossing English-language horror movie of the year worldwide.

Because theaters keep half of ticket sales, a movie's break-even point is usually at least twice its production budget. Despite those negative Tarot reviews , the movie has already surpassed $16 million at the box office, which was most likely its break-even point. In fact, at the time of writing, it is the sixth highest-grossing English-language horror movie of the year worldwide. Below, see how the movie's budget and box office compares to the current Top 5 English-language horror titles of 2024 so far:

One issue with the break-even point rule of thumb is the fact that it doesn't include marketing costs for the movies in question. This means that some of the titles with a positive balance may not have yet made their money back, depending on how much was spent promoting them. However, Tarot came with quite low marketing costs , as there wasn't a huge promotional push for the title, with horror-hungry audiences seeming to have found the movie relatively organically.

While it seems unlikely that the movie has yet earned a significant profit, it may already be in the black. If it can push this gross even higher in the coming weeks, it's possible that it will be considered a proper box office hit and that a sequel will be greenlit before long. The Tarot ending is not necessarily open-ended, but it does leave room for more stories to be told at different points in the timeline of the movie's universe, whether or not the stars who played the surviving characters return to the project.

Will Tarot Help 2024 Horror Turn Around?

2024 horror has had a rough start.

As evidenced in the top five horror films of 2024 so far, the year has been off to a rocky start with horror. As per the estimated budgets, two out of the top five highest grossing horror movies of 2024 have actually lost money rather than gained money. Abigail , for instance, which has an 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, has vastly underperformed expectations thus far. It was originally predicted to open to $12–$15 million and top the box office during its opening weekend. Instead, it brought home $10.2 million and lost out to A24’s Civil War .

Tarot may just be a note of hope in a depressing start for the year in horror. If Tarot continues on its current box office path, it will easily clear the marker needed to profit. Tarot is also only $3.2 million behind the box office gross for Immaculate , so it also has a shot at making it into the top 5 grossing horror films of the year so far. Hopefully, Tarot ’s success can be the start of a turn around for the lukewarm 2024 horror box office thus far.

Source: Variety

Tarot (2024)

Director Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg

Release Date May 3, 2024

Studio(s) Ground Control, Alloy Entertainment, Screen Gems

Distributor(s) Sony Pictures Releasing

Writers Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg

Cast Avantika Vandanapu, Wolfgang Novogratz, Larsen Thompson, Humberly Gonzlez, Harriet Slater, Jacob Batalon, Adain Bradley, Olwen Four

Rating PG-13

Runtime 92 minutes

Genres Mystery, Thriller, Horror

Main Genre Horror