With The Card Counter, Paul Schrader has written another “man in[to] a room”: William Tell (Oscar Isaac), an ex-torturer turned professional poker player, lives hotel to hotel, making each unit his own by wrapping their furniture in his own sterile, white sheets—“essentially bleached muslin,” the film’s DP Alexander Dynan says. A little light went a long way when capturing these whitened rooms on the light-sensitive, medium format Alexa LF camera. Sometimes Dynan lit Isaac journaling with nothing but a bulb wrapped in diffusion—something he could not justify using on First Reformed, as pastor Toller (Ethan Hawke) did not diary near a fabric-covered lamp. […]

Two of this year’s high-profile Venice premieres, Dune and The Card Counter, are auteurist works recognizable by multiple of their makers’ signatures. Both star Oscar Isaac and arrive as pandemic-affected productions that (try to) bear no trace of that circumstance. Dune finished principal photography before COVID-19’s global spread, while The Card Counter was 3/4 of the way through production when it hit; Isaac completed its rescheduled remainder before flying to Hungary for Dune reshoots. Optimistically subtitled Part I (this covers the first of the novel’s three volumes)*, Dune arrives with the unplanned burden of attempting to make the case for the Big Screen Experience—Denis Villeneuve’s been very […]

The first trailer for The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s keenly anticipated follow-up to First Reformed, has arrived. The premise is straightforward: sentenced to ten years in prison, fall guy Oscar Isaac learns how to count cards. The tone here is intriguingly all over the place, including Isaac’ flirtatious casino floor meeting with dealer Tiffany Haddish, promises of cold-blooded revenge and at least one shot directly quoting, per Schrader’s usual reference point, Pickpocket. (It’s the hands reaching towards each other through a prison visiting room’s glass pane.) The Card Counter premieres at this year’s Venice Film Festival before entering release on September 10 from […]