Almost walked out 5 times.

Just not good. The story was all over the place, no direction or cohesion. Edgar Wright wannabe, pretty much just terrible.

Sorry to say, if you go to a Paul Schrader movie (not Paul Schaefer; that's the keyboardist from Letterman), you should expect something a little different. This not a bland and derivative movie about a poker-playing weirdo, as the trailer would lamentably have you think. Rather, it is a searing condemnation of US foreign policy during the Bush era, conveyed through the story of a man who has been unutterably traumatized by his experiences as a guard at Abu Ghraib, who was betrayed by his government and found solace only in the repetitive, emotionless routine of gambling, drinking, and keeping a diary. Granted, the film does start a little slow, but so did Taxi Driver, Schrader's initial claim to fame. At first, I heard myself saying, "Oscar Isaac is no Robert de Niro," but as the movie progressed, I found Isaac's portrayal of a guilt-ridden former soldier to be almost hypnotic. Tiffany Haddish does a good job as well. This movie is like if "Hard 8" was directed by David Lynch.

In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.

Schrader’s made a long meditation on something that’s right up his alley, and it still feels incomplete while it’s in progress, and even in the final reckoning.

Roger Moore

Movie Nation

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.

Manohla Dargis

The New York Times