The Card Counter
Focus Features | Release Date: September 10, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
78
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 48 Critic Reviews
Positive:
39
Mixed:
9
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsSep 27, 2021
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. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperSep 9, 2021
With spectacularly haunting original songs by Robert Levon Been of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club accompanying the journey, Schrader expertly captures the equal parts exciting and depressing worlds of casinos, where the slots are always jangling and the bar is always open. Read full review
100
Vanity FairCassie da CostaSep 2, 2021
You’ll leave the film unable to stop thinking about its dimensions. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennySep 2, 2021
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 like 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. Read full review
91
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezSep 2, 2021
It’s truly a wild, blazing ride if you get on the movie’s bruising, mesmeric wavelength, a tragic but deeply moral film about a righteous, transactional man who has truly weighed and considered the cost of the wicked transgressions committed against his country, his fellow man, and his own soul. Read full review
90
The AtlanticDavid SimsSep 17, 2021
William is a strong character on his own, but he is also a metaphor for America’s struggle to overcome its grimmest failures and to break free from cycles of violence. Schrader understands that those are nigh-impossible tasks; still, he shows the value in trying nonetheless. Read full review
90
ABC NewsPeter TraversSep 10, 2021
A new Paul Schrader movie is always an event and this spellbinding meditation on sin and salvation—seen through the eyes of a gambler (a superb Oscar Isaac) who counts cards to both escape and confront his torturous past—is one of his best. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangSep 9, 2021
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. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisSep 9, 2021
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. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 7, 2021
As with First Reformed, Schrader crashes right through the boundaries separating the literal from the surreal. It is a strange journey, increasingly so, but an immensely satisfying one. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 2, 2021
The Card Counter, with Isaac’s superb performance at its heart, might be the movie you didn’t know you were wishing for, coming at a time when wishing for life to restart has become a consuming preoccupation. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreSep 2, 2021
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. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleTrace SauveurSep 9, 2021
Schrader remains committed to his late-style cold moodiness, with scenes shot in a sterile plainness and lines delivered in a frank matter-of-fact tone that to some may appear stilted but effectively accompanies his main character’s harsh view of his surroundings. Read full review
88
ObserverOliver JonesSep 10, 2021
It’s not for everybody, and it’s far from perfect, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrillingly necessary use of the filmmaking form this year. Read full review
85
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah-Tai BlackSep 12, 2021
There is an urgency to these stylistic choices which ask us how we might best realize, through image and sound, both the memory and feeling of violence, of hope, of salvation for the damned. As in life, the grotesque and the beautiful exist concurrently and are each given fair weight. Read full review
83
Original-CinJim SlotekSep 7, 2021
A tale of trauma told, fittingly, with a poker face, Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter is a sure-handed rumination on redemption and finding peace of mind. Read full review
83
The Film StageNick NewmanSep 2, 2021
The Card Counter’s powers linger well past plot machination—its methods of approaching incident miles deeper than how they’ll play, its pauses in conversation bruising harder than anything spewed. I’m smitten with his latter-day tone-setter vibe, the stumbles amusing (I’m curious who got that horrific music into key scenes) and indulgences almost touching. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 2, 2021
That The Card Counter shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyNov 5, 2021
The Card Counter – executive produced by Martin Scorsese – revisits Schrader’s twin preoccupations with despair and salvation, powered along by tart political urgency, a magnetic central performance from Isaac, and no little style. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawNov 3, 2021
Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game. Read full review
80
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsNov 2, 2021
It’s a supremely compelling tale leavened by its wry humour and a subtle commentary on the essential emptiness of American life. Read full review
80
EmpireAl HornerNov 1, 2021
An ace in the hole from a filmmaker himself unafraid to gamble. The Card Counter’s pacing won’t be for everyone, but Schrader fans will be all-in on this gripping portrait of lament. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 2, 2021
Its icy conviction and unblinking Bressonian rigour generate their own particular, intoxicating strain of doom-laced excitement. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 2, 2021
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. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksSep 2, 2021
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. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleChris VognarSep 9, 2021
Schrader’s characters are haunted (please see “First Reformed” if you haven’t). They’re also deeply moral, not in a dime-store virtue kind of way but in the sense that they struggle mightily to do the right thing. In the end they’re painfully human, which is why they keep resonating after the lights go up. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesSoren AndersenSep 9, 2021
In fact it’s really writer-director Schrader who is Isaac’s true co-star in “The Card Counter.” A product of a strict Calvinist upbringing in Michigan, the filmmaker’s trademarks — guilt, redemption, a soul in torment — are all here. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleSep 9, 2021
Toggling between Texas Hold ’Em and Iraq War nightmares makes for a head-spinning collision. But I think the incongruities of The Card Counter also give it its power. Schrader’s film is so self-evidently the impassioned work of a singularly feverish mind that its flaws add to its humanity. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenSep 9, 2021
With The Card Counter, Schrader offers another self-flagellating portrait of a man who’s experienced—and enacted—great sin, struggling to perceive anything akin to divine grace. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadaySep 8, 2021
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. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsSep 8, 2021
As the title character — a professional gambler with a lot behind him, and not much impulse to dredge it up — Oscar Isaac makes for a magnetic sphinx indeed. His is not the only good performance. But it’s the crucial one. Read full review
75
SlashfilmChris EvangelistaSep 2, 2021
The element that keeps The Card Counter truly alive is Isaac, who turns in one of the best performances of his career here, using his eyes to convey things dialogue never could. To watch him work here is something special, even if the movie as a whole can't ever quite match his intensity.  Read full review
75
TheWrapSep 2, 2021
Even when considering how it’s graced with splashes of stylistic bravado and how vigorously head-on it distills its heady themes (all to an extent rehashed from Schrader’s own body of work) — not to mention the decision to keep part of the gruesomeness off-screen and concluding the piece on a semi-hopeful note — The Card Counter still doesn’t come across as urgent or magnetic as other efforts. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChuck BowenSep 2, 2021
Paul Schrader’s film grows more heated and crazed as the chaos of the past bleeds into a repressed present. Read full review
70
The New YorkerRichard BrodySep 14, 2021
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. Read full review
70
We Got This CoveredMartin CarrSep 3, 2021
The Card Counter marks another unique cinematic contribution from a masterful filmmaker. Read full review
70
Screen DailyLee MarshallSep 2, 2021
Its odd meld of drab suburban casinos, wrapped motel rooms, nightmarish Iraqi torture sequences and military correctional facilities where the furniture is bolted to the floor, all build to a video-artist vision that comes bursting surprisingly out of an old-school box – and results in one more male-slanted Paul Schrader script about a haunted man at a crossroads. Read full review
70
VarietyOwen GleibermanSep 2, 2021
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. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 8, 2021
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. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeNov 8, 2021
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. Read full review
60
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyNov 4, 2021
The Card Counter is claustrophobic, certainly – but not always in the right ways. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 13, 2021
What’s discomforting about The Card Counter is that Schrader builds this strong moral backdrop for his characters and then allows them to drift about in front of it. Read full review
60
Paste MagazineLex BriscusoSep 9, 2021
It’s clear both The Card Counter and First Reformed are cut from that same cloth, though the latter sticks the landing better than the former. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskySep 8, 2021
The grace notes—including a final shot that could, potentially, be Schrader’s most sublime—are lost among the inconsistencies, incomplete subplots, and airlessness. It shouldn’t take an expert to figure out what a film is trying to articulate. Unfortunately, in this case, it does. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 13, 2021
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. Read full review
50
IGNKristy PuchkoSep 9, 2021
Ultimately, this storied provocateur deals out shocking imagery and disturbing scenes, but he refuses to lay down a thrilling climax much less anything satisfyingly entertaining. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeMark FeeneySep 9, 2021
The constant sense of low-grade menace that helps make the first quarter of The Card Counter intriguing and effective gets put on hold, in a good way, whenever Haddish is on screen. Read full review
40
Time OutHanna FlintNov 3, 2021
While there are some atmospheric and absorbing moments, all involving Isaac monologuing or close-ups on his face depicting stormy thoughts brewing underneath, Schrader ultimately abandons his gambling subplots in favour of a two-fold ending that is both anticlimactic and empty. Read full review
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