The Card Counter - Featured Film of Interest - Highly Recommended

No American filmmaker embraces Robert Bresson's innovative mode of cinema, both theoretically and artistically, more than Paul Shrader.  He at times leans into near visual and stylistic replication while somehow maintaining earnest originality, no doubt due to his inimitable talents for screenwriting, original narrative concept and character.  He delves the same deep seas of human suffering, redemption and existential contemplation that Bresson navigated, yet never seems a parody.  He explores similar protagonists, utilizes minimalist visual strokes and seems to adhere to the sacred oath of obstructions, yet I would never argue Shrader anything less than an integral auteur of his own making.  He has had a writers hand and a filmmakers voice in the new wave and evolution of contemporary American cinema as much as anyone of the era.  

The review below takes an approach and tone worthy of the material, demonstrating a critical manner reminiscent of Bazin, particularly in considering the film within the context of Shrader's body of work and artistic nature.  Shrader is apparently not slowing down or falling under the weight of age anymore than Bresson did.  I could argue that this film coupled with First Reformed, his last directorial/writing effort, represent some of his finest accomplishments as an auteur.  As someone that holds Bresson's films, Notes on the Cinematographer, and the Taxi Driver script as sacred precedents of filmmaking, may I say, extraordinary work, sir.  I look forward to what comes next.

"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."  

Glenn Kenny September 10, 2021

Link:  The Card Counter Film Review (2021), 'Roger Ebert.com'