KEITH UHLICH
The Card Counter
film roundup
The Card Counter (Dir. Paul Schrader). Starring: Oscar Isaac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan. No one riffs on Robert Bresson quite like writer-director Paul Schrader. His latest homage to the French cinema maestro (Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest are once again the lodestars) is about a mystery man, William Tell (Oscar Isaac), eking out a living on the poker circuit with the sponsorship of a woman, La Linda (Tiffany Haddish), for whom he has eyes. His awful past catches up with him when he meets a young man, Cirk (Tye Sheridan), out to get revenge on one of Tell’s former superiors (Willem Dafoe). The visuals are hypnotically still and sterile, 18
ICON | OCTOBER 2021 | ICONDV.COM
a contrast to the torment roiling the characters’ souls. At heart, this is a story of failed mentorship, not only between Tell and Cirk, but between generations of Americans whose moral compasses, due to the ideological predations of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” have been long out of whack. [R] HHHH1/2 Cry Macho (Dir. Clint Eastwood). Starring: Clint Eastwood, Dwight Yoakam, Eduardo Minett. Not bad for a 91-year-old. Clint Eastwood’s latest could yet again be read as a valedictory statement (he’s been saying goodbye for nearly three decades now). But what
makes this movie, adapted from a novel by N. Richard Nash, so pleasurable is how tossedoff it feels. Clint plays a broken-down rodeo star tasked by his former employer (Dwight Yoakam) with bringing the latter’s bi-racial son (Eduardo Minett) across the Mexican border. Obstacles exist—federales, a criminal working for the boy’s tart of a mother, decrepit vehicles malfunctioning at inopportune times. But this is more of a leisurely journey in which the tough youngster, his
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