He’s a disciplined player and a discreet gambler, winning just enough to avoid unwelcome attention.

Now, in anonymous, interchangeable gambling houses, he sits at blackjack and poker tables with strangers and sometimes other pros, counting, betting and often winning. That figure most famously appears in his script for “Taxi Driver,” in which Travis Bickle, the cabby turned killer, pours out his rancid and bland thoughts and he is the fulcrum of movies that Schrader has directed, notably “Light Sleeper” and “First Reformed.” 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.Ī soldier turned professional card player, Tell - Oscar Isaac, a seductive force field - learned to count cards in prison, a talent he uses as he travels from casino to casino. The solitary man in a room is Schrader’s most indelible authorial signature, a defining image and idea in one. He may be a good man gone wrong or a bad one gone right the only thing certain is that he jumped out of the head of Paul Schrader. Yet something troubles the man which, in turn, troubles you. It’s an intimate, unmodulated voice, and what he says is often unremarkable to the point of banality. We hear his words, his thoughts, in a voice-over that’s a portal to his reality. A man sits writing in a room, alone in his head, alone in the world.

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