It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

You believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be true with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to the next picture show, movie the week podcast devoted to a classic film

in the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release. I'm Scott Tobias here again with

Tasha Robinson. Keith Phipps. Our co-host Genevieve Kosky is taking a break this week,

but our esteemed guest and former co-worker, Vickram Murty returns. Hello again, Vikram.

Hello again, Scott, Keith, and Tasha. On last week's show, we talked about Hard Eight,

Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature about a professional gambler whose road to redemption

starts with a relationship with a confused and volatile young man. The new Paul Schrader film,

The Card Counter, goes on a similar

journey. Oscar Isaac stars as William Tell, an ex-servicman whose hustle as a poker player

is at once well suited to the hard, acetic discipline of a military man and a form of solitary

confinement. Two people change the trajectory of his life. Tiffany Haddish as La Linda, who acts as a

liaison between wealthy investors and the poker talents they bankroll at major tournaments, and Ty

Sheridan as Kirk, a young man suffering after his ex-military father took his own life. As William

follows La Linda around the country to various World Series of Poker events,

he and Kirk also developed plans to exact revenge on a man played by Willem Defoe,

who had been his superior at the notorious Abu Ghraib Prison.

We'll talk about this latest iteration of Schrader's God's Lonely Man character after the break.

You count cards, right?

I'm not that smart.

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