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‘The Card Counter’ Trailer Sees Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish Risk It All in High-Stakes Gambling Thriller

Oscar Isaac is seeking redemption — and revenge — in the first trailer for “The Card Counter,” a tense thriller written and directed by Paul Schrader.

The movie, co-starring Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe, centers on an ex-military-interrogator-turned-gambler named William Tell, who is haunted by the decisions of his past. After a vulnerable young man (Sheridan) reaches out to seek retribution on a common enemy (a mustachioed Dafoe), Tell attempts to give guidance in the hopes that it will provide an opportunity at restitution.

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“It doesn’t matter to me if you did something bad in your past,” Haddish’s character says to Isaac’s in the two-minute-long clip. But a brooding William Tell disagrees. “Nothing, nothing can justify what we did,” he asserts.

Isaac’s Tell is vague about his past actions, but he does share that he learned to count cards in his 10 years in prison. That presumably led to some morally dubious decision-making. “There is a weight a man can accrue,” he narrates in the trailer. “The weight created by his past actions. That is a weight which can never be removed.”

“The Card Counter” is Schrader’s feature follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “First Reformed,” a dark drama starring Ethan Hawke as a Protestant minister who struggles with his faith. Martin Scorsese is executive producing “The Card Counter,” marking his fifth collaboration with Schrader following “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Bringing Out the Dead.”

The Focus Features film will debut in theaters on Sept. 10 after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

“The Card Counter” will be executive produced by William Olsson, Lee Broda, Kathryn M. Moseley, Tiffany Boyle, Elsa Ramo, Ruben Islas and Stanley Preschutti. Producers on the film include Braxton Pope, Lauren Mann and David Wulf.

Watch the trailer for “The Card Counter” below:

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