IMDb’s “World War II Movies: The Ultimate List” offers impressive breadth across its 179 films, yet it still only represents a vanishing fraction of the thousands of WWII movies that have been made. The moral quagmire that was Vietnam inspired a good hundred or so notable movies, and even Korea, supposedly America’s forgotten war, gave us a steady stream of dramas in the 1950s and ‘60s, to say nothing of the cultural institution that was M*A*S*H. But the Iraq War has produced a minuscule number of movies in the 23 years since it began, and few, except for the factually dubious Hurt Locker and morally dubious American Sniper, have had any sort of cultural impact. Who turned out for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk?
Fittingly, Iraq bubbles beneath the surface of The Card Counter, only sometimes on the mind of some of its characters. The war had been over for a decade by the time Paul Schrader’s thriller hit theaters five years ago, and if it weren’t for the main character being a veteran, there would be no sign it had happened at all.
