After a strict Calvinist upbringing, Schrader fell hard for the profane world of the movies and became a critic. But the chilly restraint and pull away from realism found in his three most recent films recall an even earlier moment, one prior to his initial forays into screenwriting and directing. He is perhaps best known as the writer of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), his second produced screenplay, following on the heels of Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1974). ![]() Schrader’s late style takes him back to the start. They are stories of guilt, forgiveness and redemption stories that catch their protagonists in a tangle of worldly trouble and ask whether there is such a thing as righteous violence. These ‘man in a room’ movies follow solitary individuals with pasts that weigh heavily on the present. Schrader has thrown off the weight of studio pressures to work independently, making do with relatively low budgets and holding on to final cut – securing a crucial freedom after feeling that 2014’s Dying of the Light had been mauled by producers. These uncompromising films prove something that feels increasingly impossible in our franchise-laden landscape: American cinema can be profoundly philosophical and have popular appeal. ![]() This summer brings the theatrical release of Master Gardener, the concluding entry in an informal trilogy he began with the Oscar-nominated First Reformed (2017) and continued with The Card Counter (2021). The broken-down horse called movies keeps limping on and Schrader is still astride it. Today, the writer-director is as prolific as he has ever been. That decade has come and gone, and things happily haven’t turned out exactly as he predicted.
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