The Card Player

Sporting a plot that should have been left at the all-night dorm-room session that might have spawned it, The Card Player at long last provides the warmed-over serial-killer genre with the kick it needed—Internet poker playing. Ah, the sad stench of former genius: Can this really be the same Dario Argento who, for one deep-red '70s moment, seemed the most dangerous horror director around? Some of his lurid flourishes hang on by fingernails, but Argento's eye is gone; stripped of his legendary color palette and reduced to crafting degraded video images, he is art cinema's most depressing casualty.