Dr. Abe Mandelbaum moves into a nursing home and strikes up a friendship with Phil Nicoletti, a notorious gambler and womanizer. Their relationship is tested when they each try to convince a mysterious nurse that they are her long-lost father.
The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.
The film would benefit from tighter editing and the loss of 20 minutes or so of unnecessary material. As is, it spends too long going nowhere in particular in a manner we have all seen before.
The Last Poker Game is an unexpectedly warm movie, shot with a honed sense of visual storytelling-especially given the director's newness with all this-and an eye for textures, but one which flames out into a terribly overwrought ending.
Landau's performance here is a deftly calibrated thing of beauty, and it ranks among his finest work since his Oscar-winning turn as a frail Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton's "Ed Wood."
