Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
When Dr. Abe Mandelbaum (Martin Landau) moves into the nursing home, Cliffside Manor, with his deteriorating wife Molly, he forms an improbable relationship with gambler and womanizer, Phil Nicoletti (Paul Sorvino). Even though at first Abe feels that moving into the home is the end of the road, he soon realizes that his life is finding a whole new beginning. Abe and Phil's friendship is challenged when a mysterious nurse claims that her biological father resides in the home. Without children of their own, both Abe and Phil jump at the chance to convince Angela, and themselves, that they are her father.
13 April 1939, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
20 June 1928, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
29 December 1974, New Jersey, USA
9 April 1957, Santa Monica, California, USA
January 11, 2018
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.
January 10, 2018
Landau and Sorvino offer wonderfully feeling and funny work, making complex, feisty men out of Abe and Phil.
January 09, 2018
The film has its moments, but is it the film Martin Landau deserved as his farewell performance?
January 12, 2018
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."
January 09, 2018
A compassionate portrayal of lives stripped down to bare essentials by aging, illness, and loss.
April 27, 2017
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.
January 11, 2018
Focuses too obsessively on one particular male malady.
January 11, 2018
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.
