Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems could lazily be classified as a “basketball movie,” which raises the stakes in the third act via a tense and deciding Game 7 in the NBA Playoffs—numerous critics cite the nail-biting play-by-play action as the film’s tensest sequence. Yet Uncut Gems isn’t just driven by the attributes afforded a fast-paced sport: the narrative’s “house of cards” doesn’t come down to a single three-pointer or clutch free-throw that rolls around the rim before dropping in as the game clock strikes zero, Teen Wolf be damned. The Safdies pull off something trickier, interlocking their film with both on-the-record, […]

Uncut Gems traffics in the upscale loot sold and loaned in the Diamond District. A bejeweled furby necklace and a pendant of Michael Jackson pinned to a cross are fan favorites in a claustrophobic rain of riches. But a rare black opal trumps the pile. Howard (Adam Sandler), a jeweler with debt gnawing at his heels, lifts one off the black market from the Ethiopian Jews who discovered them, and sees it delivered to his show floor inside a vacuum-sealed cooler of fish. As the gambit in some of his biggest bets yet, the opal might just clear his life’s […]

The first trailer for the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, with Adam Sandler in the frantic lead, is here. More or less accurately representing the film’s tone, this also gives viewers their first listen to Daniel Lopatin’s excellent, clangorous score, although be warned: there’s plenty of footage from Uncut Gems, including from the end, throughout. Uncut Gems is out from A24 this December.

At Marriage Story‘s TIFF premiere, the audience applauded the Netflix logo; a night later, the same happened for A24 at Uncut Gems. The latter makes slightly more sense—rightly or wrongly (no comment), A24 has coherent brand cachet in positioning itself as Art-Fixated rather than purely profit-motivated—but in both cases I felt like I was going mad, and even more so when I heard that the first question for The Lighthouse‘s cast and crew at their first screening was why is A24 is so very special (surely that’s not on Willem Dafoe to answer.) Admittedly, Adam Sandler shaking Kevin Garnett’s hand onstage […]

If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]

Directors Josh and Benny Safdie and cinematographer Sean Price Williams go way back. Their latest collaboration, the crime thriller Good Time, is the trio’s fourth joint effort. They’re not only used to each other; they’ve also been through some real shit. The Safdies love to work rough and tumble, filming most of their movies — including Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What, both shot by Williams – on the streets and apartments of New York, feeding off and bottling up the city’s uniquely chaotic energy. For Good Time, they even dragged a big name, Robert Pattinson, along for the ride. To get […]

IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today programs to be included in its annual signature event, IFP Week. They include, I’m excited to say, an opening day hosted by Filmmaker timed to the celebration of this magazine’s 25th Anniversary and 100th issue. On Sunday, September 17, I and other Filmmaker editors and writers will be moderating a day of presentations and discussions at BRIC with speakers who’ve been important our collective history, including Oscar-winning filmmakers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski of Moonlight; Josh and Benny Safdie of Good Time; and Emmy-nominated director Dee Rees of the forthcoming Netflix release Mudbound. The running […]

“Hey, it’s me,” said Sean Price Williams as he walked up to me at the after-party for Josh and Benny Safdie’s simply fantastic Good Time in Cannes last week. It did take me a second to recognize Williams — cleanly shaven, in a spiffy tux and strolling around a Dior-sponsored event for a film in the Main Competition of the Cannes Film Festival. If Williams seemed like a bit of a happy anomaly there, it’s because, like Good Time itself, the DP has ascended to cinema’s most revered platform with work that’s wholly of a piece with the raw, street-level […]

Cannes, like virtually every other major international film festival showcasing feature-length filmmaking, is largely devoted to cinema that participates in a primarily theatrical mode — dialogue- and performance-driven works that feature subjects with whom we are meant to empathize to some degree. This is an expectation, fused into the medium’s DNA when it was still young, that is embedded in the layout of the festival itself; it’s the world’s largest film market (and therefore tilts mainstream, toward things that can make money), and the prizes it offers — honouring exemplary screenwriting and thespian turns rather than, for example, montage, photography, […]