Uncut Gems

Benny and Josh Safdie's courtship of Adam Sandler for the demanding role of Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems is storied among cinephiles. They started pitching the idea to Sandler in 2011 and he finally said yes two years ago. The wisdom in their determination is in nearly every frame of this riveting and exhausting film.
Sandler's Ratner is a middle-aged New York jeweler and gambler who is working tirelessly to prove that he is not the chump much of the world is taking him for. He is being chased by a half-dozen bad debts and is trying with ever-growing futility to score big and settle all scores.

His latest scheme involves a brick of raw Ethiopian opal that he hopes to auction for a million bucks. When Boston Celtics superstar Kevin Garnett is escorted to Ratner's shop by a finder (LaKeith Stanfield), Garnett is struck by the rock's brilliance, imagines it will bring him luck and convinces Ratner to let him borrow it for that night's game. Seeing a chance to capitalize on Garnett's confidence, Ratner places a bet on the game but once again, fate works against Ratner. He misses the big score, is broke once more and time is running out to make whole everyone on his tail.
The movie's pacing is brisk, the intensity excruciating. The Safdies use a film stock that is as grainy and unflattering as a florescent light, which adds to the starkness of Ratner's predicament that, based on the unsavory characters circling about, can only end badly.

Cats

While not quite the abomination critics have described, Tom Hooper's Cats is an ostentatious exhibition of theatrical craftsmanship that, regrettably, is also frequently annoying, made so primarily by a story line that casts the mischievous Macavity (Idris Elba) as a sort of demon feline abducting his competition for the chance at another life. Elba and the other "big name" draws -- Taylor Swift, Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, James Cordon and Rebel Wilson -- acquit themselves admirably while not completely answering why they signed on to the project in the first place. (It probably all looked great on paper and Hooper is, after all, a celebrated, masterful director.) It is not a mystery why belter Jennifer Hudson is on board to serve up the timeless showstopper Memory. Despite all of the CGI motion fur and flopping ears, Hudson's performance practically drips with all of the melodic angst composer Andrew Lloyd Webber poured into it 40 years ago. The picture rewards the patient with more than a few outstanding production numbers and lots of splendid dancing by the company. (The Jellicle Ball sequence is particularly arresting and pretty freaking sexy.) The pas de deux by the leads, ballerina Francesca Hayward as the abandoned Victoria and Robbie Fairchild as the master-of-ceremonies Munkustrap, are especially lovely. Yes, there is more than enough visual absurdity for a half-dozen movies based on lesser material but the cast's treading and hoofing the boards is so top-shelf it almost makes one forget how unnecessary it all is.

Dark Waters

Queer Cinema icon Todd Haynes (Carol, Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, Safe) directs films about the exploited, the marginalized and the dispossessed, people who are injured by circumstances but press on or don't depending on their proclivities. In many ways, the Mark Ruffalo-project Dark Waters fits into Haynes' portfolio neatly, as it tells the true story of a West Virginia town on the Ohio River being poisoned by the corporate goliath DuPont and challenged by Ruffalo's legal eagle David, Robert Bilott, a partner in a corporate law firm and former DuPont defense attorney. Bilott is made aware of the case of a farmer (a terrific Bill Camp) whose herd of cattle is decimated, he believes, by runoff from DuPont's nearby dump. Bilott is first reluctant but the farmer's insistence, and his own childhood memories of his grandmother's home in the town, spur him into what he believes will be a quick resolution. Haynes' direction is methodical and by-the-numbers, with Ruffalo (who never fails to hit his marks in any film -- from Avengers to Spotlight) displaying the physical manifestations of Bilott's professional and personal battles with the first-reticent and later-defiant chemical manufacturer. Haynes and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan and Mario Correa have crafted a compelling story of greed and indifference that has several stirring moments of indignation and outrage rooted in the filmmakers' deep commitment to the value of human life and dignity. It is not a perfect film (some performances feel weary and indeliberate) but it is a marvelous statement for these times -- which is much more important.

Pain and Glory, Honey Boy

Pedro Almodóvar's Pain and Glory and Alma Har'el's Honey Boy are, respectively, the tender story of the celebrated Spanish writer / director's relationship with his spicy and withholding mother and actor Shia LaBeouf's traumatically dysfunctional boyhood in the care of his disastrously incapable father. The films are reflective, fanciful and decidely ambivalent about the central character's feelings toward the wounding parent.
In Pain and Glory Antonio Banderas is Almodóvar's alter ego, a stifled filmmaker racked with physical and emotional ailments that he tries to quell with opioids and heroin. Banderas's addled, somnambulate Salvador seems suspended between dream worlds, one lively and magical, the voice of his mother (the always radiant Penelope Cruz) providing the soundtrack for his colorful awakening, and the other, his decorous, doleful and dismissive maturity, resplendent with wall art and loneliness.
In Honey Boy, LaBeouf's alter ego Otis at 12 is played by the fine young actor Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place) and at 22 by the estimable Lucas Hedges. The younger Otis lives with his father (a striking LaBeouf) in a grungy roadside motor inn at night and acts in various forgettable roles on a studio lot during the day. Driven by his father's shame and self-loathing, Otis grows into a defiant, destructive and self-sabotaging young man whose only memories of warmth are of another abused child (FKA Twigs), a teenaged girl living in the motor court with her bottomfeeding parents. Both Hedges and LaBoeuf do the heavy emotional lifting in this unsparing, conflicted but ultimately forgiving letter to LaBeouf's father.
Both Pain and Glory and Honey Boy feature elements of magical realism that enhance their messages of regret and forgiveness despite the damage done by those charged with loving us.

Waves

 

The family at the center of Trey Edward Shults's Waves is frayed, but nearly undetectably at first. Exchanges between father (Sterling K. Brown) and his coltish son (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) feel prickly but maybe that's just the natural push-pull between two alphas. Nothing more. And maybe daughter Emily (Taylor Russell) is reserved because she's shy and uncertain and not because she's lost, overshadowed by her athlete-brother and hurt by the attention both father and mother (Renee Elise Goldsberry) pour on him. The family home is a pressure cooker of expectation and disappointment, and the stresses quickly begin to show both physically and psychologically until an event sends these four damaged people flying off in different directions, taking their pain with them. Waves is quiet but its intensity is nearly unbearable. All four leads deliver extraordinary performances but young Mr. Harrison's is far and away the most real and raw depiction of youthful confusion and agony I have seen in quite a while. He is truly outstanding and on par with generational peers Timothee Chalamet and Lucas Hedges, who also appears in Waves as daughter Emily's love interest and rescuer. Waves is devastating and exhausting but richly detailed, knowing and human.

Richard Jewell

Clint Eastwood's Richard Jewell takes the story of the Centennial Park security guard falsely accused of setting off a bomb that killed and injured visitors to the Atlanta Olympic in 1996 and turns it into a blunt instrument to bludgeon the media and the FBI. The film -- which features a fine performance by Paul Walter Hauser as Jewell -- also takes swings are higher education-- a prime target for rabid red staters. Jewell comes across as a socially awkward underachiever with a juvenile zeal for law enforcement that is both admirable and naive. Olivia Wilde and Jon Hamm play an unscrupulous Atlanta newspaper reporter and an FBI agent, respectively, who sacrifice Jewell for personal ambition. The rendering of these characters is so atrocious, the dialogue so dull and unimaginative that they make viewing the film a real chore. Watching their interactions was like witnessing a mob hit. Jewell's relationship with his mother Barbara (a strangely off-kilter Kathy Bates) is cloying and with his lawyer (Sam Rockwell) is peculiarly uninvolving and underdeveloped. This picture has precious little of Eastwood's usual workmanlike competence. It feels incomplete, more of a notion than a picture, but it will be raw meat for MAGA heads everywhere and more the pity.

The Irishman

Martin Scorsese’s mobster epic The Irishman harnesses the latest in film technology to follow the story’s primary characters as they age through decades of gangland maneuvering and murder. Robert De Niro is the narrator and pseudonymous fixer, Frank Sheeran, who performs both painting (hits) and carpentry (disposals) for pay — he’s got mouths to feed. When we meet Sheeran, he’s an old man reflecting on his life after war duty in Italy. He begins with driving a meat truck in Philadelphia, stealing from his bosses and making friends with powerful criminals, including mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and later Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and becoming a trusted consigliere as well as wet worker. That Sheeran is his own witness leaves his accounting open to question, of course, but his tale of rising to capo in a crime family while serving two masters (the Mafia and the IBT) is fascinating. Scorsese is nonpareil as a storyteller, and he manages the complexity of mob action and political wrangling with dexterity. Yes, he loves criminals, and his treatment of these wise guys is no less affectionate than his earlier valentines Goodfellas, Gangs of New York and The Departed, but that’s not to say he’s amoral or that The Irishman celebrates corruption. In fact, the film includes screen notes on the often grisly deaths of the gangsters Sheeran encounters over the years — those we don’t actually see dispatched by a bullet to the face. That Sheeran himself survives to tell the tale — or at least his version — is not so much cynical as existential. As one G-man reminds him, everyone he’s known and loved is either dead or has abandoned him. That he is alone and hoping for more — redemption? expiation?  — in the picture’s last reel is a powerful statement.

Marriage Story

Writer/director Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story puts the auteur's signature wit and insight to work in a tale of the most personal and excruciating of human trials -- the dissolution of a marriage. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Drive are New York off-Broadway theater couple Nicole and Charlie, parents of young Henry (Azhy Robertson), and parties in a marriage that is threatened, we come to discover, by presumption and resentment. When we meet them they are seeking counsel, not altogether successfully, to resolve issues driving them apart. Then Nicole, who has been genius director Charlie's muse and leading lady, accepts a role in a television pilot and moves to L.A. with Henry. Charlie is unperturbed, thinking the change is temporary and he'll visit frequently. In the meantime, Nicole, who has discovered Charlie's infidelity with a company member, hires a top-dollar eviscerator (the wonderful Laura Dern) to represent her in a divorce. This action leads to an escalation of tension and spiraling bitterness that culminates in a scene of blistering vitriol the likes of which I've not seen since Liz and Dick tore at each other's throats in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966). It's a sad, depressing clash of two decent but damaged people trying to perfect the imperfectible. (And alone is worthy of the accolades the film is receiving.) Baumbach is a masterful wordsmith but in two particularly nice set pieces near the end he juxtaposes musical numbers from Stephen Sondheim's Company that Nicole and Charlie perform to different audiences. These are nice moments -- one frothy and the other wistful -- that had they been given to lesser actors would have fallen flat or been soupy. Instead, they capture two people who are slowly finding their ways out of misery..

The Lighthouse

Imbued in every image of a lighthouse are questions about the inhabitants, how they deal with the isolation, what they have seen, close calls their beaming signal has averted ... if the keeper is sane. Writer / director Robert Eggers second feature, The Lighthouse, is richly evocative of those seaside sentinels but delivers no definitive answers.This film is just as genuine in its depictions of location and dread as Eggers' first, The Witch (2015), a visually stunning scarefest set in Puritan New England. Once again, Eggers' meticulosity is in every frame, in every word uttered by the picture's two principals, a keeper (Willem Dafoe) and his taciturn assistant (Robert Pattinson), in every forboding inch of the New England lighthouse's barren, wasted rock. Eggers is working in black and white to startling, unsettling effect, as the men check into the battered quarters for a month's duty. Dafoe's Thomas Wake browbeats the younger Ephraim Winslow with humiliating invectives, forbidding him from doing anything but scullery chores and mindless repairs, and most certainly denying his requests to ascend to the top of the lighthouse, Wake's peculiarly, jealously guarded domain. As for the matter of the men's sanity, well, Eggers certainly makes a case for madness, but a powerfully evocative speech by Wake actually suggests there might be more at work than minds being devoured by personal demons.

Parasite

South Korean writer / director Bong Joon Ho (Okja, Snowpiercer) is a visionary, but he's no sentimental optimist. His films luxuriate in bloody class conflicts, where audience favorites are often sacrificed on the altar of art. The poor are not necessarily nobler than the rich, and they often don't get what they deserve -- or maybe they do. His latest film, the marvelous award-winner Parasite, is true to form -- a thoroughgoing tale of an under-employed family of frauds living below ground (the picture is brimming with metaphors) who through an elaborate ruse insinuate themselves into the lives (and home) of a wealthy family in need of an English tutor, and, incrementally, an art therapist, chauffeur and housekeeper. Bong shows true genius in building the crafty Family Kim's plan to ride the vain and vacuous Park family's gravy train until a dark and stormy night threatens to bring the scheme to a screeching halt. Bong uses a loving skeptic's eye in staging elaborate set pieces that alternate between shrieking hilarity and horror.