Pattinson peaks in ‘Good Time’
Nervy indie thriller Intentionally funny scenes
TBy Guy Lodge
hose already acquainted with the young oeuvre of Benny and Josh Safdie — the multitasking fraternal auteur duo with a joint eye to the social fringes of New York City — may see the title of their third narrative feature as a kind of perverse in-joke. “Good Time” is not the first term you’d use to describe “Daddy Longlegs” or “Heaven Knows What,” two sensitive but skin-prickling studies in human breakage; nor does it entirely apply to this nerve-raddling heist-within-a-heist thriller, which merges the Safdies’ signature gutter realism with tight genre mechanics to discomfiting but exhilarating effect.
A career-peak performance from Robert Pattinson, as a scuzzy Queens bank robber on a grimly spiraling mission to break his mentally handicapped brother out of jail, will attract more eyeballs to this A24 release than the rest of the Safdies’ oeuvre combined, though this “Good Time” is still no commercial picnic. Rather, it’s exciting proof of its makers’ ability to chafe and challenge audiences in a growing range of registers.
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here. Still, if there’s a grainy classicism to the film’s craft, balancing the fevered formal poetry of 2014’s heroin love story “Heaven Knows What” with Lumet-channeling tautness, it’s no simple throwback exercise. “Good Time’s” passing but pointed glimpses of social disenfranchisement across a range of demographics place its narrative squarely in Donald Trump’s America of 2017.
We never learn the exact circumstances that have driven Connie Nikas (Pattinson) and his vulnerable younger brother Nick (Benny Safdie, directing himself for the first time) to the underworld, though the close-shaved script — by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein — deftly alludes to parental absence and familial abuse. Nick, who has unspecified learning disabilities, is less able than
“I’m looking for some serious fun,” she confessed to the crowd gathered inside New York’s Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers. have a big fun deficit.”
“I
ABy Joe Leydon
lthough its opening scenes suggest a budget-challenged kickoff for a comic-book movie franchise, “96 Souls” turns out to be something even less engaging — a flavorless and fuzzy-headed melodrama about a scientist who accidentally develops the ability to read minds, and his attempts to aid a homeless musician who sounds like the AfricanAmerican comic relief in some badly dated Hollywood farce from the ’40s. It’s hard not to wince whenever the latter character, played by Toyin Moses with far more spunk than the role deserves, asks the scientist about “Al Gore-isms” — algorithms, get it? — and when she defends her certainty by insisting “I knows in my bones.” But, really, Moses seems scarcely more cartoonish than her co-stars, all of whom have been encouraged by writer-director Stanley Jacobs to deliver their dialogue in the overemphatic fashion of a grade-school teacher imparting information to a class of slow-learners.
his protective older brother to mask his psychological scarring.
“Good Time” opens on an extended therapy session between him and a court-appointed psychiatrist (Peter Verby), which is just beginning to needle at some nervy revelations when Connie breaks it up. It’s a riveting, disorienting intro, placing focus on a less prominent character whose emotional needs nonetheless drive the entire, life-in-the-day narrative. Revealing hitherto unsuspected range and delicacy as a performer, the younger Safdie articulates compacted years of damage and frailty in his short, shambling responses.
Pattinson, by contrast, enters proceedings as a frenzied human cyclone of bad hair and worse decisions. It’s not so much the matted, cheaply peroxided mop and faux diamond earrings that banish the erstwhile “Twilight”
Clinton offered her services as a counselor for the global community of camps — founded by late actor Paul Newman in 1988, to serve children with serious star’s willowy brooding from memory: It’s the antic, stressful body language, the rapid, hungry gait of a man with more to run from than run to, that makes Connie sympathetic and repulsive in equal, sometimes simultaneous, measure.
Busting Nick out of institutional confinement to rope him immediately into an elaborately conceived bank robbery nonetheless plagued with rookie errors, Connie is plainly a toxic influence, yet the brothers’ us-againstthe-world kinship is palpable — compounded by ace cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ affinity for tight, seasick closeups. As in last year’s Cannes breakout “Hell or High Water” (of which “Good Times” plays as a particularly Hadean variation), the crime story here is a pretext to a more searching examination of dysfunctional fraternal love. (RTRS)
illnesses — and her personnel suggestions didn’t stop there. (RTRS)
LOS ANGELES:
Vanity Fair released several new images for “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” featuring Carrie Fisher with her daughter Billie Lourd, as well as several other characters, both new and old.
The Annie Leibovitz-shot stills show Fisher in costume as General Leia Organa with Lourd, who plays Lieutenant Kaydel Connix.
An action shot of Daisy Ridley as Rey shows her leaping across rocks while grasping a blue lightsaber, likely while on the remote island where she discovered the missing Luke Skywalker at the end of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” (RTRS)
ROME:
An Italian hospital official says the fashion designer Laura Biagiotti has suffered a heart attack that has resulted in brain damage.
Lorenzo Sommella, a doctor at the Sant’Andrea hospital in Rome, said Thursday that the 73-year-old suffered “very grave damage” to the brain due to a lack of oxygen after the cardiac arrest.
Doctors are performing tests to verify possible brain death, the hospital said. (AP)