(Photo by A24 / courtesy Everett Collection)
20 Movies To Watch If You Loved Uncut Gems
Uncut Gems: Critics loved it. Adventurous audiences loved it. Even the Academy…Well, they probably did, but not enough to get Adam Sandler an Oscar nomination. If you got mauled by the relentless, noisy, vice-tightening style — and loved every second of it — and you’re looking for more movies like Uncut Gems, we’ve got a spread of 20 for you to challenge and throttle the senses.
Uncut Gems was directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, two brothers who’ve honed their intimate filmmaking over several features. They really gained traction with heroin drama Heaven Knows What, and 2017’s Good Time, starring Robert Pattinson trapped in a similar anxiety-inducing trip as the one Sandler’s unscrupulous jeweler, Howard, goes on in Uncut Gems. Howard is largely driven by his addiction to high-stakes gambling, a potentially lethal path to go down also seen in Rounders, The Gambler, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.
The fashionable hell Howard has created for himself invites many players of the criminal world in, and Uncut Gems is in many ways that classic kind of thriller where a small player cobbles together a risky plan to bet against the underworld, hoping for that big score. Some of the best that this grim genre has to offer: The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Thief (if you can’t find this, try Collateral, another Michael Mann nocturnal classic), and Sidney Lumet’s final film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Conversely, The Long Good Friday and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death (you can generally watch this without having seen the other Pushers) are from the kingpin’s perspective, which show that when you know everybody, everybody’s potentially out to kill you.
Of course, plenty of Uncut Gems fans admire the nerve-wracking pace, where problems just pile up one after the other, frequently because characters just can’t get out of their own way. If you’re looking for more of that, seek out Dog Day Afternoon, Victoria (an after-hours thriller legitimately shot in one take), Running Scared (a fan favorite with Paul Walker), Whiplash, and Run Lola Run.
Howard is arguably Sandler’s most memorable character ever: A man in deep agitation, both financial and existential in nature. You can find more deep character work from the likes of Dustin Hoffman in Straight Time, about a thief who struggles to abide by society’s pecking order after release from jail. Or Nicolas Cage in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead as a burned-out philosophical paramedic who red-eyes across multiple New York shifts. And Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, a crooked cop who loses the will to make sound decisions. These movies lay the pressure on their wayward protagonists, compressing, until out comes, well, some gritty gems of filmmaking. —Alex Vo
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