Author: Angela Gosselin

Watching Uncut Gems is like watching a car crash in slow motion. The film follows Howard, a relentless gambler played by Adam Sandler, as he races in, out, and around New York City to maintain his constant state of stress (and euphoria). As the stakes rise, we as an audience realize that this is no redemption story; it’s a realistic story.

The Safdie Brothers’ recent films have been experiences I am grateful for, but also experiences that I never want to have again. The film bears witness to Howard’s fatal flaw over and over, costing him his family, friends, and often dignity. Grisly imagery and unsavory settings are used to play off of Howard’s state of mind–and are portrayed in surprisingly beautiful and complex ways. I found myself in love with the visual and metaphorical concept of a shady jewelry shop, complete with fluorescent lighting and a glass double door requiring two buzzes for entry.

Adam Sandler, to me, has always double life when it comes to his career. Moving between thoughtful films like The Meyerowitz Stories and disquieting projects like Jack and Jill, Sandler puzzled me. Uncut Gems almost feels like the convergence of these two sides of his work–in the best way. His performance includes both his nuanced emotive skills and his somewhat slimy persona. He slides into character, donning the jewelry and slim sunglasses to become this larger-than-life yet pitiably weak figure. His work is amplified with equally impressive performances from Julia Fox, Idina Menzel, and Kevin Garnett(! An athlete in a film with Adam Sandler that has a purpose other than pulling tickets!).

Some stray thoughts include: 1. I loved being reminded intermittently that the film took place in 2012. The highly 2012-ish details (like an IPhone’s dated messaging design) were fun to watch. 2. I’m not sure why The Weeknd is in this other than maybe being friends with the Safdie Brothers? I suppose creating a fake celebrity would detract from stray thought #1, but it still felt off and not necessary in the same way Kevin Garnett playing himself was. 3. I won’t lie, I really could have done without watching a colonoscopy.

Uncut Gems is a heart attack worth having. I highly encourage both Adam Sandler fans and haters to see what is sure to be a contender this awards season.

Uncut Gems, the latest work by the Safdie Brothers, came out this Christmas and is sure to add a little bit of excitement to your winter break. The trailer seems to point towards a film experience involving a game of stakes and highly stylized, eye-catching visuals. Good Time, a previous work by this sibling duo, proved to be a crazy ride of a movie and surely Uncut Gems will pick up and continue the kind of frenzied energy presented in the 2017 work. Adam Sandler at his smarmiest will be sure to entertain, too.

Uncut Gems is now showing at the State Theater, grab a pal and enjoy the end of an amazing year for film!!!

Little Women was a highly enjoyable (if somewhat saccharine) film. I wasn’t previously familiar with the novel, but after seeing this I looked into the source material and previous adaptations to contextualize what I saw. Ultimately, I think Greta Gerwig did a pretty good job at grounding and animating a PG story that has been told many times in many different ways.

Gerwig notably changes the plot structure in this version of Little Women, using the non-chronological order to reflect interesting parallels from the sisters’ childhood and adulthood. I found this be effective in conveying themes and character development, and with that, it also reflects Gerwig’s thorough understanding of the text. The ending, in its own meta way, acknowledged the fact that Alcott never wanted to marry off Jo’s character–in the same way the author herself never married. As much as I appreciate Louis Garrel’s work, I somewhat wish Gerwig took the final step of just eliminating his character and the convenient marriage ending for Jo. At the same time, though, I still can appreciate the awareness and nods to Alcott’s intentions reflected in Jo and her discussions with her editor.

There were many actors and actresses I like in this film, but I was surprised to find that Florence Pugh had the best performance of them all. This is the first time I’ve seen her work (to be fully transparent, I’m just too squeamish for Ari Aster’s movies), and I found her to inhabit Amy in a very believable and watchable way. Sometimes her performance honestly contrasted the others to their detriment. Maybe this is due to her character being more traditional, but Emma Watson’s Meg seemed a lot less three dimensional compared to Florence Pugh’s Amy. Lastly, I thought Bob Odenkirk as the father of the March family was an interesting casting choice. His comedic presence precedes him for me personally, so seeing him inserted into this drama felt like an act of satire. While that took me out of the story a little bit, I think it also created this meta-textual feeling that this adored father figure as a cornerstone of the family is a joke. The older March sisters and their mother are the ones actually sustaining the family, so at the end of the day, I think that choice (if it was an intentional choice) and that new meaning was smart and added another layer to this generation’s adaptation.

Little Women is an enjoyable film that makes you consider the nature of adaptation when one takes a look at the many, many other versions over the past 100 years. It’s interesting to use this text as a way of diagnosing society’s changing attitudes towards women and feminism, past simply its utility as a warm story of family and love. I highly recommend seeing this film and doing a little research into this culturally significant story and its implications through time.

Little Women is the story of a group of sisters in the mid-19th century all trying to find their place in the world. The film is directed by Greta Gerwig, whose previous work Lady Bird proved her to be a highly insightful and skilled director and writer. Lady Bird also featured actors Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet, and so to see these great creatives working together again gives me great confidence that Little Women will definitely be a film worth seeing over this winter break, even (especially?) if its trailer portrays it to be slightly sentimental.

A Hidden Life, at its core, is the story of a man that refuses to swear an oath of service to Hitler. Beyond this guiding plot point, though, this film displays and questions important themes found back then and now. Ideas like the effect of the individual, the meaning of citizenship, and the value of morality are abound in this movie, and I enjoyed the way they were explored: openly and with a steady pace.

A specific aspect of the film that I found interesting was the language choice. The setting changes between Austria and Germany, and both English and German are used throughout the film. Ultimately, to me, it looks like English was just used for contemplative voice overs and when necessary in the plot. This was really intriguing, as you would experience characters speaking both languages. I don’t speak German, so piecing together the German and English-speaking sides of each character added another layer to my closeness to and contextualization of these characters. Another aspect of this language choice was that (outside of plot-essential points), the Nazi figures in the film pretty much just spoke German. It’s definitely a different effect to hear prison guards screaming abuse in German rather than English– this had me thinking about how Americans conceptualize and stereotype the German language. Not to say the director was trying to do anything more than stay historically accurate, but there’s definitely a certain public cultural memory that’s accessed with the German language being used like that.

Terrence Malick’s form of storytelling may not be for everyone, but I find the contemplative and non-linear aspects of his work to be the most compelling. Shots move in thoughtful, visually challenging ways that aren’t afraid to linger and create highly meditative moments. The beautiful Austrian mountains and a gritty Berlin prison offer two central settings that aren’t hard to make visually intriguing. That may be true, but by the end of the film I found myself taken by the sense of place achieved by Malick. When the setting returns to the lush hills of Austria, one feels the heartache of home. When one re-enters the prison setting throughout the film, one feels the tension of the compound. The places created in A Hidden Life are transferred quite vividly to the viewers’ minds, and thus create an intense, seemingly intimate understanding of the aura and symbolic relevance of the place.

I encourage people to see this film, to take the time to let Malick’s world swallow you whole, and to experience the cerebral yet very grounded and real work he has created.

Waves is a complicated and untraditional work, but at the same time, it left me hoping for more depth. I should say now that this review is riddled with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it I highly encourage doing so as the film unfolds in a unique and unexpected way.

So the essential plot of this film is that a suburban family copes with the oldest son, Tyler, murdering his pregnant ex-girlfriend, Alexis. There are two halves to this film: the first, detailing Tyler’s downwards spiral that leads him to being sentenced to life in prison, and the second showing the family (namely his sister Emily) coping with the effects of the first half.

To begin with the things I liked about the film, I think it’s very well-made. The camerawork specifically at times pulls off these fluid movements that really accentuate the action of the movie. The cinematography made me personally reflect on the the unique options a lot of films just don’t take a risk on in the way Waves does. The soundtrack to the movie is also used in an interesting, borderline Baby Driver kind of way–however, a few tracks were some of my favorite songs and did take me slightly out of the movie, though I guess that’s a me problem (just an example, I found myself chuckling at the use of “IFHY” by Tyler, The Creator as Tyler punches a hole in his wall out of rage…Tyler, The Creator’s music has such a sense of humor to it for me it just really didn’t match the intended effect). Using contemporary music simultaneously allows for a special kind of relation to this work for audiences and puts a time-stamp on the piece in a meaningful way, so ultimately I place this artistic choice as a net-positive on my experience.

The structure of this film is unique. It is composed of two halves when I didn’t know it would be two halves, thus leaving me waiting after the climax of the first half for the film to end–I thought I was watching a prologue. And it’s clear why I felt the structure to be jarring; these two halves are like two different movies. I couldn’t help thinking as I left that theater that this movie felt like the result of a filmmaker wanting to make a sequel (or even a trilogy) of films, but could only make one. The style of the first is heavily contrasted by the second, and yet overall I do think it could have worked. I understand this choice as the focus and tone of the story really shifts, but in the end it didn’t all come together for me due to a disparity of depth in the two halves.

The first half, to be honest (and a little mean), was like a stylized after-school special. “The popular, handsome star athlete gets an injury that puts him out of his identity-defining sport so he turns to his dad’s painkillers and alcohol and also his girlfriend gets pregnant and wants to keep her baby so they break up and in an alcohol and drug-fueled rage he kills her at a prom-adjacent after-party.” I have no issue at all with this story being told (and honestly, I’m still trying to diagnose how much I oppose this half because he’s a highly masculine athlete). I think adding depth to cliché concepts like this one (as much as it makes me feel like a bad person to say this tragedy is a cliché) is a totally worthwhile effort. The issue here is that I feel like I never really got inside Tyler’s head; there’s nothing especially dynamic going on character-wise. It felt pretty surface level and I found myself feeling very little for him.

Cue the next half of the film, as Emily finds a way to escape the alienation her brother caused and the family as a whole tries to reunite. Again, maybe I just relate more to the quieter Emily, but this half had so much more going on, emotionally. (Which doesn’t make sense due to all that’s happening in Tyler’s story!) I felt like the overall performances were better and the plot took more intriguing turns in this part. (I also have to mention that Lucas Hedges is now exonerated from my previous contempt, between his role in this section of this film and Honey Boy.)

Waves is a good, interesting film. Maybe my issues with it are just a negative interpretation of artistic choices, but at the end of the day I personally felt it was a beautiful but slightly lop-sided film.