Though plenty of people loved 2016’s Toni Erdmann, about a tightly wound businesswoman dealing with a difficult family member while trying to get her cynical job done in the E.U., I much prefer this darker, graver, more sinister version of the story. Her Smells hurtles-and scrapes and crawls and thrashes-with glaring intent. Astonishingly, Moss consistently pulls things back just before she stumbles onto the emotive third-rail. It’s mostly the Moss show, though, and she rockets through, leaving a Becky-shaped hole in every room that attempts to contain her. It plunges us in, full-body and gasping for air, as its fine company of actors (among them Virginia Madsen and Dan Stevens) manage Perry’s tricky poetics. Few movies this year were as bracingly immersive. Her Smell is utterly exhausting but it’s supposed to be. Perry stages five dazzling set pieces, ranging from hellish tailspin all the way to the pale, tentatively glimpsed glow of possible recovery. We certainly haven’t seen Moss work in this vein before, so loose and prowling, as her maybe sorta Courtney Love–esque girl group frontwoman Becky tears down everyone and everything around her. Her SmellĪ similarly feverish descent into something, Alex Ross Perry’s (to date) magnum opus is an awesome (in the old sense of the world) trek into the inner sancta of a drug-addled rock star, played with controlled chaos by a maybe never-better Elisabeth Moss. It’s instead a serious, humane piece of filmmaking, as unnerving as it is satisfying. Ambitious and rattlingly busy (I love the way Daniel Lopatin’s spacey score swirls discordantly with all the frenetic camerawork), Uncut Gems somehow isn’t the showy bit of Film Twitter posturing I feared it would be. A fascinating glimpse of a certain system of New York economy, Uncut Gems lets the viewer revel in the almost amiable sleaze of Howard and his cohort, before issuing a brutal-and vaguely metaphysical-reminder of the long fibers that bind the world, ones that tether Manhattan flare to real and tangible danger far-flung. Sandler is sweatily mesmerizing as desperate Howard, while newcomer Julia Fox slyly steals focus as Howard’s not-so-hapless mistress. What a happy-well, happy in a way-surprise, then, that Uncut Gems proves such a dizzying wonder, a stress-thriller about a Diamond District jeweler and gambling addict trying to keep his head above water as the forces of debt collectors and nothing less than cosmic fate bear down upon him. Not only did the film promise to be another scuzz-bro dive into a New York City prized for its squalor, but it stars Adam Sandler, a good actor who has seemed mostly uninterested in making good things for much of the past decade. Uncut GemsĪfter their unpleasantly jangling last feature, 2017’s Good Time, I expected to hate the Safdie brothers’ new feature, Uncut Gems. Many worthy films are left off this list, as happens every year, but these are the 10 movies that really struck me in 2019, pictures (thanks, Marty) that offered some welcome counterbalance to all the I.P. But surrounding all that franchise fanfare was a wealth of films, ones that spoke poignantly to the human experience, movies that drilled deep in their explorations of what it meant to be alive in 2019, or in the past. This year in moviegoing was indelibly marked by the semi-ends of big franchises-adios, Avengers sayonara, Star Wars.
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