REVIEW: PVT CHAT [2021]

Let’s play a little game. It doesn’t get more cynical than the answer Jack (Peter Vack) gives to his own question, “What’s the common thread that connects every relationship you experience?” Scarlet (Julia Fox) nervously laughs when he asks it because she knows it’s rhetorical the moment he finishes. He doesn’t want her opinion. He wants to tell her what he thinks and does exactly that when explaining how we all exist to use others and be used by them. Just because Jack’s insight is overly cynical, however, doesn’t mean…

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REVIEW: Uncut Gems [2019]

Black Jew power. Writers/directors Benny and Josh Safdie‘s debut feature bowed at Cannes in 2009 to spark a rather prolific career spanning shorts, music videos, documentaries, and critically acclaimed independents featuring an increasingly more familiar stable of actors at the lead. I mention this because that’s also the year that the Safdie brothers approached Adam Sandler with the idea that became Uncut Gems. That’s before Lenny Cooke. Before their breakthrough Heaven Knows What. Before they let Robert Pattinson loose in New York City for Good Time. That’s Hollywood. Maybe Sandler…

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