Uncut Gems: The Anxiety Thriller as Endurance Test

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Uncut Gems opens inside a body. Josh and Benny Safdie start on an Ethiopian opal mine — a miner has been hurt, there’s blood, there’s a jagged black stone glittering with hidden colour — and then cut, in one of the boldest match cuts in recent American cinema, from the glinting interior of the gem to the glinting interior of Howard Ratner’s colon during a routine endoscopy. The film is announcing its terms. Everything here is guts. Everything is the wet, involuntary machinery of a man who cannot stop.

Sicario: Villeneuve's Border of No Rules

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000

There is a shot about a third of the way into Sicario that tells you what kind of film you are watching. A convoy of black SUVs crawls across the border bridge into Ciudad Juárez, and Roger Deakins holds on the traffic, the razor wire, the bodies strung from an overpass in the middle distance while nobody in the cars will explain why they are there. Emily Blunt’s FBI agent asks the only sane question — what is the objective? — and the men beside her simply don’t answer. That refusal is the whole movie. Denis Villeneuve made a crime thriller in 2015 that keeps its own heroine, and therefore its own audience, permanently one briefing behind.

Crime Thriller - vo.rs

Uncut Gems: The Anxiety Thriller as Endurance Test

Sicario: Villeneuve's Border of No Rules