"Uncut Gems” builds a genre-busting tale of crime and debt and chutzpah around an instantly indelible character named Howard Ratner, absolutely the last person in the world you’d want to play chicken against.
The cast is fine. The effects are fine. The sense of wonder and adventure and beauty are all fine. What’s missing is any sort of payoff that suggests the keepers of these stories cared about them as anything other than an ATM.
Watching the typical Baumbach family, you wonder, “How did they ever make it, these terrible people?” But watching “Marriage Story,” you think the opposite: “How did they ever fail?”
The FOMO in a time of smartphones must be crippling: here you are plowing through AP Calc while elsewhere dudes are at Nick's karate-chopping stacks of pizza boxes and still scoring full rides to Stanford.
The new documentary “Hail Satan?”, directed by Penny Lane, falls somewhere between a ridealong with a genuinely oddball subculture and a valentine to the emerging religion of satanists.