![]() ![]() ![]() The rest of the movie is Connie frantically trying to come up with $10,000 to get his little brother out on bail, lunging from one hare-brained scheme to another on what comes to feel like a treadmill of petty crimes. A scene from "Good Times." (Courtesy Lindsay Macik/A24) Robert Pattinson stars as the scuzzy Connie Nikas, who harbors a misguided “Of Mice and Men” fantasy about moving to a farm in Virginia with his developmentally disabled brother, Nick (played quite affectingly by co-director Benny Safdie.) But before these two can tend the rabbits they first must rob a bank in Queens - while tellingly decked out in crude rubber blackface masks - and they even almost get away with it, until Nick runs through a plate glass window and gets picked up by the cops. If “Good Time” makes you uncomfortable, that’s because it’s supposed to. The Safdies score queasy laughs off of everyday prejudices and unquestioned assumptions, with our wily, dirtbag protagonist often eluding authorities by scapegoating innocent people of color unlucky enough to cross his path. It’s an edgy, electrifying movie that feels a little bit dangerous. “Good Time,” the brothers’ fiendishly funny follow-up, has a comparable sort of tunnel vision, chronicling the hectic improvisations of a not-particularly-bright criminal as his best intentions make bad situations worse over the course of one long night’s journey into day. The picture existed in the same fleetingly temporary headspace as the characters’ day-to-day hustle, hand-to-mouth and fix-to-fix. The movie’s homeless junkie denizens of New York’s Upper West Side had no futures and never mentioned their pasts. When reviewing “ Heaven Knows What,” the remarkable, underseen 2015 drama directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, I noted that the film seemed to take place entirely in the present tense. Facebook Email Robert Pattinson in "Good Times." (Courtesy Lindsay Macik/A24) ![]()
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