Benny Safdie
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Anora (2024)
Directed by Sean Baker
influenced by Uncut Gems (2019), Good Time (2017)
and Benny Safdie by name
Visuals Themes
On Safdie, rather than any one film
Con un aire también al cine de los hermanos Safdie…
Similar modes of madness resonate from the recent films of the Safdie brothers…
There’s an almost Safdie-esque jangling energy to the film…
…a rowdy Safdie-style movie…
…redolent of the Safdies and Scorsese…
On the films
There will likely be comparisons made between this film and the work of the Safdie Brothers, with much of this middle feeling similar to Good Time, though it is in the downshift where Baker finds something distinct from that.
…the whirlwind speed and cacophonous energy of a Safdie brothers movie (Good Times, Uncut Gems)…
If Good Time and Uncut Gems were heart-clutching, cinematic panic attacks, Anora is in fine company, and a real banger.
Anora, Sean Baker’s latest film following 2021's Cannes-premiering Red Rocket, is a raucous blast - a kinetic New York City screwball comedy that shares the chaotic energy of the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems and disguises a darker heart.
The film is equal parts rom-com, screwball comedy and Uncut Gems…
It packs 130 minutes to the brim with some of the most stress-inducing comedic moments that I’ve seen since, probably, “Uncut Gems.”
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019)
Visuals Characters Themes Plot
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
Led by Robert Pattinson, giving arguably his most commanding performance to date as a desperate bank robber cut from the same cloth as Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, this is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music, which recalls the great mood-shaping movie scores of Tangerine Dream.
You have to go back into the vaults — maybe as far back as “Dog Day Afternoon” — to find a movie about a New York bank robber more intense than Benny and Josh Safdie’s ironically titled drama “Good Time.”
Their latest seems to take as its model another Al Pacino vehicle of the seventies, “Dog Day Afternoon.”
He's the subject of the movie's biggest, if most improbable, joke as well as its darkest, most despairing one, but Connie is the real star of the film, and the movie's point is his desperation - like Sonny in "Dog Day Afternoon," Connie is always thinking, always looking for the next angle.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
After Hours (1985)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019)
Plot Visuals
The Safdies are aiming for sensory overload, taking a classic genre of New York moviemaking (following “one crazy night,” like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours) and turning it into the ultimate bad trip.
What follows plays out like a drug cocktail of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and a Michael Mann-directed acid trip.
Good Time recalls the wearily hallucinatory qualities of other one-shot stories like Night on Earth and After Hours, but what the Safdies and co-screenwriter Ronald Bronstein accomplish here is a film of a distinctly filthy ilk.
Good Time is set almost entirely in a single twenty-four-hour period, and its accelerating dive-toward-doom trajectory (screenplay by Josh Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein; editing by Benny and Ronnie; direction by both Safdies) resembles nothing so much as Martin Scorsese ’s 1985 After Hours, albeit Connie is a lot closer to Robert De Niro ’s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets (1972) than to Griffin Dunne’s uptown nebbish terrorized by cool and/or crazy Tribeca women.
The presence in Broken City of Griffin Dunne, as the developer behind the corrupt mayor’s machinations, was a reminder of how far we are from After Hours , Martin Scorcese’s nocturnal SoHo freakout.
Good Time is structured like a “one crazy evening” escapade in the style of After Hours, and the Safdies send Connie on a midnight odyssey that zigs and zags with impetuous abandon.
Raging Bull (1980)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced The Smashing Machine (2025), Good Time (2017)
Themes Visuals
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine depict this in two different sports and eras, but they come to a similar conclusion: masculinity is a performance.
One senses Safdie wishes to make something closer to the psychological devastation of Raging Bull…
…rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull…
If you’re thinking about pugilists like LaMotta (of RAGING BULL) fame or Muhammad Ali, then you’re in a different arena.
From its opening scenes, Safdie appears to be reaching for the harrowing psychological intensity of films like Raging Bull or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
…like Raging Bull, it finds simple, poetic beauty in the ring…
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)
Directed by Mary Bronstein
influenced by Uncut Gems (2019), Heaven Knows What (2015), Good Time (2017)
Themes Visuals
It’s understandably drawing comparisons to things like Uncut Gems, mother!, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and The Babadook, and rightfully so.
It’s easy to classify this as Uncut Gems or Marty Supreme for middle-aged moms.
Compared to the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, it certainly harbours the same New York freneticism…
In the most stressful movie since Uncut Gems, Rose Byrne gives the single best performance I've seen all year.
Sort of like if Uncut Gems ended with a much-needed therapy session.
Before having kids, see this movie about a married single mom given the “Uncut Gems” (2019) treatment.
Rocky (1976)
Directed by John G. Avildsen
influenced The Smashing Machine (2025)
Themes Plot Characters
Rocky and Creed are great, but they do glorify boxing as something heroic and/or intrinsically American.
The Smashing Machine’s anti-biopic approach plays more like a modern, realist update of “Rocky” and less like a revisionist take on the “Rocky” sequels.
…and like Rocky, it finds failure meaningful…
Where other sports films, from Rocky to The Iron Claw, get up close and personal with the characters, essentially getting in the ring with them, Safdie and team unwisely maintain a degree of separation.
Even in the case of something like Rocky, it doesn’t even matter that he loses to Apollo Creed, as merely holding his own feels like a triumph.
…a similar, world-weary vulnerability that Sylvester Stallone showed in ROCKY…
Marty Supreme (2025)
Directed by Josh Safdie
influenced by Uncut Gems (2019), The Smashing Machine (2025), Good Time (2017), Heaven Knows What (2015)
Themes Visuals
Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme fuses the relentless intensity of Uncut Gems with the Kafkaesque absurdity of After Hours…
Marty is so stylistically and thematically in line with 2019’s Gems, it’s shocking this isn’t the duo’s official follow-up to that film.
…it’s tempting to compare its structure and many detours to those of Uncut Gems, as both films feature much of the same crew and operate as humiliating character studies…
Josh seems to have retained a bit more of the Uncut Gems/Good Time feel with his latest, Marty Supreme.
Marty Supreme's overall comedic screwball tone and filmmaking remind me of Uncut Gems; it feels like a greatest hits down to its opening sequence being the "business in the front" to Uncut's "party in the back."
Where Uncut Gems is claustrophobic and punishing, Marty Supreme has a laxity and strange warmth beneath the noise.
Ratner is every bit as secular as the gambling duo Elliott Gould and George Segal in Robert Altman’s California Split (1974)—a movie to which Uncut Gems seems somewhat indebted, not least in the Safdies’ Altman-esque love for the sound of all-American clatter and chatter.
Two 1974 classics: “California Split” and “The Gambler.”
Y en Diamantes en bruto , de nuevo con Martin Scorsese, esta vez con el de Malas calles y su cine de rabia desbocada, a borbotones, con desequilibrios de guion pero con inusitada fuerza visual y sonora; y también con el Robert Altman de la insólita y ludópata California Split, y esas secuencias con cuatro o cinco personajes hablando a la vez, sin apenas profundidad de campo, turbadoras y conmovedoras.
The Safdies clearly idolize Robert Altman (and have openly cited his gambling romp “California Split” as inspiration here), but they’re more precisely operating within the grimy New York milieu that Martin Scorsese made famous in the ‘70s (Scorsese serves as an executive producer).
Like the late director Robert Altman’s movies (see 1974’s “California Split”), the audio track contains an earthy mix of constant background noise and chatter.
Similar to Sydney Sweeney’s Christy biopic about boxer Christy Martin, The Smashing Machine is unconventional in that success for Kerr isn’t just measured in the winning of titles.
Even just earlier this year, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had to grow even more muscles and don facial prosthetics for The Smashing Machine, apparently to prove he is very strong and can act while being strong.
This is the second boxing-centered transformation drama of the year, following Dwayne Johnson’s “The Smashing Machine,” and like Johnson, Sweeney fully commits.
…in an Oscar season surprisingly rife with offbeat sports biopics (The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, each by one of the Safdie brothers)…
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Testament of Ann Lee, Blue Moon, The Smashing Machine, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, and more are at the front of said queue…
Much like The Smashing Machine with Dwayne Johnson and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere with Jeremy Allen White, Christy marches diligently alongside 2025's middling, performance-forward biographies…
Mean Streets (1973)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Uncut Gems (2019), Good Time (2017)
Visuals Plot Themes
The film, by Boston University grads Benny and Josh Safdie, is imbued with the type of on-the-street grit that made Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” so indelible, and the riveting electric score by Daniel Lopatin notches up the emotional disarray in every frame.
Good Time is set almost entirely in a single twenty-four-hour period, and its accelerating dive-toward-doom trajectory (screenplay by Josh Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein; editing by Benny and Ronnie; direction by both Safdies) resembles nothing so much as Martin Scorsese ’s 1985 After Hours, albeit Connie is a lot closer to Robert De Niro ’s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets (1972) than to Griffin Dunne’s uptown nebbish terrorized by cool and/or crazy Tribeca women.
Think of the Safdie brothers’ pulsating new drama, Good Time, as Of Mice and Men meets Mean Streets.
One scene elicits memories of “ Dog Day Afternoon ,” while others recall “ Midnight Cowboy ,” “ Mean Streets ” and “ Panic in Needle Park .”
Think of that in the sense that an early 1970s movie like “Mean Streets” showed New York guys getting into a fight.
Estelarizada por Robert Pattinson, inquieto y determinado, quien entrega la mejor actuación de su carrera con todo y peróxido en el cabello, la película es una trepidante exploración urbana que remonta a Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets, 1973; After Hours, 1984; Bringing out the Dead, 1999) en su veloz pero detallada radiografía sociológica movida por un objetivo claro: en este caso, el poder recuperar al hermano de Pattinson (Safdie) quien padece una discapacidad intelectual.
The Panic in Needle Park (1971)
Directed by Jerry Schatzberg
influenced Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019)
Themes Music
If the Safdie Brothers' last feature, Heaven Knows What, evoked The Panic in Needle Park with its cinema verite observation of the New York City heroin subculture, their impressive follow-up, Good Time, sees them continuing to draw inspiration from the gritty American movies of the 1970s, albeit with their own distinctive street edge.
As many commentators have noted, “Heaven Knows What,” the previous film by Safdie brothers Benny and Josh, essentially revisited the territory covered in 1971 by “The Panic in Needle Park”—the grim, destructive reality of drug use.
The Safdies are often described in terms of what their movies owe to the city symphonies of the ’70s—movies like Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park, to which Heaven Knows What drew more than its share of comparisons.
In this case, he adds a wistful, flute-infused motif that alternates with a gentle, whistled reverie, recalling the smeary character pieces of the 1970s--The Panic in Needle Park, Scarecrow--that clearly served as an influence.
The prologue recalls William Friedkin’s The Exorcist , a movie that similarly (and ominously) opens in a foreign land before transporting the viewer to America.
The siblings, who have experience turning mainstream icons into earring-clad scumbags thanks to 2017′s Robert Pattinson-starring Good Time, start big and fast and grimy – after an opening that pays homage to the underground horrors of The Exorcist, the directors dive deep into the under-the-skin horrors of the human body, tracing the inside of Howard’s colon – and do not stop to take a breath for one single vulgar moment.
More specifically, the dusty, enigmatic opener in “Uncut Gems” drolly echoes the start of “The Exorcist” (1973), where a priest at an archaeological dig in Iraq unearths the demonic relic that sets off the ensuing horror, the possession and spewing vomit.
The ancient power awakens in the film’s opening moments, the camera swooping like a locust across an Ethiopian mine to find a bunch of workers, overseen by their multinational bosses, in an opal-struck frenzy that recalls nothing so much as the discovery of the demon idol in The Exorcist .
The Wrestler (2008)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced The Smashing Machine (2025), Uncut Gems (2019)
Visuals Characters Plot
…rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull and even The Wrestler…
Certainly not on par with De Niro in Raging Bull or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, both of whom viscerally tapped into the vulnerabilities of their characters and how it fuelled their demons.
Mickey Rourke showcased in THE WRESTLER…
…it’s a portrait of a fighter a la The Wrestler for sure…
Like The Wrestler , Darren Aronofsky's descent into the grubby world of provincial grappling matches, Uncut Gems takes us into a rarely examined social arena—the Diamond District of Midtown Manhattan, here portrayed as a place of frenzy and menace.
You might have to go back to 2008 when Mickey Rourke played Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler to find a lead character as demonstrably pathetic.
Two 1974 classics: “California Split” and “The Gambler.”
It's essentially a twisted, over/under gambling story, not unlike Karel Reisz's The Gambler (1974), wherein our protagonist rushes around borrowing things, hocking things, betting on things, and hoping everything evens out, or else he's going to meet an unpleasant fate.
Taxi Driver (1976)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Good Time (2017), Uncut Gems (2019)
Visuals Themes Characters
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
I could say that “Good Time” looks like a movie that Martin Scorsese would have made around that time, pre-”Taxi Driver,” and that is intended as high praise.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
Think Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection.
The film is also more of a deft, passionately dynamic homage to the 1970s, early ‘80s works of Martin Scorsese than Todd Phillips Joker even slightly was, Uncut Gems capturing the same urgent agency of films like Mean Streets , Taxi Driver and After Hours with viscerally audacious ease.
If Jerry Lewis had played Taxi Driver ’s Travis Bickle, he might have gotten the same misguided praise that Sandler has for going against his strengths and misrepresenting his anxieties.
In making the results of a playoff series a life-and-death matter for an in-too-deep gambler, Uncut Gems owes not a little to 1992’s Bad Lieutenant, a film by another New York moviemaker distinguished by his commitment to capturing the tonality of the city—Abel Ferrara, who turned in a cameo in the Safdies’ 2009 Daddy Longlegs.
So, with a mix of guts and resourcefulness, the film rips a page out of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love playbook and leans into certain Sandlerisms—primarily the idea of a loud, abrasive man-child without a behavioral filter—while placing them in a discombobulating new dramatic and artistic context, like Billy Madison remade as Abel Ferrara’s neo-exploitation classic Bad Lieutenant.
If Good Time , which you can view on Amazon Prime, had something of the feel of Dog Day Afternoon , Uncut Gems made me think of Bad Lieutenant, the pugnacious 1992 Abel Ferrara film about a not-nice police officer, memorably played by Harvey Keitel, and his attempts to survive his gambling addiction during a New York Mets playoff run.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
influenced Uncut Gems (2019)
Themes Characters
If you like your movies over-the-top like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Inglorious Basterds,” then has A24 a movie for you!
Uncut Gems had echoes of other stressful movies like A Serious Man and The Wolf of Wall Street , though neither film achieves the same level of adrenaline.
There are echoes of The Wolf of Wall Street ‘s Jordan Belfort here, minus the endlessly luxurious lifestyle.
Of course, I had to sit through the entire film as that's my job, and I have to say it was an arduous watch, not just due to its aggressive and sensory assaultive nature, but also because it nearly made it to "The Wolf of Wall Street" numbers in terms of F-bombs dropped.
Quizá —ojalá me perdonen el fanatismo— el productor ejecutivo de su última película, Martin Scorsese, pero su Lobo de Wall Street ( The Wolf of Wall Street , 2013) fue una sátira, motivada tal vez por un fraude financiero que sufrió en 2010.
Fox charms audiences in a way that feels manipulative but largely isn’t and her presence on screen is reminiscent of the dynamic energy Margot Robbie brought to her first major role in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
As compared to 2023’s The Iron Claw, which was a journey through immense trauma for a family of wrestlers, lending itself to lots of melodrama and stereotypes, while Smashing Machine is a journey through relatively unremarkable events with characters you’re not given much reason to empathize with.
Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw (2023)…
Every sad wrestling film (“Foxcatcher,” “The Iron Claw,” “Cassandro”) usually gives a sense of quotidian routine…
Where other sports films, from Rocky to The Iron Claw, get up close and personal with the characters, essentially getting in the ring with them, Safdie and team unwisely maintain a degree of separation.
There are more than a few parallels to the Safdies’ 2017 thriller Good Time (right down to a bluffed bank robbery that results in an ink pack going off), but the focus is more on social breakdown than the tragic follies of a flawed protagonist.
Aneil Karia’s debut feature is (intentionally) uncomfortable viewing from first to last, reminiscent in its apparent aims and mood as the Safdie brothers’ Good Time and Uncut Gems .
His crime spree often hits familiar beats; a Post Office robbery even ends in the same manner as the ill fated heist that opens the Safdie’s Good Time , which this often feels like it’s striving to be the British cousin of.
A rare shot of genuinely frenzied energy in British genre cinema, “Surge” seems likely to prompt comparisons to the recent work of Benny and Josh Safdie — in particular, 2017’s Robert Pattinson starrer “Good Time,” another untethered study of an amateur criminal undone by his own escalating neuroses.
Bennet Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014)…
Every sad wrestling film (“Foxcatcher,” “The Iron Claw,” “Cassandro”) usually gives a sense of quotidian routine…
From its opening scenes, Safdie appears to be reaching for the harrowing psychological intensity of films like Raging Bull or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.