Benny Safdie
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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Directed by Sidney Lumet
influenced Good Time (2017)
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.
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…
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…
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.
The Wrestler (2008)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
influenced The Smashing Machine (2025)
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…
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, 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.
Uncut Gems (2019)
Directed by Josh Safdie
influenced by The Smashing Machine (2025), Heaven Knows What (2015)
Themes Visuals Characters
…sticking with the sporting world of Lenny Cooke and Uncut Gems…
Safdie directs with the same nervy intensity that defined Uncut Gems, but here that energy is turned inward…
Safdie’s direction is very intimate and tight, almost paying homage to the chaotic handheld movements of Uncut Gems…
Like the Safdie’s classic “feel so bad it’s good” projects Good Time and Uncut Gems, the film looks incredible.
Safdie employs a fly-on-the-wall approach that echoes Uncut Gems…
It’s cool to see this fixation applied to a non-fiction story rather than someone as “larger than life” as Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems.
Marty Supreme (2025)
Directed by Josh Safdie
influenced by The Smashing Machine (2025), Good Time (2017), Heaven Knows What (2015)
Themes Visuals
…their particular type of dreamers are also con-men, liars, and schemers…but ultimately “Heaven Knows What,” “Good Time,” and “Uncut Gems” all revolve around people who dream of a bigger and better life for themselves.
Marty Supreme is the third film in an unofficial Safdie trilogy of thrilling, propulsive character studies of grubby, egotistical, narcissistic New Yorkers, along with Good Time and Uncut Gems…
Josh seems to have retained a bit more of the Uncut Gems/Good Time feel with his latest, Marty Supreme.
If you took any enjoyment from the layers of Good Time and Uncut Gems…
It’s not exactly the neon-lit splendour of Good Time…
Even after splitting up to direct their own films, the duo is still detailing the anxiogenic stories of dreamers, with Benny Safdie making “The Smashing Machine” and Josh Safdie making “Marty Supreme.”
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.
Of course it’s possible to make a compelling film about a morally bankrupt and recklessly violent criminal sociopath, but Connie is such a small-time loser, and he is so repulsive in his brutal treatment of decent human beings (an alarming number of whom are women and/or minorities), that unlike, say, the Al Pacino character in “Dog Day Afternoon” or the bank robbers in “Heat” (to name just a couple of far superior heist films), it’s nearly impossible to feel any empathy for this guy.
Something like this probably shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of the movie, but knowing that the Safdies programmed a series of films that inspired Good Time that included some of those very classics, such as After Hours, 48 Hours, Jackie Brown and Michael Mann’s Thief and Heat, just makes their film more of a letdown.
In the annals of the crime film, the pulpy “Good Time” is roughly the opposite of something like the uber-professional thieves of “Heat.”
Movie bank robberies have grown increasingly technical over the decades: enough blueprints, hardware, sangfroid, and hours in the library researching metals and we could all be Robert De Niro in Heat .
The Panic in Needle Park is one point of reference, though Larry Clark’s Kids might be another—movies that embed the viewer into a (presumably) heretofore-unknown world, and impress with an insider’s knowledge of that world’s day-to-day realities.
Nick is mentally disabled; Connie has vague, "Of Mice and Men" dreams of getting enough money to buy a farm somewhere, or at least to get the two of them as far away from Queens as possible.
Connie and Nick were raised by their abusive grandmother, and there’s an “Of Mice and Men”-type bond between the two brothers, with Connie looking out for the hapless Nick.
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.)
The setup has faint echoes of Of Mice and Men, but the movie does not aspire to that level of human dignity, and in any event, the script separates the two characters in short order.
In “Good Time,” a variation upon a theme of John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella “Of Mice and Men,” Pattinson plays Constantine “Connie” Nikas, the not-much-smarter Queens, N.Y., brother of occasionally violent, mentally handicapped Nick Nikas (co-director Benny Safdie).
What starts out feeling vaguely like a modern take on "Of Mice and Men," however, becomes something different entirely when a botched bank robbery sees Nick thrown in jail.
Something like this probably shouldn’t affect the enjoyment of the movie, but knowing that the Safdies programmed a series of films that inspired Good Time that included some of those very classics, such as After Hours, 48 Hours, Jackie Brown and Michael Mann’s Thief and Heat, just makes their film more of a letdown.
The holdup couldn’t go worse if they were Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run (“I have a gub.”)
It doesn't bode well that the exchange of written notes begins to look like the famous scene in Woody Allen's Take the Money and Run - "I have a gub, what's a gub?" Almost miraculously they get out with some money but things unravel.
One scene elicits memories of “ Dog Day Afternoon ,” while others recall “ Midnight Cowboy ,” “ Mean Streets ” and “ Panic in Needle Park .”
Think Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection.
New York's drug subculture has occupied its share of screen time over the years, from "Midnight Cowboy" to "The Basketball Diaries," but few of those portrayals are as brutally raw as "Heaven Knows What," directed by the sibling team of Josh and Benny Safdie.