>> good time
Dir. Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie · 2017 · Robert Pattinson, Benny Safdie, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Barkhad Abdi
Connie Nikas calls everything loyalty because the other word would be control. He breaks his brother Nick out of a supervised life, pulls him into a bank robbery, and spends the rest of the film trying to repair a disaster he created without ever admitting that he is the disaster.
Good Time moves like a panic attack with a plot. Every scene is a new plan forming before the previous one has collapsed. A hospital. A theme park. A stranger's apartment. A bottle of acid. The film never gives Connie enough time to think, because thinking would expose the fact that he has no strategy. He only has velocity.
Robert Pattinson is all pressure here: jaw locked, eyes scanning, charm deployed like a weapon and abandoned the second it stops working. The performance is frightening because Connie is not stupid. He can read people quickly. He can improvise. He can find leverage in almost any room. What he cannot do is love anyone without turning that love into damage.
The Safdies shoot New York as a system of fluorescent traps. Nothing is glamorous. Everything buzzes. The neon is not style for its own sake; it is the color of bad options at 3 a.m., of convenience stores and bail offices and corridors where every choice has already become smaller than the last one.
The title is cruel. There is no good time in the film. There is only the fantasy that one more move, one more lie, one more improvised escape will turn panic into freedom. It never does.
The final cut back to Nick is what gives the film its weight. Connie's night was loud, kinetic, almost seductively alive. Nick's reality is quieter and more serious: a room, a group exercise, a chance to answer honestly. The film ends there because that is where escape might actually begin.