The Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems opens with a shimmer; an opal pulsing like a galactic nebula beneath a microscope, and ends with something closer to an implosion. In between, it careens, lunges, yells, gambles, and pleads. It is not a film that unfolds so much as it happens to you. And at the center of this unrelenting maelstrom stands Adam Sandler, giving the kind of performance that feels less like a career reinvention and more like an unearthing. Where has this Sandler been hiding?
His name is Howard Ratner, and he is, without question, the most aggravating man in New York. A diamond district dealer with a gambling problem so corrosive it borders on metaphysical, Howard is a man always running; through debts, deals, hallways, and bad ideas—with the wild-eyed optimism of someone convinced that the next bet will fix everything. He is a character so thoroughly, sweatily alive that to watch him for two hours is to feel the walls of the theater shrink around you.
Sandler plays him with remarkable elasticity, toggling between charisma and desperation, comic bravado and unfiltered terror. There is a moment, mid-rant, mid-bargain, mid-fall, when he pauses to deliver an oddly tender pep talk to Kevin Garnett (yes, the actual Garnett, playing himself with surprising gravity), and it’s in this scene that we glimpse the strange, beating heart of the film: Howard is not a con man so much as he is a believer. In his own way, he’s chasing transcendence. Unfortunately, his cathedral is a pawn shop, and his scripture is a betting slip.
The Safdies, whose previous film Good Time already hinted at their flair for high-anxiety storytelling, push their aesthetic to the limit here. Every frame is crowded, every scene overlapping with noise and movement; phones ringing, deals being shouted, doors slamming, debts being collected. The camera never stops moving. It doesn’t want you to get comfortable. And you won’t. The experience of watching Uncut Gems is like being caught in a revolving door of escalating stakes, where every decision seems impossibly bad and yet, somehow, worse ones keep coming.
That Howard’s world is populated by real figures from the worlds of sports and business; The Weeknd makes a caustic cameo; Garnett becomes an improbable Greek chorus, only adds to the uncanny sense that this madness is tethered, somehow, to our own. This is not satire; it’s just a funhouse mirror held up to the logic of late capitalism, where hustle trumps ethics and the chase for “the next big score” is both religious and suicidal.
And then there is the domestic chaos; Howard’s brittle marriage, his tempestuous affair, his children who hover just outside the fray, absorbing his misfires by osmosis. One moment he’s at a school play, the next he’s locked in a car trunk, naked, pleading. It’s comedy, and it’s tragedy, and it’s terrifying.
In the end, Uncut Gems doesn’t resolve; it detonates. What lingers isn’t just the image of Howard, eyes wide, heart pounding, waiting for the wheel to land, but the recognition that the American dream has always been a gamble, and some people are never allowed to stop playing. The Safdies don’t offer judgment. They offer velocity.
And Sandler, finally unchained from his comedic persona, doesn’t just rise to the occasion, he annihilates it. In Uncut Gems, he isn’t funny, though you may laugh. He isn’t heroic, though you may root for him. He is simply human: infuriating, inexplicable, unforgettable.
