“The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly off the screen like Crank with an arthouse pulse and the soulful eyes of a particularly loyal puppy, it’s a feat of sonic, visual and narrative engineering that confirms the Safdies’ arrival, after Heaven Knows What, as the beat filmmakers of the millennial generation. And in Robert Pattinson‘s central performance, these Kerouacs of current-day Queens find their Neal Cassady.”
“Good Time is not the first term you’d use to describe Daddy Longlegs or Heaven Knows What, two sensitive but skin-prickling studies in human breakage,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety, “nor does it entirely apply to this nerve-raddling heist-within-a-heist thriller, which merges the Safdies’ signature gutter realism with tight genre mechanics to discomfiting but exhilarating effect.” And it features a “career-peak performance from Robert Pattinson, as a scuzzy Queens bank robber on a grimly spiraling mission to break his mentally handicapped brother out of jail.”
More on Pattinson from Little White Lies’ David Jenkins: “In some of the credo-salvaging films in which he appeared directly after his stint as everyone’s favorite braying goth vampire, it sometimes felt that he was a little out of his depth. He wanted so badly to show his range that all you could see was the acting. But the tipping point arrived in James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, in which he insouciantly stole the film from underneath bulky lead Charlie Hunnam with a breathtaking and unshowy supporting turn. Good Time marks the full transition, as if his acting dirty laundry is now completely ice white once more and he can make great movies without the burden of his formative CV.”
“We start not with him,” notes the Telegraph’s Tim Robey, “but on an uncomfortably intense close-up of his brother Nick (Benny Safdie), a brute of a guy with learning difficulties, in mid-therapy session. Connie bursts in and takes him straight off to rob a bank. They do this in rubbery black-face masks while the throbbing industrial score rises in a nearly unbearable crescendo. The sequence is grueling, but it’s funny, too: the notes being passed back and forth between Connie and the unimpressed bank-teller puncture the tension. Imagine a Michael Mann heist with Tarantino blockheads mistakenly given the duffel bag, or think back to sweating, desperate Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, and you get the idea.”
“Once the Brooklyn bank job goes south the film stays on the move, running, punching, tumbling, stumbling over 24 hours as the fallout drags us through streets, vehicles, homes, jail, a hospital, a theme park and more,” writes Time Out’s Dave Calhoun. “Racing through the gutter of the city, it's all shot in a scuzzy, real-world style, although the photography by Sean Price Williams also runs with a theme of neon and scarlet—and bathing some scenes in brothel-red isn’t the only thing here that nods to early Martin Scorsese (check out Robert Pattinson walking down the street hunched like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver for one). It also boasts a terrific, throbbing electronic score by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never.”
“Because Good Time reveals little of Connie’s backstory, Pattinson must suggest a lifetime’s worth of anxiety and scrappiness in just a look or an action,” writes Screen’s Tim Grierson. “The actor rises to the challenge, effortlessly conveying Connie’s drowned-rat edginess. Because he’s smart and resourceful, this grubby thief emerges as an unlikely rooting interest, and much of the pleasure of Good Time comes from watching the character adroitly navigate through different perils—whether it’s an innocent 16-year-old (Taliah Webster) who gets in his way or a recent parolee (Buddy Duress) with a connection to some ill-gotten money.”
For the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, this is “a sometimes funny, sometimes bewildering odyssey of crime-chaos and crime-incompetence, co-written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein; they borrow some tropes and images from Elmore Leonard. It’s a New York story with a bizarrely picaresque feel.”
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“The authority demonstrated here in the use of locations, lighting, sound, an anxiety-inducing shooting style and agitated editing—not to mention acting that is as invigoratingly in-the-moment as the breathless storytelling—more than justifies the elevation of co-directors Josh and Benny Safdie to the main competition in Cannes,” argues David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter. “The movie continues a trend of superior genre entries landing a slot in the premier global film showcase, though unlike, say, Drive, to name an entertaining recent example, Good Time never sacrifices its raw urgency to slickness.”
“The Safdies may be working on a slightly bigger scale this time around, but the movie also shows the limitations of their range,” finds IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “However, there’s simply no other modern American filmmaker capable of generating comedy and deep-seated suspense at the same time.”
“It’s respectable, but it doesn’t grip,” finds Richard Lawson, dispatching back to Vanity Fair.
“The story in the last act splutters to a weirdly abrupt end with an arbitrariness that suggest that the money ran out on the meter,” grants John Bleasdale at CineVue, but “Good Time runs like a barfly narrative of bad luck catching up.”
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