On the Safdie Brothers' Good Time (2017) and what it does with the crime film that its reputation undersells.

Good Time is a film about a man trying to bail his brother out of jail after a bank robbery goes wrong, and it unfolds across one night in New York with the relentlessness that the Safdie Brothers have made their formal signature.

The ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER score is doing something specific: it's creating a state of auditory alarm that doesn't correspond to any particular on-screen event. The score is always slightly ahead of the action, or slightly adjacent to it. This is not conventional scoring, which tells you how to feel about what you're seeing. It's scoring that creates a baseline anxiety that the film never resolves.

Robert Pattinson's performance is a case study in playing a character who is simultaneously very smart and very wrong. Connie Nikas makes quick, intelligent decisions. They are all bad. Not because he's stupid but because his model of the world is incorrect: he believes that energy and cleverness can overcome institutional reality, and the film is the demonstration of why they cannot.

Good Time is a heist film that hates heist films. It uses all the genre's excitement mechanisms and then refuses every one of its genre's consolations.