Uncut Gems is a 2019 American crime thriller film directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ronald Bronstein. It stars Adam Sandler, LaKeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, and Eric Bogosian. The film tells the story of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Jewish-American jeweler and gambling addict in New York City's Diamond District, who must retrieve an expensive gem he purchased in order to pay off his debts. Filming took place from September to November 2018. The original score was composed by Daniel Lopatin.
The film premiered at the 46th Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2019. A24 gave it a limited release in the United States on December 13, 2019, and a wide release on December 25. Uncut Gems received widespread critical acclaim, especially for Sandler's performance, which several reviewers described as the best of his career. The film was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2019.
Plot
In 2010, Ethiopian Jewish miners retrieve a rare black opal from the Welo mine in Ethiopia. In 2012, gambling addict Howard Ratner runs KMH, a jewelry store in New York City's Diamond District. Howard struggles to pay off his gambling debts, which include $100,000 he owes to Arno, his loan shark brother-in-law. His domestic life is split between his wife Dinah, who has agreed to divorce after Passover, and his girlfriend Julia, a KMH employee.
Howard's business associate Demany brings basketball star Kevin Garnett to KMH. While he is there, the opal, which Howard had smuggled in, arrives. The obsessed Garnett insists on holding onto it for good luck at his game that night. Howard reluctantly agrees, demanding Garnett's 2008 NBA Championship ring as collateral.
After Garnett leaves, Howard pawns the ring, placing a six-way parlay on Garnett playing extraordinarily well in that night's game, which he does. The next day, Demany says that Garnett still has the opal, angering him. Howard is ambushed at his daughter's school play by Arno and his mafia handlers, Phil and Nico. His winning bet should have won him $600,000, but Arno placed a stop on the bet, as it was made with money Howard owed him. Phil and Nico strip Howard naked and lock him in the trunk of his car, forcing him to call Dinah for help.
Howard meets Demany at a nightclub party hosted by R&B singer the Weeknd to retrieve the opal, but learns that Garnett still has it. Howard finds Julia snorting cocaine in a bathroom with the Weeknd and, believing they were having sex, gets into a fight with him. Feeling betrayed, Howard confronts Julia and demands that she move out of his apartment.
Garnett returns the opal before an auction, offering to purchase it for $175,000, but Howard refuses, as he believes it is worth much more. Garnett demands his ring back, but Howard lies that it's at his house. After Garnett leaves, Howard berates Demany for allowing Garnett to hold onto the opal for so long. Incensed, Demany quits, trashing Howard's office. After an awkward Passover dinner, Dinah rejects Howard's plea to give their marriage another chance.
Just before the auction starts, Howard discovers the opal is worth much less than his initial estimate of $1 million. He convinces his father-in-law Gooey to bid to drive up the price, but the plan backfires when Garnett fails to top Gooey's final bid. A furious Gooey gives Howard the opal before Arno, Phil, and Nico assault him outside the auction house. He returns to KMH, bloody and in tears. Julia comforts him and they reconcile.
Garnett still wants to buy the opal and pays Howard with cash at KMH. Instead of repaying his debt, Howard asks Julia to put the cash on a three-way parlay on Garnett having a strong performance. Arno, Phil, and Nico arrive at the store and threaten Howard, but Julia has gone by helicopter to the Mohegan Sun casino to place the bet. Refusing to tell Julia to call off the bet, Howard traps the mobsters between the store's security doors. He watches the game on television, taunting the three by pointing out their court-side mob associates while they remain trapped.
The Boston Celtics win the game, earning Howard $1.2 million. Ecstatic, he frees the three thugs, but an enraged Phil shoots Howard in the face, killing him instantly. Arno protests before attempting to escape, leading Phil to shoot him dead as well. Julia leaves the casino with Howard's winnings as Phil and Nico loot the store.
Paul, a famous football player, lands up in jail and meets the warden, Rudolph, a football fan, who asks him to put a team together consisting of prison inmates to challenge the prison guards.
"Adam Sandler, Chris Rock and Burt Reynolds star in this remake of the 1970's classic about a former football star who is busted for drunk-driving and sent to a tough penitentiary where he must recruit and lead his fellow inmates in a brutal game against the facility's top-notch team of guards"
Paul Crewe went to jail because he stole his girlfriend car and started a big persecution with the police, he destroyed her car and then he is sentenced to go to a distant prison where the guards hitting him all the time.
Paul is always beat by the guards in prison and when he is invited he starts to prepare the prisoners team against the security team that was used to hitting and attack the prisoners. He chooses carefully his team and in the beginning it's a disaster but with a lot of training they increase their level like the guards of the prison. Later he receives support and of the basketball team.
The movie is super interesting and shows the reality in that prison that the white assault the negars. It's super fun and one friend of them die before the game starts trapped and burned.
In the last quarter's the team win and everybody goes crazy in the prison. Was a super game.
Mortal Engines is a 2018 steampunk film directed by Christian Rivers and with a screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson, based on the 2001 novel of the same name by Philip Reeve, and starring Hera Hilmar, Robert Sheehan, Hugo Weaving, Jihae, Ronan Raftery, Leila George, Patrick Malahide, and Stephen Lang. It's an American–New Zealand co-production.
The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world where entire cities have been mounted on wheels and motorised, and practice municipal Darwinism; its movie universe is different from that of the books.
"Imagine that you live one thousand years in the future is a world that doesn't exist anymore, there is no house, the only house is a big machine that looks like a super big car, and they have different kind of cars and they battle absorbing parts of these cars. They have also interesting airplanes and when they battle in the end, was mortal". The big cathastrophe is that one of the big cars has quantic energy that destroyed the Chinese city like a bomb atomic. For lucky, the girl found the key that turn off the machine.
Jackson purchased the rights to the book in 2009, but the film languished for several years before being officially announced in 2016. Jackson picked Rivers, who won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Jackson's King Kong, to make his feature-length directorial debut with the project, and also brought on several members of his production teams from The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit film trilogies. Filming took place from April to July 2017 in New Zealand.
Mortal Engines had its world premiere on November 27, 2018, in London, was theatrically released in Australia and New Zealand on December 6, 2018, and in the United States on December 14, 2018.
The film received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics, with some praising the visual effects and score, but with most criticizing the direction, screenplay and "lack of personality". It went down in history as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time, grossing $83.7 million against a production budget of $100–150 million and losing the studio an estimated $175 million.
CAST
Hera Hilmar as Hester Shaw, a disfigured, mask-wearing fugitive assassin with a personal vendetta against Thaddeus Valentine. She was raised by cyborg Shrike.
Poppy MacLeod as Young Hester Shaw
Robert Sheehan as Tom Natsworthy, a low-class Apprentice Historian of London thrown out of the city and forced to ally himself with Hester and the resistance as an aviator.
Hugo Weaving as Thaddeus Valentine, Deputy Lord Mayor, the obsessed archaeologist and power-hungry Head of the Guild of Historians.
Jihae as Anna Fang, a pilot, warrior, and leader of the Anti-Traction League, a resistance group banding against the moving cities devouring Earth's resources.
Ronan Raftery as Bevis Pod, an Apprentice Engineer whom Katherine befriends.
Leila George as Katherine Valentine, daughter of Thaddeus Valentine and one of London's elite.
Stephen Lang as Shrike, a cyborg (the last of an undead battalion of soldiers known as Stalkers, who were war casualties re-animated with machine parts), and Hester's guardian.
Colin Salmon as Chudleigh Pomeroy, Tom's historian boss.
Additional cameo actors: Michael Bennett and his wife, Pele, make uncredited cameos as two London residents; Philip Reeve and his son cameo as two Shan Guonese onlookers and Peter Jackson cameoes as Sooty Pete, one of London's guards.
TRAILER
PLOT
Set more than a thousand years in the future following a cataclysmic conflict known as the Sixty Minute War, the remnants of mankind regroup and form mobile cities, called "Traction Cities". Under a philosophy known as "Municipal Darwinism", larger "predator" cities hunt and absorb smaller settlements in the "Great Hunting Ground", which includes Great Britain and Continental Europe. In opposition, settlements of the "Anti-Traction League" have developed an alternative civilization consisting of "static settlements" (traditional, non-mobile cities) in Asia led by Shan Guo (formerly China), protected by the "Shield Wall". Relics of 21st-century technology such as toasters, computers, and smartphones are valued by historians as "Old-Tech."
The city of London captures a small Bavarian mining town called Salzhaken, absorbing its population and resources, under orders of Lord Mayor Magnus Crome.Tom Natsworthy, an apprentice historian, arrives at London's "Gut" to collect Salzhaken's Old-Tech for London's Museum. Hester Shaw, a masked twenty-something woman among the Salzhakens, attempts to assassinate Thaddeus Valentine, Head of the Guild of Historians, but Tom intervenes, pursuing Hester to a chute. Hester escapes, but not before telling him that Valentine murdered her mother and scarred her face. When Tom informs Valentine of this, he pushes Tom down the chute.
Tom and Hester are forced to work together to traverse the Hunting Ground, surviving Southies, Scavs on a night hunt, and finding refuge in a vehicle called Scuttlebug, but the owners lock them in a cell, intending to sell them as slaves. Hester confides that Valentine killed her archaeologist mother Pandora after stealing a piece of Old-Tech she found in a dig in the Dead Continent of the Americas, while young Hester escaped with a necklace her mother gave her. Meanwhile, Valentine frees Shrike, a reanimated cyborg known as a "Stalker", from the offshore walking prison Sharkmoor, to find and kill Hester. At the slave market of Rustwater in the Outlands, Tom and Hester are rescued by Anti-Traction League agent Anna Fang. During the chaos, they are pursued by Shrike, whom Hester reveals she knows. Hester explains that Shrike had found and raised her after escaping Valentine, and Hester promised to let him turn her into a Stalker like himself, but she left after discovering that London had entered the Great Hunting Ground, giving her a chance to kill Valentine. In London, Valentine's good-natured daughter Katherine grows estranged from her father, especially after Apprentice Engineer Bevis Pod informs her that Valentine pushed Tom down the chute, and they learn Valentine's energy project in the re-purposed St Paul's Cathedral is more than it seems.
Hester and Tom travel on Anna's airship, the Jenny Haniver, to the airborne city Airhaven, meeting other Anti-Traction League members. After questioning Hester, Tom realizes Pandora discovered a computer core for MEDUSA, a quantum energy-based superweapon used by the belligerents during the Sixty Minute War to instantly destroy entire cities, albeit shattering the Earth's crust into a thousand pieces that have rearranged the former continents. The Guild of Engineers has stolen the remaining components from Tom's museum workshop and built a MEDUSA under Valentine's orders. Shrike catches up with them, resulting in a fierce skirmish that critically wounds him and destroys Airhaven. Realizing that Hester is in love with Tom, he spares Tom and frees her of her promise before perishing. As Hester, Tom, and Anna travel to the Shield Wall of Batmunkh Gompa with the surviving Anti-Tractionists, Valentine kills Crome in a coup and musters support from Londoners by vowing to destroy the Shield Wall with MEDUSA and lead them to a new Hunting Ground in Asia. Anna convinces Shan Guo's Governor Kwan to launch the Anti-Tractionist airship fleet against London, but MEDUSA destroys the fleet and blasts a hole through the Shield Wall. After coming upon a stone carving of Medusa, Hester discovers that her mother's necklace hides a "crash drive", a kill switch for MEDUSA. Hester, Tom, Anna, and the remaining Anti-Tractionists lead a raid against London, braving the city's anti-aircraft guns.
Hester and Anna infiltrate St Paul's, and though Valentine mortally wounds Anna during a sword duel, Hester destroys MEDUSA with the crash drive. In a last-ditch attempt to destroy the Shield Wall, the insane Valentine has his henchmen kill the city's control crew and put the city on full throttle on a collision course with the Wall with no concern for all involved. With Katherine's help, Tom uses the Jenny Haniver to destroy London's engine. Hester catches and fights Valentine aboard his airship, where he reveals that he is her father. Tom rescues Hester and shoots down Valentine's ship, which is crushed by London's slowing tracks, killing Valentine. With Valentine's defeat, the surviving Londoners, now led by Katherine, make peace with the Anti-Tractionists of Shan Guo. As Governor Kwan welcomes the Londoners, Tom and Hester embrace each other and leave in the Jenny Haniver together to see the world.
