Things to do in Los Angeles today

Josh and Benny Safdie, the indie filmmaking brothers whose New York City movies shudder with attitude, tell fast, grubby stories that harken back to the 1970s, when Sidney Lumet ruled sets. Their vigor is an instant rush: Why creep a camera down a hallway when you can fling it behind equally unhinged characters? In Heaven Knows What, the Safdies turned uptown heroin junkies into wild, unkempt angels. Then, in Good Time, they gave Robert Pattinson all the confusion he could handle as a Pacino-like Queens hustler out of his depth. There’s no nostalgia to these films, no cuteness, only the mania of urban survival, improvised on the fly with a side of trash talk. Uncut Gems, the Safdies’ electrifying and abrasive latest drama, flirts with becoming a headache. (For some, it will feel like more than flirting.) But the film gets closer than the brothers ever have to developing a genuine affection for their various schemers, and that makes all the difference. Tenaciously, it follows a week in the 2012 life of a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants Diamond District dealer, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler, channeling his obnoxiousness into something magically right, even moving). You may be overwhelmed by the Safdies’ spiky sound design—filled with yelling, sports betting, the jewelry shop’s constantly buzzing security door and an overcaffeinated, Tangerine Dream–like synth score—but Howard thrives in this chaos. It’s his normal. Beyond his bling salesmanship, Howard dreams of a big score, which

A pure adrenaline hit of a movie that takes place mostly in the lethal glare of daylight, Sam Mendes’s stunning, sorta-single-take 1917 hits its greatest heights when darkness falls. A single British soldier dusts himself off from a glancing wound, wanders to the window of a broken-down house and, in one invisible cut, emerges magically into the skeletal, hellish remains of a French town. The abandoned settlement glows with orange hues as Thomas Newman’s score hits a rare crescendo. It’s at once an epic piece of filmmaking, the launchpad for the second half of the movie, and possibly the greatest “person walks into a town” moment in cinema since Claudia Cardinale strolled into Once Upon a Time in the West. Needless to say, in a film that only stops to reload, the soldier is soon running like hell. Once Upon a Time on the Western Front—as you could subtitle Mendes’s nerve-fraying rollercoaster of a war movie—is a simple men-on-a-mission drama dressed up with all the technical bells and whistles at the director’s disposal. The men are Lance Cpls. Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are summoned into the trenches for a hurried briefing with Colin Firth’s General Erinmore. The entire German army, it turns out, has hit reverse to the tune of about 8 miles, holing up behind the Hindenburg Line and waiting secretly for an unsuspecting British attack that will cost the lives of 1,600 men, including Blake’s brother. The mission? To deliver a message to sto

Greta Gerwig has directed only two films that are solely her own but she’s already become a brand. It’s in evidence within the first five minutes of Little Women, a huggably self-deprecating take on the Louisa May Alcott classic: Brashly confident Jo (Lady Bird’s Saoirse Ronan, still uncorking those soulful stares that outclass the competition) sits in the office of a New York publishing house. Because it’s the 1860s, she has to pretend she’s trying to sell the work of a friend. But a parental editor (Tracy Letts, also from Lady Bird) sees through this and has mercy on her. He reads, pencil in hand. “Make sure she’s married at the end—or dead,” he concludes, somewhat approvingly. Jo, elated, runs down a city block, just like Gerwig did in Frances Ha. If this isn’t the Little Women you remember, either on page or screen, that’s understandable. But it’s likely the one you felt, and that’s more important. Gerwig, who should be celebrated as both an evolving screenwriter (the bold adaptation is hers) and a shrewd formal stylist, cuts to the thematic essence of the novel—sisterhood and coming of age, but also nostalgia and mourning your own past—and finds a visual language for it. Alcott’s saga of the four March sisters has been divided and restitched by Gerwig into two interwoven halves. Girlish energy suffuses the warmly lit scenes of their Massachusetts teenhood (Daddy’s away, fighting the Civil War), days chockablock with attic theatrical productions, boy crushes and rivalrie

You can almost taste the salt on your lips while watching the new psychological horror film from The Witch’s Robert Eggers, one that will leave even the sturdiest of sea legs shaking. It’s a two-handed chamber piece about a pair of lighthouse keepers living on a remote island off the New England coast at the turn of the 20th century, and it’s lit up by mesmerizing performances by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. Dafoe is Tom Wake, an old sea dog with a clay pipe jutting from his thick beard. He’s the chief “wickie” of the lighthouse and an amalgam of clichés (which the script wittily acknowledges), including his peg leg and his love of gin, sea shanties and cooking lobster. Pattinson plays ex-logger Ephraim Winslow, recently arrived from Canada. He’s the strong-and-silent type who seems to have a skeleton or two in his closet. Both are men’s men—the quarrelsome, petty, tobacco-chomping variety. Dafoe and Pattinson deliver the script (by Eggers and his brother, Max) with incredible pathos, sounding like characters who have slipped from the pages of Melville’s Moby-Dick. The dialogue is packed with the sort of withering insults worthy of In the Loop’s Malcolm Tucker, and they lash like a hailstorm. Dafoe has a long-established reputation, but for many, Pattinson remains “that guy from Twilight,” despite sterling work with the likes of David Cronenberg, James Gray and Claire Denis. Those films showcased his talents, but Eggers draws something new from the actor. Pattinson’s

It's the laugh that gets you: Joaquin Phoenix’s half cackle, half rasp has all the soothing music of a vulture in a blender. It’ll be ratting around in your head long after the old-school “The End” card flashes up on this unrelenting, grimly funny and brilliantly visceral reinvention of the DC supervillain. Joker is a truly nightmarish vision of late-era capitalism—arguably the best “social horror” film since Get Out—and Phoenix is magnetic in it. He runs Heath Ledger cigarette paper-close as the finest screen Joker. Like everything in this drum-tight movie, the title’s lack of a definite article is no accident: It’s not the fully formed Joker being introduced here, but Arthur Fleck, a man whose ambition to tell jokes professionally is at odds with the living he scraps as a clown for hire on Gotham’s grimy streets. Judging by posters of the movies playing—Excalibur and Blow Out—it’s 1981, but it feels more like the ’70s of Death Wish. He lives with his frail mom (Frances Conroy) in a broken-down tenement, eking out a little joy watching a TV chat show hosted with oily relish by Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Arthur’s on seven types of medication and has a neurological condition that causes him to laugh—okay, cackle—uncontrollably. In these domestic early scenes, Phoenix establishes Arthur as a man who sees himself less as an underdog than a mutt waiting to be put down. “I just don’t want to feel so bad anymore,” he says. And no wonder: It’s a seriously bleak world he inh