For all the early reaction visit our post here. There were so many great comments about the films and Rob's performance that we wanted to highlight some. See the quotes copied below:
The Hollywood Reporter
"If the Safdie Brothers' last feature, Heaven Knows What, evoked The Panic in Needle Park with its cinema verite observation of the New York City heroin subculture, their impressive follow-up, Good Time, sees them continuing to draw inspiration from the gritty American movies of the 1970s, albeit with their own distinctive street edge. Led by Robert Pattinson, giving arguably his most commanding performance to date as a desperate bank robber cut from the same cloth as Al Pacino's Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon, this is a richly textured genre piece that packs a visceral charge in its restless widescreen visuals and adrenalizing music, which recalls the great mood-shaping movie scores of Tangerine Dream."
"the magnetic center is Pattinson, playing a driven man whose ethics may be questionable even if his motivation at all times is rooted in fraternal devotion. It's a performance of can't-look-away intensity without an ounce of movie-star vanity."
Variety
"Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here. Still, if there’s a grainy classicism to the film’s craft, balancing the fevered formal poetry of 2014’s heroin love story “Heaven Knows What” with Lumet-channeling tautness, it’s no simple throwback exercise. “Good Time’s” passing but pointed glimpses of social disenfranchisement across a range of demographics place its narrative squarely in Donald Trump’s America of 2017."
"Pattinson, by contrast, enters proceedings as a frenzied human cyclone of bad hair and worse decisions. It’s not so much the matted, cheaply peroxided mop and faux diamond earrings that banish the erstwhile “Twilight” star’s willowy brooding from memory: It’s the antic, stressful body language, the rapid, hungry gait of a man with more to run from than run to, that makes Connie sympathetic and repulsive in equal, sometimes simultaneous, measure."Click below for more
Entertainment Weekly
“Pattinson provides the propulsive energy that makes the whole apparatus churn. Pushing beyond the muted roles for which he’s best known, the actor transforms into a vain, reckless character driven against impossible odds,” IndieWire‘s Eric Kohn raves in his A- grade review. “The whole movie zips forward at an unnerving speed, and Pattinson’s tasked with making much of it believable.”The Playlist
"The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has a heist ever gone quite so wrong to such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie‘s “Good Time“? 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. After a long period of ascent in which the signal to noise ratio for the young actor has been consistently out of whack, here he turns in his first unequivocally commanding performance: bringing absolute commitment, wolfish energy and Method-y charisma. Robert Pattinson is, finally, fantastic."The Film Stage
"It’s probably safe to say that, up until now, no lucid person had compared a Safdie brothers film to the work of Michael Mann. Indeed, it may still be a stretch, however Good Time — the New York siblings’ latest eye-popping, pill-popping, attention-deficit character study — could feasibly be described as just that. It’s in parts a heist movie (iconic masks included) and a chase movie, but not an homage in any sense, more an evolution, like a 21st century fast-food hybrid that mixes trash television and drug culture with Day-Glo splattered night-time cinematography and throbbing synthesizers, thanks to a standout score from Oneohtrix Point Never.
We open on a very Mannian helicopter shot that leads to an unmistakably 80s title card. Robert Pattinson gives the performance of his career thus far as Connie Nikas, a wired, erratically dangerous, and unpredictable pariah who looks like he could use a good night’s sleep. His brother Nick (quite boldly played by Ben Safdie, half of the directing duo) suffers from a mental disability, a Lenny to his George. We open on a scene where Connie rescues — in his eyes at least — Nick from a therapy session and takes him along to rob a bank."
The Wrap
"Cinema has conditioned us to these criminal scenarios. We understand the difference between a seamless operation (“The Sting,” the “Oceans” franchise) and one on the verge of crumbling (“Out of Sight”). The Safdie brothers, with the help of composer Daniel Lopatin’s foreboding, electronic score, are uninterested in the former. Connie and Nick are playing a losing game, and we know it.
Once the botched robbery unfolds, Connie finds himself scrambling for Nick’s bail money. This is where “Good Time” doesn’t merely change its tune, but finds it. Everything leading up to Nick’s incarceration was a smartly crafted prelude. What follows is the song. The melody is something like a modern take on “The Fugitive” in which Connie traverses Queens, ducking and hiding from those searching for him.
If he contains some mystical on-off switch, the Safdie brothers have figured out how to keep the light burning. Pattinson delivers a manic, adrenalized performance in the vein of Robert DeNiro in “Mean Streets,” a film to which “Good Time” often pays homage."
Vulture
"Good Time is a more propulsive, violent thriller than the Safdies’ last film, the poetic and raw Heaven Knows What, but the heart at its center is every bit as humane. It takes its time to establish the dysfunctional love between the brothers before diving into neon-hued squealing electronic chaos. Most of this is on the shoulders of Pattinson, doing some of the best work of his post-franchise journeyman career. His Connie is both capable and foolhardy, empathetic and scuzzy in the extreme. He believes he was a dog in a former life, and so do I: There’s a loyalty and tenderness to him fighting with his instinct for self-preservation. The more people he has to justify screwing over, the more Pattinson’s face hardens; on some level he knows the spiritual hole he’s dug for himself, but he’s unable to change course.
For all its throttling thrills, Good Time is a film about a destructive love — and loving someone despite not having the right kind of love to give them. Ignore the deceptively convivial title: This is the kind of thrill that sticks."Telegraph
"Wrath of the Twilight brigade be damned: Good Time gives Robert Pattinson easily the best part he’s ever played. We are henceforth, not Team Edward, but Team Connie, a fever-brained small-time crook in New York, who has no kind of master plan, just a series of quick initiatives to save his hide. This Cannes premiere for the Safdie brothers, Benny and Josh – previously best-known for their street-savvy junkie saga Heaven Knows What – has injected into the heavy-weather competition slate a welcome shot of restless narrative dynamism. Like Connie, the film never stays put for long without a nervous eye on its exit strategy."
"The Safdies are certainly offering a love-it-or-hate-it style proposition, above all with the infernal sound grinding away, and their filmmaking can teeter on the brink of look-ma arrogance. It’s Pattinson here who manages to centre and save it, stripping himself free of artificial mannerism and working beautifully with the non-professionals bulking out the cast. In a good way, you could well believe this was an acting debut."The Guardian
"It’s a New York story with a bizarrely picaresque feel and a pulsingly obtrusive synth score. There are big grainy close-ups and punch-ups, a prison fight, a bail-bond office scene and it all kicks off with a tremendously exciting bank robbery. But Good Time encourages its audience to invest emotionally in characters who disappear from the plot – the film appears simply to mislay them in its headlong forward rush, and loses its own direction in ways that aren’t entirely intentional. Of course, it makes a kind of sense as the film is about loss – and losers. These are people who are slithering down the slope of their own bad luck and bad choices. The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance."Screen Daily
"Plenty of films revolve around heists gone wrong, but few have the desperate, grungy velocity of Good Time. With Robert Pattinson giving a raw performance full of gutter urgency, this powerfully immersive thriller from directors Josh and Benny Safdie crackles with unpredictability, telling the story of a two-bit criminal who finds himself running into and out of jams one nightmarish evening, his journey becoming more surreal and absorbing at every turn.Entertainment Ireland
The film’s title is meant to be sarcastic, but for the audience, Good Time is an unforgettable ride.
After its Cannes premiere, this A24 offering is set for release in the US on August 11. The Safdies have earned critical acclaim but little commercial visibility for their intense, intimate dramas Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What. But considering that this new work is in a more mainstream genre and stars Pattinson, Good Time should give the brothers a much-deserved higher profile."
"But you get the impression that Pattinson was honing his craft and looking for interesting roles after the insanity that was the Twilight era. Well, he seems to have found a production that was worth the wait.LA Times
Pattinson plays a small-time criminal in 'Good Time', which has received the heaviest plaudits yet at Cannes, so much so that the standing ovation at the end of the screening brought one of the filmmakers, the Safdie Brothers, to tears.
While the film is being widely lauded, Pattinson had been garnering considerable praise. THR said "the magnetic center is Pattinson, playing a driven man whose ethics may be questionable even if his motivation at all times is rooted in fraternal devotion. It's a performance of can't-look-away intensity without an ounce of movie-star vanity.""
"For the last decade, the New York filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie have been making raw, low-budget movies, carving out a place in the U.S. indie film world but not much beyond that.
So you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to suddenly break out on the global stage of Cannes with a competition pot-stirrer.
And you really wouldn't expect them to make that mark via … an homage to “Of Mice and Men” in the form of a social-realist chase picture?
Yet the Safdies, perennial outsiders, have perhaps the movie of this tres important cinema gathering: “Good Time,” a film about two criminal brothers from a Greek American family in the directors’ hometown of Queens, N.Y.
"The Safdies had been toiling on their long-standing passion project, “Uncut Gems,” a drama set in the jewelry world (they still aim to shoot that early next year), when Pattinson got in touch to collaborate.Games Radar
The “Twilight” pinup had seen the Safdies’ heroin-world story, “Heaven Knows What,” and thought their rough-hewn sensibility is what he was needing in this new career phase. The Safdies didn’t think there was a meaty role for Pattinson in “Gems.” So they began writing a new piece for him.
The star’s involvement began attracting other actors and financing; in turn, the Safdies gave the former Edward Cullen an implicit street cred. Pattinson was so keen to dive into the film’s street hustle world that he would visit New York prisons with the Safdies in the name of research."
"As urgent and gaudy as the lights flashing on the many cop cars that pass through this poetically pulpy crime-thriller, Good Time sees Robert Pattinson give a career-best performance as a criminal negotiating a night of escalating violence and mayhem after a botched heist.
Anyone familiar with Josh and Benny Safdie’s grimy New York movies Heaven Knows What and Daddy Longlegs will know they favour scuzzball characters caught in dire circumstances. Good Time is not about to buck the trend, opening with Constantine Nikas (Pattinson) and his mentally handicapped brother Nick (Benny Safdie) securing a decent score only for their triumph to explode in their faces.
With its squalid locations and tight focus on desperate characters (literally – Sean Price Williams’ shoots startlingly close, as befits Connie’s in-the-moment decision-making devoid of a bigger picture), Good Time flicks a sweaty salute to ‘70s crime movies such as Dog Day Afternoon and Taxi Driver. But there’s also something of Scorsese’s screwy ‘80s classic After Hours to this downward-spiralling odyssey, adorned as it is with surreal sequences and Oneohtrix Point Never’s electro score, by turns ambient and (im)pure noisemongering.
The performances are as vivid as the colour-scheme (entire scenes are drenched in eye-stinging primary colours), though in Safdie’s case, he also manages to capture Nick’s fear and fragility in a well-judged turn that could so easily have offended. Pattinson, for his considerable part, is all shocked hair, blazing eyes and forward momentum. So often still and brooding in previous roles, it’s like watching a flock of birds explode off a lake."
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