You think your life is stressful? Try swapping lives with this guy for two hours and see how you get on. This film is 135 minutes that will end with you needing beta blockers to cope with the heart palpitations you now have. And the craziest thing is that the goofiest comedic actor who ever lived is the one directly at the heart of this movie, which is now streaming for free.
Uncut Gems follows Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a New York jeweler and gambling addict who thinks he’s always one big score away from fixing his life. Who hasn’t thought that once or twice? But when he gets his hands on a rare jewel, Howard sees a chance to clear his debts and maybe, just maybe, get ahead for once. Instead, every step he takes involves making wrong choices, and he ends up in a mess involving loan sharks, NBA superstar Kevin Garnett, his crumbling marriage, and his own self-destructive need to keep pushing his luck.
The cast alongside Sandler includes LaKeith Stanfield (Atlanta) as Demany, Julia Fox (No Sudden Move) as Julia De Fiore, Kevin Garnett (Hustle) as himself, Idina Menzel (Frozen) as Dinah Ratner, and Eric Bogosian (Talk Radio) as Arno.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
Parasite
Everything Everywhere
Oppenheimer
Birdman
No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Was ‘Uncut Gems’ Successful?
In context, yes, the movie was a massive success for A24, but only by their own standards, as it wasn’t a giant mainstream blockbuster. Financially, it did very well for its scale, as it had a reported $19 million budget and grossed $50 million domestically/worldwide through its U.S. theatrical release. There wasn’t a widely reported international gross, most likely down to the fact that Netflix handled it internationally, so the theatrical number doesn’t tell the whole money story.
Critically, it was a smash. Uncut Gems has a 91% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus praising the Safdie brothers’ anxiety-machine filmmaking and Sandler’s dramatic performance. The movie was also talked about all the time during awards season, with Sandler receiving both nominations and victories for his role as Howard Ratner. Astonishingly, though, Sandler missed out on an Oscar nomination. That became its own mini-scandal, but the film still picked up major critics’ attention and helped cement the idea that this was probably the best dramatic work of his career.
Directed by Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie, Uncut Gems is streaming for free now on Fawesome.
