Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie direct Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones and Buddy Duress in this true tale of a heroin addict living on the streets of New York City; her day-to-day grind, her abusive men and her intense shifts in emotion.

… And she essentially plays herself. This is based on Arielle Holmes’ unpublished memoirs. I watched it to be a Safdie completist. There are sequences that have the overbearing quicksand threat and chaos of their later modern classics. But it is unrelentingly grim. How do you survive when you have nothing but bad choices left to make? The Safdies are wizards at taking outsider talent and blending them all together into these visceral emotional rollercoasters. But they work best when explicitly tooling around in the crime genre. Is it this continually bleak as that is the truth of the matter or because they know it makes the most palpable impact on a straight, safe audience?

6

Perfect Double Bill: Gridlock’d (1997)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/ and my own Substack https://substack.com/@edinburghlaughterbulletin