Early in Uncut Gems, writer-directors Josh and Benny Safdie (they co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein) gift us, and themselves, a visual metaphor that is simply too irresistible to pass up. After a prologue set in the blood-diamond mines of Ethiopia, a telephoto lens zooms deep into the crevices of an iridescent gem, as though excavating the soul of the diamond. The image becomes an increasingly amorphous, abstract canvas of raw colors and even rawer conundrums, an obliquely sublime carnival of sheer sensory overload. Before, that is, it finally mutates into the innards of a scan of protagonist Harold Ratner’s colon. A wonderfully grotesque metaphor for the film’s ability to find beauty in the detestable and atrociousness in the beautiful, it’s also a recognition of the ease with which the audience might overlook the violence that undergirds the artifacts of late capitalism. The cloacal excursion is a surprisingly pure encapsulation of the film itself, a sojourn into this man’s psychological innards that expose the webs of social entanglement that both construct him as himself and that invite him to believe that he can actually mobilize them for his gain before finally setting him adrift in a void of delusional egotism.

The film? It works pretty well. It’s a bit of a pity that it never develops beyond this initial, beautifully lurid metaphor, or finding variations on it. I can’t help but feel that something got lost, an intangible something missing somewhere between the anus and the mine, betwixt the film’s play of the absurd, the wonderful, and the violent. The Safdie Brothers’ Good Time was nearly my favorite film of 2017, a scintillating acid-bath of 21^st century brutality and a frayed raw-nerve of psychological and architectural disarray. Uncut Gems is bigger, has more polish, and is at times more intoxicating, but it essentially repeats and in some ways reduces the formula, and like the gem at the center of the tale, it sometimes feels a bit more like the crystalline craftsmanship hides a black hole. It plays at larger thematic and geopolitical concerns, but these were already present in the earlier film, lodged between a dye pack and a hard place, and making the gestures explicit doesn’t necessarily make the film itself smarter. While it hits the ground running, it also has only, essentially, one tonal note to play from beginning to end. Despite the opening metaphor, Uncut Gems sometimes seems to work like its protagonist, so blinded by the rush of its own momentum and the thrill of its own formal beauty that it cannot quite see the full picture, let alone recognize how trapped in holding pattern it may be.

The rush is a rush, admittedly, and the thrill is, for the most part, honestly earned. This is a film that does everything in its power to evoke the choking atmosphere of sheer possibility, the way that the belief that we have an open field of play actually compresses us and squeezes the life out of us. It has a forbidding forcefield of a sonic palate that somehow manages to constrict us in the act of opening itself up, like a carnivorous plant releasing spores of sparkling metallic dust drawing any intrepid wanderer into its vise. Daniel Lopatin’s exquisite synthesizer score often seems like a demonic emanation from the gem itself, an alien artifact that is seldom seen but which organizes lines of human physical and mental energy in its name. The gem, like the score, weighs on us even when it remains invisible. When Howard cuts through the New York City streets at a pace between a strut and a shuffle, unable to stop or even look in another direction, the metallic glisten of the score takes on a gravitational quality, ever pulling him toward a forward that is actually just a spiral.

 Add to that a sound mix that summons a swarm of voices and competing dialogues always threatening Howard’s supremacy in the frame, and the film starts to seem like an anti-Altman film that utilizes a dense, heterogeneous soundscape not to spread out and wander (as Altman does) but to narrow in on us and imply tightening forces that are only semi-visible but that sculpt and shrink its protagonists’ field of possibility nonetheless. The Darius Khondji cinematography is also pretty thorny, a harsh melding of vicious realism and garish ethereality, New York City greasiness and gossamer glow. For a film that traces unexpected lines of connection between all forms of matter and the entrails of one man’s belief that he can transcend them by riding the chaos of the international market to his betterment, this is stellar, pointed filmmaking. Each of these tools evokes the sense of raw potential in the air, some dormant energy all around us that invites us to search for it and weaponize it even as it is secretly using us, like a strange shimmer beckoning you that is secretly a shiv at your throat.

If I say “pagan horror cinema” to you, dear film viewer, and it doesn’t automatically raise the specter of The Wicker Man, I am not sure that you are operating on writer-director Ari Aster’s wavelength, nor, I think, within his intended audience. That cinematic relationship is both the film’s personal test and its cruel inheritance, a horror lineage that bestows a queasy moral vista that the film very evidently wishes to surpass. The schematic reading of any pagan horror film (which is to say, films hardly trying to hide their indebtedness to The Wicker Man) is that they allegorize the dormant aftershocks of Paganism on modern Christianity, typically coding the latter as individualistic and civilization and the former as communal and essentially transgressive in its refusal of modern liberal norms. And, inevitably, they tend to find the latter mortally terrifying, especially when the pagan religion is, gasp, lead by women rather than men.

Films in this mode partially relieve the moral dubiousness of meditating on the supremacy of the modern West by only explicitly comparing it to essentially European pasts (otherwise, Midsommar bears an unmistakable ideological kinship with Eli Roth’s ludicrously racist Green Inferno, even if they are aesthetic and affective polarities). But while this blunts Midsommar’s immediate sense of ethical indiscretion, the film’s vestiges of more overtly Eurocentric visions are still readily apparent. Midsommar tests itself against The Wicker Man by upending and disfiguring the original film’s obviously dubious gender politics and skepticism about communal life, but, as I wrote above, it also inherits a debt that it can’t fully break from. Midsommar would dearly like us to know that it is skeptical of modern Western social forms, more overtly so than The Wicker Man or most pagan horror films, but that doesn’t overtake the slow-creeping terror with which it treats the non-individualistic Western past.

Joker is a portrait of a lost soul waywardly wandering his way through a meat thresher called 1980s Gotham City. Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a clown who dreams of being a stand-up comedian, who cares for and lives with his physically and perhaps mentally ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy), and who suffers from a rare and unnamed neurological disease that makes him laugh when he gets nervous. When he is fired from his job for (unthinkingly, which is telling of his personality) bringing a gun to a gig at a children’s hospital, he kills three drunk Wayne Enterprises stockbrokers on the subway, nominally to stop them from assaulting a woman and, more immediately, from attacking him, but ultimately to let out his slowly encroaching agitation at the world. While Fleck starts a relationship with Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) and worships aged television talk-show host Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), Joker strangles Arthur in a swampy miasma of social disarray and simmering economic and cultural tensions that look suspiciously like those effecting the United States circa 2019, and which have done nothing to abate in the ensuing years.

First things first: It’s not actually original, except within the heavily circumscribed container of the comic book film, either in its loose meditations on mental illness, or what Fleck, like Travis Bickle before him, would probably call “urban rot,” or its very Scorsese-esque depiction of a facsimile of post-‘70s New York, or in its rehashing of Batman’s most famous, and most negative-mirror-image-of-himself, antagonist. Joker really, and unapologetically, is just an inferior rehash of Taxi Driver meets The King of Comedy, and its strengths are inseparable from the viscous brutality and nervous energy of those two classics of frayed New York discombobulation and neoliberal deregulation.

The thing is: Joker is a pretty pungent pistol-whip of a film. While copping from Taxi Driver is old hat in the world of “serious” and “not-so-serious” (and “why-so-serious?”) cinema, King of Comedy remains mostly uncharted territory, even all these years later. Like that acid-bath parody of domesticated masculinity, Joker is a shiv of a character study, from Joaquin Phoenix’s toxically limber evocation of self-destructive animosity to De Niro’s own exploration of his own cinematic history in his appearance as Franklin, the embodiment of Rupert Pupkin’s wildest milquetoast desires. I didn’t think writer-director Todd Phillips (cowriting with Scott Silver), he of The Hangover fame, had it in him.