The film premiered at the 46th Telluride Film Festival on August 30, 2019. A24 gave it a limited release in the United States on December 13 and a wide release on December 25. Uncut Gems was a box-office success and received acclaim, especially for Sandler's against-type performance, which several reviewers called the best of his career. The film was chosen by the National Board of Review as one of the top ten films of 2019.
Plot
In Spring 2012, Howard Ratner runs the KMH jewelry store in New York City's Diamond District. His job pays well, but his habits are very expensive. He has a gambling addiction, a fancy house on Long Island with his wife Dinah and children, and pied-à-terre in Manhattan for his mistress, Julia. Dinah is fed up with his antics and plans to divorce him after Passover.
Howard has borrowed $100,000 from his brother-in-law Arno, a loan shark, and used the money to purchase and smuggle a 600-carat black opal from Ethiopia's Welo mine. After the repayment deadline passes, Arno sends two hired goons, Phil and Nico, to accost Howard at his shop. Howard asks to extend the deadline to Monday, when the opal is set for auction, as Howard believes it will sell for as much as $1 million.
Howard's business associate Demany brings Boston Celtics star Kevin Garnett to KMH. Garnett becomes enamored with the opal and believes it will bring him good luck at his playoff game that night. Howard refuses to sell Garnett the opal, as it is set for auction, but agrees to lend it to him for the night. Garnett gives Howard his 2008NBA Championship ring as collateral. Howard pawns the ring to place a six-way parlay worth $600,000, betting that Garnett will play well that night.[a] Garnett dominates, but angers Howard by neglecting to return the opal before leaving New York. Howard travels to Philadelphia with Demany to retrieve it from Garnett, but once they arrive at the sports facility Demany ditches him.
That evening, Howard is ambushed at his daughter's school play by Arno, Phil, and Nico. Arno tells him that he stopped Howard's bet and lectures him about his reckless spending. The loan sharks strip Howard naked and lock him in the trunk of his car, forcing him to call Dinah for help.
Howard meets Demany at a nightclub party hosted by R&B singer the Weeknd to retrieve the opal, only to find that Garnett still has it. Howard catches Julia with the Weeknd in the club bathroom and believes they were having sex. He fights the Weeknd and orders Julia to leave his apartment.
Garnett returns the opal to Howard and resolves to buy it at the upcoming auction. He asks for his ring back, but Howard lies that he left it at home. Later, Howard berates Demany for allowing Garnett to keep the opal so long. Enraged, Demany trashes Howard's office and poisons his fish tank. After an awkward Passover family dinner, Howard pleads with Dinah to give their marriage another chance. On the drive home, Howard stops at the apartment. His son, accompanying him, finds out from another tenant that a woman had been staying there.
The auction house shocks Howard by valuing the opal at just $155,000. To salvage the situation, Howard recruits his father-in-law, Gooey, to drive up the price by bidding. Gooey bids up Garnett to $180,000, but Howard pushes for more, and Garnett backs out. Enraged by Howard's bungling, Arno, Phil, and Nico assault him outside the auction house.
Howard returns to KMH bloody and in tears. Julia comforts him and they reconcile. He retrieves Garnett's ring from the pawn shop but is late, and forced to exchange his prized 1973 Knicks ring for it. Garnett visits KMH to pick up the ring and confront Howard about his auction scheme. Howard explains that he has an emotional need to chase the next big score. He is already planning his next big bet, and uses the confrontation to motivate Garnett to dominate the next game.
Garnett pays Howard $165,000 for the opal and Howard gambles the money on a Garnett-focused parlay instead of clearing his debts.[b] Arno, Phil, and Nico visit KMH to threaten Howard. Howard recruits Julia to sneak out the cash and place the bet at the Mohegan Sun casino.[c] He then traps the loan sharks inside the store's security doors and forces them to watch the game with him. They send their associates to track down Julia. Howard calls Dinah and invents a story about a gas leak to convince her and the children to leave the house; Dinah suspects something is wrong.
Garnett comes through again, earning Howard $1.2 million. Ecstatic, Howard frees Arno and his men, but is abruptly shot and killed by an enraged Phil, to Arno's shock. When Arno attempts to escape, Phil murders him and begins looting the store with Nico. Julia collects Howard's winnings and evades Arno's men with the help of a wealthy Mohegan Sun guest named Wayne. Dinah calls the police.
Wayne Diamond as the High Roller (a fictionalized version of himself), a fashion designer and gambler[8]
John Amos, Ca$h Out, and Trinidad James appear as themselves, Amos as Howard's neighbor and the others as acquaintances of Demany.[9]Tilda Swinton and Natasha Lyonne have vocal cameos as the auction manager and a Celtics staff member, respectively.[10] Celtics head coach Doc Rivers wrote and delivered a voiceover pep talk for the film.[11]Pom Klementieff has a brief cameo as Lexis, a friend of Julia who greets Howard outside his Manhattan apartment during the opening credits.
Production
Concept and screenplay
Josh and Benny Safdie came up with the idea of a Diamond District movie in 2009, influenced by their father's stories of working as a diamond salesman.[12][13][14] Co-writer Ronald Bronstein came from a similar background, as his father worked in the Garment District.[15] Their shared Jewish upbringing was essential to their crafting of the film. The Safdies have said that "the film is about belonging" but also "about cheating God".[14]Slate called the film "the most Jewish movie in years".[16]IndieWire's David Ehrlich wrote, "Uncut Gems is the movie that Jews were promised in the Torah. Uncut Gems is gonna be the theme of my son's bar mitzvah."[17]
The question that everyone had about this movie before it even came out is whether it's antisemitic to make a movie about a crooked Jewish diamond dealer. The assumption built into that question is that the diamond dealer is a symbol of the wealthy Jew. But what we see in this movie is that he's a symbol of the working-class Jew, the desperate Jew. Maybe he's not meaningfully working-class in terms of his place in the American economy, but he is culturally marked as working-class, and that is what's actually embarrassing about it.
When creating the character of Howard, the Safdies were heavily influenced by Jewish humor and actors from the 20th century. Howard has been likened to a schlimazel, a stock Jewish humor character marked by his poor luck,[19][20] or a schlemiel, marked by his ineptitude and clumsiness,[18][21] though The Village Voice's J. Hoberman argued that Howard's shamelessness precludes the latter comparison.[22] The Safdies said they wanted Howard to encompass Jewish stereotypes proudly and treat them as a "superpower", saying, "it was very important to make Howard a strong guy who doesn't back down."[16] Josh Safdie said that one of his goals was to prove "that people can look beyond a flaw. ... That's why the movie is called 'Uncut Gems.' Uncut gems are rough things that are considered ugly by most people, but when you scope them out and get underneath you can find the beauty and value in them."[23]
The Jewish concept of "learning through suffering" was also important for the character.[16] In a round-table hosted by Jewish Currents, David Klion said, "the overriding effect that the movie seems to have on virtually everyone who sees it is one of intense anxiety, which feels like a very Jewish theme."[18]Arielle Angel wrote that Howard embodies a combination of "insecurity plus power" and that his Jewishness makes him "white enough to have access" while leaving him "with this immigrant hustler mentality".[18]
The Safdies designed Howard to channel Jewish "stereotypes that were forced onto us in the Middle Ages, when ... our only way of accruing status as an individual, as a person who was considered a human being, was through material consumption."[16] Production designer Sam Lisenco worked with the Safdies to depict a new-money striver who, despite his wealth, retains the trashy tastes of his childhood. Lisenco noted that Howard buys expensive but dated items he could not afford when he was younger, like the Sony Trinitron television in his Manhattan apartment, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and large fish tanks. The Ringer's Katie Baker called the overall effect "a study in tacky midtownish entropy".[15]
Development
In May 2016, it was announced that the Safdies would direct the film from a screenplay they wrote with Bronstein,[24] and that the Safdies' company Elara Pictures and RT Features would produce, with Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Martin Scorsese as executive producers.[24] In May 2017, the Safdies announced that Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, and Sebastian Bear-McClard would produce the film, and A24 would distribute it.[1]Netflix acquired the international distribution rights.[25]
Casting
The Safdies initially approached Adam Sandler to star in 2010 and 2015,[14][26] but his manager rejected the script.[27] Once Scorsese agreed to executive produce the film, actors started taking the film more seriously.[14][26]Jonah Hill was cast as Howard in May 2017, and the Safdies tried to rewrite the character to be younger, but Hill dropped out due to scheduling problems and chose to direct Mid90s.[27][28] In April 2018, Sandler agreed to play Howard after watching the Safdies' film Good Time.[26][29] Other actors considered for the role included Sacha Baron Cohen, Harvey Keitel, and James Caan (around 2011).[26][30]
For the role of the basketball player, Kevin Garnett was cast in September 2018.[35]Kobe Bryant, Amar'e Stoudemire, and Joel Embiid were also considered.[35] The Safdies originally wrote the part with Bryant in mind, and planned to focus on the day that Bryant broke the Madison Square Garden single-game scoring record,[11][36] but Bryant's agent said Bryant was interested only in directing.[37] The Safdies were drawn to Stoudemire due to his joint black and Jewish heritage, as well as his years with the New York Knicks, the Safdies' favorite team.[16][38] (Josh Safdie said, "There's a strong correlation with Judaism and Knicks basketball ... it has to do with suffering and trying to understand your life."[38]) But Stoudemire refused to shave his head to mirror his Knicks-era look.[26] Embiid initially agreed to join the film, but was forced to drop out when the Safdies moved filming to the basketball season.[38] The Safdies began to look at retired players and settled on Garnett, even though Garnett's Celtics and the Knicks have a historic rivalry.[39]
In October 2018, it was revealed that the Weeknd, Trinidad James, and Pom Klementieff had joined the cast.[40] The Weeknd specifically requested to play the role as an egotistical punk, saying that that was how he treated people in 2012.[7] Klementieff's scenes, apart from a brief cameo during the opening credits, were cut from the film.
Filming
Principal photography began on September 25, 2018, in New York City,[41] and concluded on November 15.[42] The film was shot by Darius Khondji, primarily on 35 mm film, using vintage anamorphic prime and long zoom lenses. Night sequences were filmed using the Arri Alexa Mini camera outfitted with the same pairing of lens types.[43][44]O'Kiep, South Africa doubled as the Welo mine in Ethiopia, but Ethiopians were cast as extras.[16] For verisimilitude, the filmmakers borrowed real footage from Garnett's NBA games, assuming that it qualified as fair use.[11]
Daniel Lopatin composed the film's original score.[47] He also recorded several songs with the Weeknd for the film. They were not used, but he has production credits on the Weeknd's 2020 album After Hours.[48] A soundtrack album of Lopatin's music for the film was released on December 13, 2019, on CD, vinyl, and digital streaming services.[49]
The Criterion Collection acquired the rights to distribute the film on home video, and issued a DVD in 2021.[56] The Safdies rented and ripped Criterion discs from Netflix growing up; Josh Safdie said that being acquired by Criterion felt like sneaking into a museum.[57]
Reception
Box office
The first weekend of its limited release, the film made $537,242 at five theaters; its per-venue average of $107,448 was the highest ever for A24 and the second-best of any film released in 2019.[58] It made $241,431 its second weekend in theaters.[59]
The film made $5.9 million on the first day of its wide release (including $1.1 million from previews on Christmas Eve), the highest single-day gross in A24 history.[60] It made $18.5 million over the five-day holiday weekend ($9.6 million of that during the weekend proper), finishing sixth at the box office.[61] In its second weekend of wide release, the film made $7.5 million, finishing eighth at the box office.[62] By the end of its theatrical run, the film had earned $50 million and was A24's highest-grossing film domestically until it was surpassed by Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022.[63]
Critical response
Adam Sandler's performance garnered critical acclaim, with several critics deeming it the best of his career.
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91% based on 351 reviews, with an average score of 8.4/10; the site's "critics consensus" reads: "Uncut Gems reaffirms the Safdies as masters of anxiety-inducing cinema—and proves Adam Sandler remains a formidable dramatic actor when given the right material."[64] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 93 out of 100 based on reviews by 56 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[65] Audiences polled by CinemaScore during the film's limited release gave it an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. Following the film's wide release, CinemaScore re-polled audiences and its score declined to "C+", and the film received an average score of 2 out of 5 stars on PostTrak.[58][61]
Sandler's performance received critical acclaim, with some commentators calling it the best of his career.[66][67][68][69]Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Many will agree that this is Sandler's best performance, and the Safdies will finally move from the fringes of the commercial film scene to somewhere closer to the center."[70] Some considered Sandler a possible Academy Award for Best Actor nominee.[71] On The Howard Stern Show, he joked that if he did not win an Oscar, he would make the "worst movie ever ... so bad on purpose just to make you all pay."[72] After learning that he had not been nominated, he congratulated Kathy Bates—his former co-star in The Waterboy(1998)—on her Best Supporting Actress nomination, and joked that he finally "can stop wearing suits."[71]
Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave the film a grade of "A", calling it "a riveting high-wire act, pairing cosmic visuals with the gritty energy of a dark psychological thriller and sudden bursts of frantic comedy".[73] Jake Cole of Slant Magazine gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, writing: "As in Good Time, Uncut Gems finds the Safdies working in a genre rooted in the grimy, character-oriented crime films of the '70s."[74] Radheyan Simonpillai of Now wrote, "there's so much propulsive, forward momentum even when the characters never get anywhere."[75] In her roundup of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, Wendy Ide of The Guardian ranked Uncut Gems one of the best films of the year, calling it "Audacious, thrilling and exhausting" and Sandler's "remarkable performance" one of the best of the year, and praising the cinematography.[76]
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Directed with relentless tension and diamond-hard intelligence by Josh and Benny Safdie (who earlier this month won directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle), Uncut Gems is a thriller and a character study, a tragedy and a blast."[69]Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called the film "a cinema of pure energy and grungy voltage, and the Safdies make it look very easy. This will be the year's most exciting film."[77]
The soundtrack and sound editing were acclaimed. Jon Caramanica of the New York Times wrote: "there is no opportunity for sonic escape in 'Uncut Gems,' a film that often sounds like it is itself taking in three movies at once. The thrum of the thing is massive, varied and thick—the noise of the city, a paranoid score, and sometimes you even hear the dialogue."[78]
Kevin Garnett's performance was also praised,[79][80] with Brady Langmann of Esquire calling it the year's best breakout performance, and Alan Siegel of The Ringer calling it "one of the best acting performances by an athlete ever".[81][82]
Accolades
According to a list compiled by Metacritic, Uncut Gems was included on the fifth-most year-end "Top Ten" lists of the best films of 2019 published by major film critics and publications.[83]
The A.V. Club ranked Uncut Gems the 92nd-best film of the 2010s.[98] In June 2025, the film ranked 58th on The New York Times's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" and 72nd on the "Readers' Choice" edition of the list.[99][100] In July 2025, it ranked 75th on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century."[101]
Uncut Gems influenced the visual language and camera work in the Pixar film Inside Out 2, and many of its elements were used in the film. The film's main characters are personifications of the feelings of Riley, a teenage girl, and Uncut Gems influenced the framing of Anxiety's scenes, particularly when Anxiety takes charge of Riley's brain.[102][103]
Diamond District workers praised the film's accurate portrayal of the industry and high-stress setting, though some said that certain aspects of Howard's character were exaggerated for dramatic effect, including his gambling addiction, his large debts, and his willingness to evade anti-smuggling laws.[104][105][106][107] Several real-life industry figures had cameos in the film.[108]
Uncut Gems was the Safdie brothers' last feature film before they dissolved their partnership in 2024,[109] though they also collaborated with Sandler on the 2020 short film Goldman v. Silverman.[110] The Safdies worked on a followup film that also starred Sandler, but Benny dropped out. He said that Josh would continue to work on the film and that he had not made significant contributions during pre-production.[111] But after the split, Josh turned his attention to Marty Supreme[112] and shot a Netflix comedy special with Sandler.[110]
Notes
↑For Howard to win, the following conditions must be satisfied: (1) Garnett wins the opening tipoff, (2) the Celtics lead at halftime, (3) the Celtics win the game, (4) Garnett beats his points projection, (5) Garnett beats his rebounds projection, and (6) Garnett beats his blocks projection. Reviewing Howard's bets for Thrillist, Anthony Schneck wrote, "including the opening tip in any parlay signifies gambling addiction in the same way that having a baby signifies you were pregnant."[6]
↑Howard bets that (1) the Celtics will win the game, (2) Garnett will win the opening tipoff, and (3) Garnett will record more than 26 combined points and rebounds.[6] Again, he recklessly bets on the opening tip.
↑The actual bet was $155,000. It is implied that Howard spent $10,000 to hire a private helicopter to take Julia to the casino.
↑Loughrey?, Clarisse (January 31, 2020). "Uncut Gems review: The best performance of Adam Sandler's career". The Independent. Archived from the original on February 27, 2023. Retrieved March 30, 2023. In the Safdie brothers' Uncut Gems, he plays Howard Ratner, a gambling addict and jeweller in New York's Diamond District – it's the best performance of his career. Sandler toys with his audience's empathy, disgust and pity like a cat with its next meal.
↑Simonpillai, Radheyan (September 13, 2019). "TIFF review: Uncut Gems". Now. Archived from the original on September 29, 2019. Retrieved September 29, 2019.
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