FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

The casting of Adam Sandler as dramatic-yet-subtly-comic lead in Uncut Gems was a stroke of genius by the Safdie brothers. Your choices, then, for what we’ll be screening on Tuesday 5 May are out of three more films which feature inspired examples of casting-against-type. Up for the vote are:

About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, USA, 2002)

“Perfectly pitched between comedy and tragedy, hope and despair, About Schmidt instead comes far closer than many movies to expressing the way many of us live -- someplace between consuming self-absorption and insistently demanding otherness.” - Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times

Jack Nicholson is cast against type as the titular Warren Schmidt: newly retired from the insurance industry and recently widowed from his wife, living a life of quiet desperation in Omaha, Nebraska. Faced with the prospect of an uncertain future, he sets out on an RV to attend the marriage of his estranged daughter () in Denver, Colorado... About Schmidt is a quietly powerful, bittersweet exploration of life, ageing and the search for meaning, and Nicholson’s sublimely understated performance saw him nomintated for an Oscar and won him a Golden Globe.

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, USA, 2017)

A furiously engaging movie that features Margot Robbie in an ice rink, Margot Robbie at the action end of brutalising domestic abuse and, most significantly, Margot Robbie transforming fourth-wall breaking into a nearly sublime art form. Kevin Maher, The Times

Margot Robbie is cast against type as controversial, gauche and decidedly unglamorous figure skater, Tonya Harding, who, in 1991 became the first American woman to complete a triple axel. But Tonya's rise to fame is fatally scuppered by her connection to the violent 1994 assault on rival skater, Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver)... Based on real-life events, I, Tonya is a blackly comic look at the price of fame, without losing sight of its more tragic and emotionally resonant elements and arguably Robbie’s finest performance.

Sexy Beast (Johnathan Glazier, UK, 2000)

“From the off it's clear at once that Jonathan Glazer will be a ballsy, switched-on film-maker” Time Out

Ray Winston stars as Gal Dove: a retired career criminal who is enjoying his new life on the Costa Del Crime with a wife he adores (Amanda Redman). But Gal's idyll is shattered by the arrival of Don Logan (an absolutely terrifying cast-against-type Ben Kingsley), who has been sent by crime boss Teddy Bass (an equally terrifying and cast-against-type Ian McShane) to “persuade” Gal to return to London for one last job… As audacious a take on the gangster flick as you would expect from the director of Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer's first feature is a stone-cold-classic-debut; one that heralded an exciting new cinematic voice; and one of the best British films of the 2000s.