R-PATZ SINKS TEETH INTO NEW ROLE, AND CRITICS ARE SEDUCED

Vampire makeup never provided much of a disguise for British actor Robert Pattinson. His young female fans still swooned when they saw his pasty face on screen in the Twilight series. His attempts to reinvent himself sans makeup since that franchise came to an end, in such stylish films as Cosmopolis, The Lost City of Z, Maps to the Stars and The Rover, have largely been unsuccessful — mainly, perhaps, because he still looked like Edward Cullen, his Twilight character, in them. But it would appear that Pattinson has at last found the road to reinvention — in a movie in which he is virtually unrecognizable. The movie is Benny and Josh Safdie’s Good Time, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, and which stars Pattinson as a small-time, manic New York crook. The reviews at Cannes have been outstanding. While some critics may have raised questions about some of the Safdies’ contrivances, nearly all of them have praised Pattinson’s performance. Tim Robey, the film critic of the London Daily Telegraph was among a number of critics who predicted that Pattinson will be in the running for the Best Actor award at the festival. His “star turn goes off like an illegal firework,” Robey wrote. It’s a “thrilling performance,” observed Kate Muir in the London Times. Screen Daily‘s Tim Grierson applauded Pattinson for his “raw performance full of gutter urgency,” while concluding that “the film’s title is meant to be sarcastic, but for the audience, Good Time is an unforgettable ride.” “Astonishing” is the adjective Erick Kohn of IndieWire employed to describe Pattinson’s performance, while David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter remarked that Pattinson gives “his most commanding performance to date.” While several critics mention how Pattinson’s makeup and grungy attire helped to transform him into his character, no one, apparently, was more surprised at how effective that transformation turned out to be than Pattinson himself. This is what he told a news conference at the Cannes festival: