For New York independent filmmakers Josh and Ben Safdie, the weak lineup at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival could mean a boost in profile. Their film, Good Time, does not fit the prescribed formula of what a Cannes competition film “ought” to be; it's made by two relatively unknown directors, it’s political without being overtly so, and it’s a genre film to the bone.

Following-up Heaven Knows What, their heartbreaker about the daily trials and tribulations of a heroin-dependant woman in New York, the brothers have gone in another direction, riffed on After Hours, and doused their film in a pool of acid.

Set over one long and hallucinatory day, Connie (Robert Pattinson) pulls his special needs brother Nick (co-director Ben Safdie) from therapy to use him as an accomplice in a bank robbery. After a paint bomb marks the brothers’ clothing, it's all downhill from there. Nick is arrested, Connie hides the money in the ceiling of a public bathroom, and after finally devising a haphazard plan, he accidentally breaks out the wrong person from police custody at the hospital.

The decision-making process is almost always foregrounded. Characters respond in the moment; they make mistakes, forget about banal but critical things like where to find a cell phone, and behave as actual humans do—complicated, flawed, and ambivalent.

What's most interesting about Good Time is not the rejuvenation of genre, but the reorienting of a character’s point of view within this set of conventions. The Safdies have crafted a wrenching thriller, expanded the universe around it, and positioned their story in a diaspora of characters and specifically drawn settings. Connie is interlaced with people on the fringes: the patrons on a bus en route to a neglected neighborhood, the black security guard working the graveyard shift at a theme park, and a 16-year-old girl who ushers herself into the story only to be torn out of it by prejudice. That's the how the world of this film works: Connie makes mistakes, other people pay for them.

Good Time begins and ends with scenes that solidify the Safdies’ intentions. Nick’s therapist asks him to draw an association between pairs of words, like 'cat' and 'mouse', or 'scissors' and 'pans'. Similarly, in the coda, an exercise is performed where Nick’s special needs class is asked an innocent question and instructed to go to one side of the room for the affirmative answer or the other side for the negative. These sequences are about Nick’s integration as a functioning and productive member of society, but perhaps the point would be clearer if Connie were receiving this therapy: “Choose your truth… choose your side of the room.”

Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is another quasi-genre movie playing in competition. A bulky Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe, a hitman hired to rampage an underage brothel and rescue a politician’s daughter from inside. With a pantheon of work behind it like Le Samourai, The Driver, and Taxi Driver, Ramsay builds a sensibility out of exhausted tropes and proves more adept as a stylist than a storyteller. As a subversion or variation on thoroughly trod material it can be effective; as a profound character study, it’s mostly useless.

This is a confident development of what Ramsay did in her previous film We Need to Talk About Kevin, fragmenting narrative to even finer shards. But the problem is less the subliminal storytelling than than the fact that little of meaning has been sublimated. The contours of a story is etched in and our suspicions fill in the gaps.

When viewed as an expression of Joe’s state of mind, the purpose of the elliptical form is revealed reductive and facile. Overlaid throughout the film, Joe and the young girl count down on the soundtrack—"39, 38, 37"—signifying a lapse in consciousness or a disassociation from the outside world. But as a way of connecting the form to character psychology, this and most of Ramsay’s other techniques feel more like gimmicks than legitimate and earned sentiment.

It should be noted that although You Were Never Really Here is polished and coherent, the cut that screened is not finished. The advertised run time in the program listed the film as over 90 minutes; the version we saw clocked in at around 80 minutes. Whatever cut screens next will presumably also have end credits.

Finished but noticeably incomplete, the disappointing joint venture between co-writer Olivier Assayas and director Roman Polanski is half-hearted on nearly all accounts. Based on a True Story, a sexless lesbian thriller, recounts the relationship of an author, Delphine (Emanuelle Seigner), and her most obsessive fan, Elle (Eva Green) who pretends to be a successful ghost writer. There's some yada-yada-yada about fiction’s complicated relationship to reality and a writer’s anxiety of integrating life experience into her work, but with a meandering plotline and without any apparent purpose, Polanski, like most of us at this point, appears to be sleepwalking.