When early reviews for "Uncut Gems" started to pour in, we were intrigued. It wasn't an Adam Sandler movie; it was a movie with Adam Sandler... and he was supposedly great in it.

We were more than pleasantly surprised. The movie's Jew Quotient is through the roof: from its creators (it took the Safdie brothers, who wrote and directed, a decade to bring it to the screen) to the main character (a jewelry dealer in Manhattan's diamond district, for crying out loud!) to the rest of the cast. (Our favorite Disney princess, the one and only Elsa (Idina Menzel), is Sandler's wife. Judd Hirsch is not too shabby either, in a smaller role.)

But it wasn't the movie's overt Jewishness that blew us away. It was... Sandler. Appearing in pretty much every scene of its two-hour-plus runtime, he actually... acts. He does something you never expect Sandler to do, elevating and carrying a story, without resorting to fecal humor. It's truly a remarkable performance that is justifiably gathering Oscar buzz.

At the end, Sandler didn't get nominated. So much for intrigue...