Fail Safe: A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

In A House of Dynamite, director Kathryn Bigelow brings the procedural precision of her War on Terror films The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to a hypothetical doomsday scenario. In tensely believable scenes of people staring at monitors and tapping on keyboards and frantically setting up phone calls, we see a scarily workaday picture of how the end might arrive. As the movie begins, a nuclear warhead of unknown origin has been launched toward America. The whole security apparatus springs into action, tracking the object, attempting to intercept it, tracing its origin, planning potential retaliation, and, finally, bracing for the worst. It’s a vision of competence in the face of the inexplicable and cataclysmic, contingencies planned for since the Cold War suddenly defrosted and put to use. Bigelow marshals a large cast of talented, dependable actors whose very presence denotes professionalism. We check in at the White House Situation Room with Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, in the oval office with Idris Elba, with high-ranking officer Tracy Letts and cabinet official Jared Harris, and at FEMA with Moses Ingram. The cast expands as the options narrow. There’s something uniquely suspenseful about watching people who we believe to be thoroughly knowledgable and totally capable growing frightened as the implications settle into their faces. 

Bigelow has such a firm grasp of tone to keep things tense and tenable that it is a shame it doesn’t add up to more. She here deploys the typical modern signifiers of Hollywood verisimilitude: handheld camera, spontaneous movement, tumbling jargon. The actors are all crisp and clear. It’s all pleasingly convincing on the surface, although the political context of its release in this turbulent 2025 has with it a kind of disbelief or alternate reality feeling. I watched these rooms of professionals calmly and reasonably and thoughtfully respond to a crisis with the awareness that rooms like these don’t look like this now. Imagine the current president, and cabinet officials, and advisors in this situation and the cold sweat induced by the premise grows even colder. That said, the movie is ultimately a disappointment, not for this disjunction alone, but for the movie’s ultimate lack of a conclusion. The movie is three first acts in search of ending. Noah Oppenheim's screenplay takes us to a cataclysmic climactic point and then doubles back to show us a different perspective and then goes back again a third time. We never get past that moment of peak suspense, and each trip through the same beats is actually diminishing returns, never meaningfully adding to the scenario since many actors and key lines repeat anyway. Then the intention to leave us in doubt certainly plays a part in drawing out a political statement about the dangers of nuclear proliferation, but it’s all The Day Of with nary a hint toward The Day After, which gives the movie a big deflating lack of impact or release. It’s a lot of expert suspense with nothing in the end to say about its ideas. 

Angel in the Right Field: GOOD FORTUNE

In Good Fortune, Keanu Reeves plays a guardian angel looking for a promotion who tries to save his first lost soul by showing a guy how the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. The joke is that he swaps a poor man’s life with a rich man’s life and the poor man decides it actually is better that way. For a cute comedy, the movie’s pretty sharp about the wages of poverty, enumerating the indignities of part-time and gig work. The result is a sitcom concoction with an unusual combination of influences. It’s one part Frank Capra fable—think It’s a Wonderful Life without the deeper emotional force—and one part Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. That 2001 book-length work of reportage subtitled On (Not) Getting By in America is a now-classic look at the American working poor. To read its accounts of unpredictable schedules, runaway housing costs, labyrinthine fines and fees, arbitrary rules, and inconsistent low pay is to be reminded of the crushing obstacles toward success for those trying to cobble together a living with multiple minimum (or near minimum) wage jobs. The problems she describes have not been ameliorated, but instead exacerbated by the growth of fleeting transactional tasks mediated by tech companies’ apps. There’s no sense of community or connection between employer and employee in such insecurity and inequity, and certainly no sense of duty or responsibility to take care, either. It’s this tension that gets a working over in the writer-director-co-star’s Aziz Ansari’s comic concept. 

It’s an amusing and earnest effort for Ansari. He plays the poor man who’s sleeping in his car and working multiple jobs when he crosses paths with a shallow tech bro played by Seth Rogen. When they are swapped by Reeves’ angel, it appears that, although money may not buy happiness, it can certainly alleviate a whole lot of unhappiness. It also turns Ansari into quite an unpleasantly selfish guy willing to trick his way into more time in this setup. It sneakily makes Rogen into the main character, too, as he’s humbled by just how difficult it is to get and keep work, let alone make ends meet. He’s paired with Reeves, who’s increasingly zen frazzled as he’s made mortal as punishment by his peeved boss (Sandra Oh), and the two guys make a fun odd couple bumming around the lower classes while Ansari just might realize how his hollow riches still won’t win him a second date with Keke Palmer’s pretty union organizer. The movie has a light touch even as it hits its socioeconomic points hard, with a pleasant, likable cast as characters and with bantering dialogues that bounce breezily through the plot’s modest complications. If you think it’ll end without everyone learning a valuable lesson and returning to a slightly better status quo, you don’t know what kind of movie you’re watching. It’s all so bright and brightly lit that it’s hard to dislike even as you sense it won’t get any deeper. 

Off the Hook: BLACK PHONE 2

The Black Phone has a perfect horror hook for today’s youth since it dares pose the question: what if the phone rang? That movie was ultimately a repetitively structured work of video game logic. An abducted boy (Mason Thames) locked in a basement takes ghostly calls from the previous victims of his kidnapper, the devil-masked Grabber (Ethan Hawke). The kid learns from their mistakes to level up his escape attempts until he can kill his foe and flee. Now here’s the sequel, Black Phone 2, and returning director Scott Derrickson and screenwriter C. Robert Cargill have some solid moves. It doesn’t quite turn the premise into a good movie, but it’s at least a more distinctive one. First, the sequel is built entirely out of the psychological and supernatural consequences of its predecessor. Turns out killing a serial killer has given the poor boy a sullen and aggressive affect. His younger sister (Madeleine McGraw) has it even worse: she’s haunted by ghosts who invade her dreams and call her toward a remote woodsy campground where The Grabber’s first victims’ spirits linger. This leads to the sequel’s other good move: taking the action out of a bland basement and into that snowy lakeside forest sleepaway camp. (Between The Shining and The Thing, you could make the argument that wintry weather is an immediate elevating element for a horror picture.) 

The siblings end up snowed in with the camp’s manager (Demián Bichir) and a few others. Once there the hauntings get stronger, with eerie violent visions of the victims and increasingly malevolent poltergeist nightmare logic from the ghost of the Grabber himself. And, yeah, there’s that phone ringing and ringing. Pick it up and you’ll hear dead people. Why they keep picking it up is beyond me, but they’re hoping for clues to stop the haunting and I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. The 80’s camp setting, the dream antagonism, and the gory slasher suspense cause the movie to play like separate good ideas for Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street reboots run full steam into each other. That gives the proceedings a sense of overfamiliar and off-brand thrills. To liven things up, Derrickson shoots dreams in grainy filmic near-abstraction and the “real” world in pale digital dreariness. The interplay between the images, not unlike the dance between frames in his best work, the snuff-film chiller Sinister, causes some decent jumps, and an invisible man finale has its bloody appeal. But there’s a dull, grinding sense of horror tropes underlying every plot point, whirring away at the expected under every scene. It’s an empty experiment in which characters are drawn up for the needs of the plotting and no further. Why is anything in particular happening other than to exercise some neat horror imagery adding up to only itself? Ah, well. Its style makes it a better brand of boring. 

Off the Grid: TRON: ARES

Tron: Ares has a great concept for a Tron movie. It brings the inner world of the computer to the real world with a villainous tech company’s high-tech 3D printer zip-zapping evil programs out of the cloud into corporeal form. After two movies about people being zapped into the computer, it’s about time to flip the direction. The fun of seeing the fluorescent-accented bodysuit-wearing warriors and glowing energy vehicles swooping down San Francisco streets makes for a pleasing contrast. Add to that a thumping and throbbing Nine Inch Nails rock score and there’s all the aesthetic markers for a satisfying blockbuster. What a let down, then, that the whole thing feels so anemic as the journey to the real world is focused on the entirely wrong character. The warring tech titans are played by talented actors. On the side of good is Greta Lee, who’s hopping the globe looking for an old magic algorithm that’ll allow her to print real crops and save the world. On the side of evil is Evan Peters and Gillian Anderson who are trying to beat their corporate rivals to the control of this tech. But instead of settling into that understandable human conflict, the story is perched on Ares, a dead-eyed program who shambles toward something like self-awareness as he’s tasked with the baddies’ bidding until a glitch causes him to seek to rewrite his own code. In a movie that’s already under-serving its human characters with hollow blockbuster plotting and thin motivations, it’s a shame to take even a little real rooting interest and drive it into something as superfluous and vacant as the empty inner mind of a machine. 

This is already a series of false starts. The 1982 original is a strange artifact, a one-off sci-fi boondoggle in which Jeff Bridges is cast adrift on a sea of chunky, simple early CG landscapes. The sequel didn’t emerge until 2010, well after that first film was an established cult object. Tron: Legacy is an across-the-board improvement, fully activating the ideas’ potential with a tighter emotional focus on a long lost father (Bridges) and a troubled grown son (Garrett Hedlund) reunited in the vast digital grid. It’s also an elegantly exciting aesthetic experience, a fitting directorial debut for the speed and sensation of Top Gun 2 and F1’s Joseph Kosinski. He makes Legacy glowing neon propulsive spectacle, with a hard-driving Daft Punk score and a swooping camera hurtling through its digital spaces. Ares is a retreat from all of that fun and innovation. It has neither the quaint eccentricities of the first, nor the non-stop dazzlement of the second. And it forgets that the concept worked best through hooking into real human feeling. This belated follow-up, despite smooth professional lensing and decent bludgeoning sound, never jolts to life. It is an inert artifact, drafting off dusty references and tropes. Turns out the only reason we cared about the cool-looking and -sounding earlier efforts set in Tron’s computers was the personal touch.

This film is impersonally crafted as pure product. Director Joachim Rønning’s made a habit of producing lesser sequels to live-action Disney fantasy hits, having previously handled Pirates of the Caribbean 5 and Maleficent 2. He’s a competent craftsman, though. His best work is the Disney live-action sports movie Young Woman and the Sea, as sturdy an example of the form as that type gives us. He knows how to hit the beats and bring a screenplay to life. As such, Ares pops with red grids and pixelated chaos, and does indeed have a bit of a charge from putting the computer things on real city streets. But there’s just not enough there there to disguise the mercenary element involved. Of course all movies, especially those at this scale, are commercial products. But this one’s empty enough to make you sit there thinking about why the company would take another crack at a franchise that’s only barely before worked for their balance sheets, and then only through the modest long-tail cult audience. Even as this one sinks at the box office, they’ll surely sell plenty of theme park tickets for the Tron ride, and Blu-ray box sets (as a completionist, I’ll get one), and copies of the soundtrack album (NIN’s thrashing electric tones are the clear highlight; I’ll buy one of those discs, too). Maybe in another decade or three they’ll take another swing at it jump-starting the series. For now, this is a sad case of a promising movie in which everyone involved is on the same page. It’s just the wrong page.

The Lost Daughter: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another multiracial leftist militants and conspiratorial white supremacists share a love of codewords, rituals, purity tests, and in-fighting. In fact, they’re so concerned with their own inner workings, that we see the actual plot of the movie is an almost inconsequential side-story to these groups’ larger aims. Without drawing a false equivalency, or even clean lines of ideological dispute other than clearly preferring the doomed progressive impulses to the drooling cartoon evil of racist authoritarians, the movie becomes a picture of a well-intentioned father-daughter pair just trying to survive. “I don’t get angry about anything anymore,” says the man, a former explosives expert for that leftist terrorist organization who now spends his days in hiding smoking weed and worrying that the government, or his ex-wife, will come knocking at the small house he shares with his teenage daughter. One gets the sense that so much fear and anger has passed in the decade-and-a-half of hiding that he’s just tired of caring. He just wants his daughter safe. 

It makes for an electrifying contemporaneous American film. Anderson uses imagery of immigration raids, paramilitary invasions, and police harassing protestors as so much vivid, dangerous backdrop to a quite simple chase story embellished with literally sensational filmmaking focused on a roving camera, booming sound, and sequences chockablock with eccentric characters down to the smallest bit parts. It’s a lot of movie: a big, filmic beauty with exacting set-pieces and satisfying spectacle. Even so, Anderson swerves from the expected. It opens with what appears to be a doomed romance between Rocket Man (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slightly off-tempo activist, and the imperious militant Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). She casts a strong impression as she almost instantly becomes a more complicated, hard-edged character who first secretly betrays him, then allows her hair-trigger propensity for violence to put her in a position from which she rats out the group. For appearing only in the prologue, her complications—and struts and stares—linger over the picture. She, and the dizzying political backdrop, is refracted in the relatively small story that follows as it’s blown up to epic proportions. The paranoid ex-radical DiCaprio is separated from his daughter (Chase Infiniti) when a paramilitary strike force (led by a wacky intense Sean Penn) takes over their small town in an immigration raid intended as a distraction for a personal revenge extraction. 

What follows is an overflow of action and activity, dense sequences with constant detail and movements, by turns sharply satirical and propulsively suspenseful, sometimes in the same moment. Somehow it manages to be a biting political cartoon, a hard-charging suspense picture, a bustling tossed-off portrait of marginalized communities, and an earnestly sentimental father-daughter picture. The result is a deeply on-edge hurly-burly whirligig of a picture, at once sweeping and small, chaotic and contained, wickedly raucous and righteously angry. DiCaprio floats through the chaos, pushing through the haze to find the right passwords and coordinates to rendezvous with his daughter, and to avoid the personal vendetta of the evil Colonel Jockjaw (the names are pure Pynchon, whose novel Vineland loosely inspired the movie). How dreadful to see the villain is emboldened to use the cover of law enforcement to selfishly chase the ghosts of his past and find favor in the secretive suits who literally lurk in underground layers. It’s in the dichotomies that the movie holds its bold, slippery power. Here a country is slipping into authoritarianism and tearing itself apart, between the boot heels hoping to stomp and the wide variety of resistance that pushes back. One group of radicals exits as others are born. One villain is taken down, but the system remains. There’s no winning the war, just the next battle, and the next. 

It becomes a movie about the legacy of struggle and division that each generation leaves for the next, this American life as a constant messy push-and-pull for progress in the face of old-fashioned backlash and repression, and those who’d use the struggle as excuse to wreak havoc. It’s also a movie about how caring for individuals is always better than centering violence. The latter is ideology as power; the former is real power. Consider the squabbling pedantic radicals on a circular hotline juxtaposed with the chill warmth of Benicio del Toro’s calm karate master who casually floats through his city’s underground communities, a steady center around which much activity orbits as he’s offering aid around every corner. (A long wandering take through his underground railroad’s maze of doors and corridors and tunnels as he confidently takes care of business while DiCaprio unravels behind him is a highlight.) 

I wish the movie had more time for its choice supporting players. Anderson’s usually so good at elucidating complicated relationships, like in The Master’s cult-leader-and-convert or Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza’s romantic infatuations as power plays. But here they just breeze by. Only Del Toro really pops, and there’s entirely too much Penn, and the rest of the ensemble (from Regina Hall to Alana Haim) is just evocative fleeting impressions. I especially wanted to know more about what drove the father, and the daughter’s political perspective, and how they filled regular days. But the strong shorthand of Chase Infiniti’s rooting charisma, a blend of vulnerable and inviolable, and the stumbling melancholic comic urgency of DiCaprio, high out of his mind, flailing around like a Millennial Lebowski, make for a sturdy through line as the camera’s elegant tracking shots and jangled score find laughter and twists in the live-wire energy of now. Through its wild comedy and dark action, it sees all manner of leftists are targets of civic violence from those wielding the force of quasi-military power, who are themselves split between matter-of-fact law enforcement and a collection of loose-cannon militias and bounty hunters. By the end, the only hope is that the next generation will be even slightly better than those who’ve left them this mess.

Love Hurts: OH, HI! and TWINLESS and SPLITSVILLE

Too often small movies these days have a concept or a premise and then leave it there, flatlining for the rest of the run time. I yearn for these movies to discover a second, let alone a third, gear. Take the acidic relationship comedy Oh, Hi!, for instance. Here writer-director Sophie Brooks delivers a fine hook. A young couple is on a weekend vacation at a sleepy rural cabin far from the city. She (Molly Gordon) is head-over-heels for him (Logan Lerman). After a nice day of boyfriend-girlfriend fun, they’re cuddled up in bed when he admits that he’s way less serious about this relationship than she is. Bad move. She leaves him handcuffed to the headboard and insists she’ll win him over. Visions of Stephen King (Misery meets Gerald’s Game, perhaps) dance in this darkly funny inciting incident. She’s desperate to keep him, and the literal vision of that neediness twists with a biting mania. Unfortunately, the movie’s exactly as stuck as the guy is. The initial provocation is startling and silly, and the early dialogue just past this development has a tense ping-ponging triangulation as each party tries to say the right things to unlock the next right step. But as it goes on, Brooks doesn’t quite know how to bring it to a resolution. Some late additions to the cast fall flat despite their appealing presences because the comedy grows sitcom loopy and the last lingering strands of emotional intelligence dissipate. The performances are committed, and the movie’s blessedly short. But it still runs out of ideas by the halfway mark and then just repeats itself until finding a pretty limp final beat to play. 

For a movie with more than a couple good moves past its premise to offer, there’s Twinless. Writer-director James Sweeney’s dark relationship dramedy has an even better hook. Sweeney plays a gay loner who meets a depressed straight guy (Dylan O’Brien) in a support group for people who are mourning the death of their twins. They become unlikely friends. At first I was worried the movie tips its hand with an obvious twist. I was dreading waiting the next hour or more for the reveal. Instead, it almost immediately lets us know that it knows we know that (mild spoiler) Sweeney doesn’t have a twin. The betrayal has layers of deception, and as he gets closer and closer to the other man so desperately and earnestly reaching out for companionship in his loneliness and grief, the movie’s tone is all the more filled with sickly sweet tension and a sensitive queasiness. Here’s a movie so tightly attuned to both characters in this situation that it doesn’t short-change the compounded psychological damage that brought them together and is brewing a sad reveal. We’re waiting for the characters to notice the twist we’ve already been shown. Sweeney gives it all a soft wit and sharp eye, developing the characters’ awkwardness and neediness and slowly developing connection. The writing has clever construction, and there’s intentionality in the visual flourishes, too, like a casually masterful split-screen journey through a party in which the halves of the frame separate, wander, and then rejoin. And the performances feel just real enough, from Sweeney’s cringing vulnerability and awkwardly hidden secrets, to O’Brien’s convincingly inhabited fumbling through pain in a hunched posture and tight jaw. (When flashbacks to his cocky twin make it a double role, it’s all the more impressive.) The picture’s all of a piece in a melancholic and unusual situation in which two people are too entangled to make a clean break. There’s no real satisfying resolution on the offer, but it’s decent enough to sit in the ambiguities of a situation that maybe can’t resolve without something tenuous and sad. 

It’s Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville, however, that offers the most robust indie relationship dramedy in quite some time. What a relief to see a movie that starts with a provocative idea and then keeps building through the implications and consequences until we arrive at a dizzy screwball finale as natural as it is surprising. It’s about time one of these actually gave us characters with places to go and people to see and changes to make. It not only has a meaty first act, it has a second, and a third, each more propulsive and entertaining than the last. It stars co-writer Kyle Marvin as a well-meaning dope blindsided when his stunning wife (Adria Arjona) asks him for a divorce. He runs, literally, to his friends’ vacation home, where, as he whines over glasses of wine, his best friend (Covino) tries to cheer him up by admitting that he and his wife (Dakota Johnson) have decided to be non-monogamous. Marvin laughs it off until, late at night, he wonders if it was an invitation. Later, upon returning to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, he wonders if they should try that arrangement, too, instead of divorce. What follows is a riot of modern befuddlement over gender roles, sexual mores, and relationship norms as what people find exciting or even just plausible in theory, is pretty complicated once real feelings and bodies get involved.

It follows a couple marriages that threaten to turn into the Marx Brothers routine in which too many people pile into too small a room. It keeps up a brisk pace of hilarious line-readings, brisk banter, clever reversals, and surprising, only slightly heightened, sight gags, and then gives it all an undertow of serious emotional stakes. It follows the twists and turns of its characters’ whims as they can’t get out of their own ways, double back to try to provoke jealousy, then scramble more as their plans end up manipulating themselves more than others. It’s a movie of anxious tap-dancing over inevitable confusion, constantly second-guessing if they’re with the right person or making the right plans for the future. How apt for a society that feels perpetually on the brink of pulling apart these days. The movie’s blend of nervy humanism, too-easy sex, and Millennial neuroticism matches well with its vulgarity and its anything-goes permissiveness that has a sharp spine of regret and bewilderment. The performances are as energetic and committed as its script, and, though it occasionally threatens to play like a vanity project to pair its writer and director as actors with gorgeous scene-partners, it’s ultimately too self-critical and breezily open to fleshing out even the bit players with meaty, complicated humanity to succumb. It’s a feat of writing and directing to kick up all this mess and keep messing until it lands with a relaxed inevitability that actually cares about the fates of these flawed and fumbling people. 

Batter or Worse: CAUGHT STEALING

Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing is atypical for him since it’s shorn of self-conscious ambition. He’s a filmmaker usually loaded down with style while straining for abstractions and existential metaphor. When it works it works. Consider the Biblical fantasy of Noah or epic existential time-spanning sci-fi The Fountain or the panicked pressure-cooker allegory of mother! or the twirling mirrored ballet nightmare of Black Swan. He’s an energetic image-maker, expert at enveloping with consistent mood and getting committed performances out of talented casts. For better and worse, there are no small choices in an Aronofsky film. The hysteria of his addiction dramas, the manic druggy Requiem for a Dream and doom-laden overeating of The Whale, is maddeningly misjudged. But the jumpy intensity of the grit and grain to his character drama The Wrestler is intensely focused. When his choices hit, they hit hard; otherwise they’re painful wild swings that totally miss. So it’s fun to see his newest feature be his breeziest and least burdened by weighty themes. It’s an up-tempo, low-level thriller set on the streets of New York City. It’s 1998 and an alcoholic ex-baseball player (Austin Butler) is barely making it work as a bartender with a nice girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz). Too bad, then, that he makes the mistake of agreeing to watch a pet cat for his punk neighbor (Matt Smith). This gets him caught between competing drug dealing gangsters (Bad Bunny and some Russians on one side; Hasidic Vincent D’Onofrio and Liev Schreiber on the other) who think the punk left him a clue to their cash. 

It sets off a mad, darkly funny, increasingly violent scramble to get out of trouble. Not even a weary cop (Regina King) seems much help. He’ll have to do it himself. Butler makes such a fine, sympathetic presence at the center of the tension. He’s stepped confidently into leading man mode, using his physicality to get and hold attention in the frame with an easy charm and casual energy that’s somehow both perfectly posed and totally relaxed. Now there’s a Movie Star. He holds the center easily as the thriller plotting pops off around him. Aronofsky gives it all a hurtling momentum, like a madcap After Hours take (there’s even Griffin Dunne) on the kind of scrappy, chatty, irreverent post-Tarantino thrillers that would’ve been on screens in 1998. Now that’s commitment to period accuracy. It’s a movie of small choices with big effects: the crack of a bat to bring our lead out of a recurring nightmare; an affinity for elegant long tracking shots; a well-spun collection of needle drops; a steady teetering between lighthearted eccentric characterizations and heavy deadly twists and turns. The movie has speed on its side; the thing doesn’t feel thin until the credits have ended and you’re walking back to the parking lot. If it’s ultimately just glossy genre pulpiness for the sake of it, then at least it’s done with such a high level of confident skill. I could get used to this style of Aronofsky.