Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an Accident

A House of Dynamite

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (R)

★★★

Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years “takes the unthinkable and puts it right in front of us,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. A nuclear missile fired by an unknown overseas source has been spotted headed toward Chicago, and America’s crisis response team, including the president, has 18 minutes to attempt a defense and decide whether an instant counterstrike is worth risking a potentially apocalyptic escalation. “A real-life horror movie,” A House of Dynamite “lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about,” and watching it was “one of the most stressful viewing experiences I’ve had in years.”

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The movie is playing in theaters for two weeks before it moves to Netflix on Oct. 24, and its “most unusual” formal choice is a time structure that plays through the crucial 18 minutes three times from different perspectives, said Dana Stevens in Slate. First, we’re focused on Rebecca Ferguson as a senior officer in the White House Situation Room. Then we’re with Anthony Ramos as the young major in Alaska who spotted the missile on radar, and then with the president, played by Idris Elba.

Although the “twist-packed” conclusion isn’t fully satisfying, the movie “keeps surprising you right up to the end.” For me, the repetitions sapped the drama of much of its power, said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe, while the ending proved to be “a hilarious cop-out” that drew “laughter and angry groans” at the screening I attended. But Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker, remains “a virtuoso of complex action cinema,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. While the script here “occasionally gets in her way,” she creates and sustains “a powerful sense of forward momentum.”

After the Hunt

Directed by Luca Guadagnino (R)

★★

Luca Guadagnino’s “pretend-provocative” new campus drama proves to be “a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Julia Roberts stars as a Yale professor caught in the middle when one of her white male pals on the faculty is accused of sexual misconduct by one of her protégés, a young Black queer woman.

Unfortunately, the director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers doesn’t care what actually transpired between Andrew Garfield’s Hank and Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie. Instead, “Guadagnino’s driving interest is attacking academia as a rat’s nest of egomaniacs and cowards and insular, faux-radical thinking.” After the Hunt “will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards,” and “I wouldn’t disagree,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. But Guadagnino clearly savors the drama. “He’s drawn to this material not by the weight of its ethical conundrums but by the chance to watch beautiful people attempt, or pretend, to hash those conundrums out.”

Roberts, “her face a mask,” is rivetingly icy as Alma struggles to pick a side while not jeopardizing her path to tenure. “Sadly, Edebiri feels miscast,” said Siddhant Adlakha in Observer. But also, the script never gives the Emmy winner a chance to deepen her character, and the movie around her winds up settling for easy answers. Alma and Hank accuse their students of engaging in performative discontent, and “so too does the film.”

It Was Just an Accident

Directed by Jafar Panahi (PG-13)

★★★★

Despite the title, “you can’t find a more controlled film,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. From the opening scene of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, when a family driving at night accidentally runs over a dog, “we’re fully in the Iranian auteur’s grasp.” The mishap sends the father to a garage where an employee susses him out to be the intelligence officer who tortured him in prison.

Yet Accident “isn’t a vindictive picture.” Instead, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, when the ex-prisoner, Vahid, kidnaps and prepares to bury his presumed abuser, he suddenly suffers doubts about whether he has the right man, transforming the film into “both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama.” Vahid begins visiting and picking up other victims to determine if he’s chosen the correct target and punishment, and resolution for the group proves elusive. “With haunting terror, Panahi suggests that there are no good answers to the questions he raises.”

Panahi has been a victim of government oppression himself, having been banned from filmmaking until recently and twice imprisoned, and he has drawn heavily from that dark experience, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. His film “draws much of its climactic power from the sense that hell will always follow Vahid like a whistle ringing in his ears, no matter what becomes of the man he has abducted.”