A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE*****

Director Kathryn Bigelow (THE HURT LOCKER) and writer Noah Oppenheim (JACKIE) have created a stunningly good film that keeps your pulse racing and your mind spinning in the most disturbingly brilliant film of 2025. It will be on Netflix on October 24th but I urge you to watch it in a cinema if you can, to take advantage of the stunning score and sound design, and brilliant lensing.

The film is Apocalypse Rashomon. Someone has fired a nuclear weapon at the USA. The military and political command scramble to figure out who did it, but it's unclear whether it's Russia, North Korea, China, a cyberattack or an IT malfunction. Even switching from Defcon 4 to 2 alerts the USA's enemies to the fact that they are on a war footing. The single point of decision making is the President. Within 18 minutes of the missile being fired - not even hitting its target - just fired - he has to decide whether to retaliate or wait. Should he knock out the command and control centres of the USA's enemies, with mass casualties, to prevent yet more US cities being lost? Or should he trust Russia when they say it's not them? Take a chance that it was just a rogue actor or an IT failure? And risk losing an all-out nuclear war in minutes? What would you decide?

We see this decision tree played out over three acts and from three perspectives. The first segment is in the White House situation room, helmed by Rebecca Ferguson's highly trained naval officer. The reactions are varied. Some flee, panicked. Others buckle down and do their jobs, knowing their families are at risk and that they cannot warn them. We see the news trickle out into the White House and panic spread. There's a moment when Ferguson's character thinks her colleague and friend has left her. We think he might have too. He was planning to propose to his girlfriend that evening. When he returns we feel her relief: if this is the end of the world she won't be alone. There's another scene where she turns her face from that colleague to momentarily experience, and then have to peg back, her grief. This is beautifully acted by Ferguson and captured by DP Barry Ackroyd. Kathryn Bigelow's admiration for the professionalism and duty that these men and women exude is palpable and affecting.

In the second segment we run the 18 minutes from the perspective of those in Stratcom - a US military compound in the middle of nowhere, deep underground. These generals have rehearsed this situation hundreds of times and are prepared to take tough decisions. Except the decision is not theirs to take. They are merely in an advisory role. The always superb Tracy Letts anchors this segment as a four star general advising the president to go for an all out retaliation. On the other side of the argument, and the conference call, is a ludicrously young national security advisor played by Gabriel Basso (HILLBILLY ELEGY). He believes that POTUS should hold back and try and calm the other nuclear nations. 

The final segment is when we actually meet the President, as played by Idris Elba, who has so far just been a black tile and a panicking voice in a conference call. He is the one who has to take in all the information, and in the final scene, make his decision accompanied only by a mid-ranking Naval officer who shadows him at all times, carrying the nuclear football. He presents the President with a book of laminated options and explains the severity of the outcomes. What an impossible decision! Meanwhile, the heart of the film is arguably the Secretary of Defense, as played by Jared Harris (Chernobyl), who learns that his estranged daughter (Kaitlyn Dever) is in the city under attack, and has to somehow be of service to his President when his world is falling apart. 

I cannot speak highly enough of the actors in this film who have to essay their characters and moral dilemmas in very limited screen time. The characters are all good people trying to do their best. Even the most hawkish of them - Tracy Letts' general - has a reasonable and rational response. But the situation is impossible. I spent much of the film petrified at what would happen with the current incumbents in the roles of SecDefense and Potus, but also reassured at the competence of those in positions around them. I think this is partly Bigelow's point. Admire the professionals. Vote knowing that in extremis these are the decision makers you are empowering. 

I feel strongly that she deserves to be Oscar-nominated for this film, as does her screenwriter. There is real skill in creating a film of such verisimilitude and unrelenting tension, as well as one that provokes so many vital and urgent questions. The way that Oppenheim doubles back on the same scene from different angles, and deepens our understanding over the three segments, is masterful. Gabriel Basso's character is a case in point. He starts off as a bit of a joke. A tile on a zoom call jogging to work and losing signal. By the end he has gravitas and our empathy.

I would also nominate Rebecca Ferguson and Jared Harris in the Supporting Actor categories for performances of deep emotional power created in a handful of minutes of screen time. This is Harris' film more than anyone else's. Kudos also to Greta Lee and Tracy Letts.

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE has a running time of 112 minutes and is rated R. It played Venice and will be released on Netflix on October 24th.

JACKIE

JACKIE is a mesmerising portrait of Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of her husband, President John F Kennedy.  It attempts to give us an intimate portrait of one of the most recognisable and yet most enigmatic women in history at both her most vulnerable and strong moments - when she's both dealing with her personal shock and grief, but also struggling to protect the legacy of her husband and to shape his place in history. We are left with a picture of a woman who is intelligent, fierce in her protective instincts, but not above sly manipulation - Jackie as a political player then, equal in her influence to Bobby Kennedy, and a match for LBJ and even General de Gaulle.  We get Jackie famously refusing to change out of her blood-stained clothes for the cameras as well as the less well known fight to have an Abraham Lincoln style full state funeral. But at the same time, we are given a tragic portrayal of just how quickly the machinery of power, rightly but savagely, moves to protect the new President, and just how quickly the old President's wife and children are cast aside.  

Screen-writer Noah Oppenheim's choice to focus on Jackie and to make JFK, who killed him, his actual politics, almost incidental is novel.  But so too is Chilean director Pablo Larrain's decision to tell the story using a complex non-linear structure.  We move back and forth from the assassination to the autopsy to the swearing in to the funeral arrangements to the interview Jackie gives to a journalist where she creates the myth of Camelot.  But even this dizzying back and forth is intercut with flashbacks to Jackie guiding TV viewers through the White House in meticulously re-created awkwardly staged black and white footage, not to mention White House recitals and balls. The vivid primary colours of the times of Camelot - Jackie in stunning ballgowns dancing with her prince, make a stark contrast with the dun-coloured scenes of Jackie alone in the White House after his assassination, and sitting in the dreary rain-soaked country house to give her interview.  Kudos to Larrain and editor Sebastian Sepulveda for managing to pull off this complex construction while but not losing the viewer. 

THE MAZE RUNNER

THE MAZE RUNNER is the latest in a series of dystopian action films aimed at the teenage market and adapted from successful Young Adult fiction franchises.  As with HUNGER GAMES and DIVERGENT we find ourselves in a post apocalyptic America where teenagers are pitted against each other in a kind of mad game, society riven by factions and controlled by some kind of overlord.  In this case, the protagonist isn't a girl but a boy, Thomas (Teen Wolf's Dylan O'Brien) who wakes up to find himself inside a Glade enclosed by the Maze.  A society of Lost Boys explains the rules to him - each person has a role in society, and the runners get to go inside the Maze and find food, although to be trapped overnight is to be killed by the Grievers.  A girl called Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) is sent into the mix with two vials of anti-venom and a jolting Big Reveal in the final 30 minutes of the film.  Be assured that if you're familiar with the genre, it won't be a big surprise.

What the plot lacks in originality or genuine scares, it makes up for in good acting. The mostly British lead cast sport know how to sell the complex emotions of abandonment, brute cruelty, camaraderie and mistrust.  Thomas Brodie Sangster (GAME OF THRONES) is very sympathetic as one of the Glade's leaders, and Will Poulter is, as ever, the most captivating of the actors in a tricky unsympathetic role. The movie has a far lower budget than HUNGER GAMES or DIVERGENT but this isn't a problem. It is beautifully designed and the lack of big show piece effects focusses the audience's attention on the characters. 

Overall the familiarity of the set-up is a bit of a problem, as is the occasionally hammy dialogue. But I'm sufficiently interested to see what's next to welcome the inevitable sequel.

THE MAZE RUNNER has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie is on global release.