The rapturous Venice response to this one has always been a head-scratcher. Netflix has now unveiled the full trailer for Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite.”
Does it land for you? The film’s sharpest assets are in its lean, gripping first act and Volker Bertelmann’s lush score—teased in the trailer, though it does echo his earlier work in “Conclave.”
The film screened for New York Film Festival press on Tuesday, and the reactions there were far more tempered than the Venice hype. My guess? That initial wave of enthusiasm won’t hold. As the rollout continues, you’ll likely hear a recurring critique: the opening thirty minutes are electric, but the “Rashomon”-inspired structural repetition soon grows redundant.
I liked it well enough, though if you erase its three-act structure, it plays as a fairly standard political/disaster thriller. No performance or actor really stands out, and no single shot lingers in the mind, even if the craft is solid throughout.
“A House of Dynamite,” Bigelow’s first movie in eight years, stars Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Jason Clarke: they’re the players on the board, but the real star is the faceless villain—a rogue nuclear missile streaking toward Chicago, giving us a twenty-minute deadline to doomsday.
The movie is sliced into three movements, each about half an hour, each told from a different set of eyes, and each ending with the same cliffhanger. The script, by Noah Oppenheim (who brilliantly wrote “Jackie” but also conceived Netflix’s dreadful “Zero Day”), isn’t one for subtlety. There’s no denying the research, the detail, the acronyms that get thrown into ‘Dynamite.’ It’s a film that attempts to be as realistic and grounded as possible about the situation at hand.
“A House of Dynamite” will open in theaters on October 10 and arrive on Netflix on October 24.
The ‘Smile’ franchise has a new director. David Bruckner, who made “The Night House” and the 2022 “Hellraiser” reboot, has been hired to direct “Smile 3” for Paramount.