REVIEW: “A House of Dynamite” (2025)

October 24, 2025 by Keith Garlington

Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated and long awaited next movie has finally arrived via Netflix. It’s “A House of Dynamite” and it’s Bigelow’s first feature film since her 2017 historical crime drama “Detroit”. This is another audacious swing from the Oscar-winning director who delivers a harrowing ‘what-if’ nail-biter that’s infused with a sobering sense of urgency. It’s one of the best films of the year.

“A House of Dynamite” is a riveting thriller that can also serve as a pressing wake-up call to the ever-present danger of living in this new nuclear age. Written for the screen by Noah Oppenheim, the story plays like a hardcore military/political procedural laced with 1990s thriller vibes. But it’s Bigelow’s striking efficiency and razor-sharp precision that makes the movie’s engine hum. She maintains such control of the story’s many moving parts while keeping her audience firmly in her grip for the duration.

Bigelow is helped by a star-studded ensemble who fill out this three-pronged story. The narrative structure follows one significant event but tells it from three distinct yet interconnected perspectives. It begins at the 49th Missile Defense Battalion at Fort Greely, Alaska. Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) and his unit pickup an unidentified ballistic missile in the air. At first they believe it’s a test. But by failing to detect the launch’s point of origin, they don’t know for sure.

Fort Greely informs the White House situation room in Washington DC where Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) and her team monitor potential threats to the country. Experts soon inform Walker that the missile is not a test and is only 19 minutes away from striking the continental United States. Multiple agencies spring into action, making efforts to intercept the missile while narrowing down its impact zone. As the clock counts down, fear and anxiety sets in.

We then hop back in time to when the missile was first detected but shift our focus to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska where General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) leads the US Strategic Command and Control. Brady’s team is able to determine the missile’s target to be Chicago and its 9.2 million people. With a nuclear attack seeming imminent, Brady pushes for the President to immediately consider a counter attack. But Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) disagrees, insisting they get more information before thrusting the world into a nuclear war.

The movie transports us back once more, this time focusing on the President of the United States (played by an impressively grounded Idris Elba). We follow him as he gets word about the inbound missile and works under immense pressure to decide the best course of action. Does he follow Brady’s recommendation and counterattack before their window closes? Or does he listen to Baerington and wait, despite the dangers of doing so?

The cast is full of other supporting players who have their own roles in the story. Jason Clarke plays the senior Situation Room officer and Walker’s boss. Greta Lee plays an intelligence agent with the NSA. Moses Ingram plays a FEMA official. Jared Harris plays the Secretary of Defense. Renée Elise Goldsberry plays the First Lady. Jonah Hauer-King plays the President’s retaliatory adviser. These are just some of the characters serving as key pieces in the story, who either provide vital information that moves the plot forward or add needed humanity to the chaos.

“A House of Dynamite” wastes no time lighting its fuse and it steadily burns right up to the film’s gutsy finish. It’s a near certainty that some viewers will be upset with where Bigelow pulls the plug. But I can’t imagine a more effective ending for the kind of impression she wants to leave. The palpable fear, the unnerving uncertainty, the sobering real-world relevance – it all hits like a hammer in the film’s final shots which Bigelow lands just as intended.

With “A House of Dynamite” Bigelow reminds us of how close we are to annihilation and how helpless we would be once those dominoes started to fall. At the same time, her film maintains its human pulse, never losing sight of the personal stakes for many of the people involved. The changes in viewpoints work surprisingly well within the ticking clock formula in large part thanks to Bigelow’s laser-focused execution. The urgency is emphasized in Barry Ackroyd’s documentary-style cinematography while the tone resonates through the ominous groan of Volker Bertelmann’s score. It all creates a tension-fueled movie that offers a prescient warning for our current day. “A House of Dynamite” premieres October 24th on Netflix.

VERDICT – 4.5 STARS

“ARGO” and the Oscars

January 28, 2013 by Keith Garlington

There’s a very interesting thing happening this awards season. The believed to be front-runner for Oscar’s biggest award, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln”, finds itself in the dust of the surprising “Argo”, Ben Affleck’s Iran hostage thriller. I loved “Argo” as did many others and I have no problem with its award season success, but very few people saw this one coming. Sunday night it took home the biggest prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards to go along with the top prize it won at The Golden Globes. So now all eyes are on The Academy Awards. But for “Argo” to pull one final rabbit out of its hat it’s going to have to buck a pretty established trend.

In what I believe are two of the most inexplicable snubs in Oscar history, the Academy failed to give director nominations to either Affleck for “Argo” or Kathryn Bigelow for “Zero Dark Thirty”. Bigelow has won several recent awards including the Best Director nod from the New York Film Critics. But it’s “Argo” that’s really running wild and it’s “Argo” that could be the fly in the Academy’s soup. You see the winner of the Best Director Oscar is almost always a sign of who will win Best Picture. It’s extremely, extremely rare for a Best Picture winner to not also take home the Best Director Oscar. So what is the Academy to do? This spotlights their blatant snubs even more and with them comes real questions of motivation.

Could it be the Academy is punishing Bigelow and Affleck for the perceived politics behind their films? Now I think anyone watching these two fantastic movies with an ounce of objectivity has to conclude that both are simply telling stories and not trying to make a huge political point. Perhaps that’s why I loved them so much. I get tired of being force-fed political perspective at the expense of good storytelling. Both of these movies are set in politically charged climates yet both Affleck and Bigelow allow the audience to process the politics. In fact, for me both pictures go beyond politics and into much deeper and more personal areas – something I can really appreciate.

So what else could the Academy’s beef be with Affleck and Bigelow? Both have created strong and challenging movies that certainly deserve to be nominated. Could it be that the Academy is unhappy with Affleck and Bigelow’s failure to use their opportunity to put a hard political slant on their films? Are they angry because they see the two films as leaning too much to the political right? Whatever the inexcusable reasoning is behind it the Academy has dropped the ball and now “Argo” is bringing it all into the light. I love it!

“Zero Dark Thirty” – 4.5 STARS

January 12, 2013 by Keith Garlington

Kathryn Bigelow may be the boldest and gutsiest director in the business. One things for certain, she’s not scared to jump head first into a part of the film industry sandbox normally dominated by male directors. I think that’s the main reason I like her so much. Bigelow doesn’t allow others to define what type of director she is or what type of movies she’s going to make. She makes the movies she wants to make and lately they just happen to be gritty and realistic military pictures. But what’s really cool is that she does it better than almost anyone else. She doesn’t bow to gender trends, political positions, or industry traditions. She tells powerful and mesmerizing stories and does it her own way.

Bigelow’s latest film is “Zero Dark Thirty” and it didn’t take long for the cries of controversy to begin. This is also a movie that’s received a lot of praise even garnering several Oscar nominations including Best Picture. But Bigelow herself received what I think is the biggest snub of the Oscars when she was passed over for a best director nomination. This has brought speculations of gender bias from some while others believe it’s Academy backlash for what they perceive as bad politics from Bigelow. I don’t know about any of that but it’s an inexplicable snub. Bigelow has crafted a dense and thrilling film that surpasses her previous movie, the Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker”.

“Zero Dark Thirty” is an edge-of-your-seat procedural that follows the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden. This isn’t a paper-thin conventional Hollywood action picture. This movie follows the CIA’s taxing search through evidence, information, and leads in order to find the terrorist mastermind. It’s an arduous and toll-taking mission that weeds through enhanced interrogations, misdirections, and loss of life. Bigelow manages to condense this decade’s worth of investigation into a gripping and concise 2 1/2 hours. She stops at critical points during the manhunt, some where we made important progress and others that were disastrous.

Bigelow once again teams up with writer Mark Boal and, as with “The Hurt Locker”, they aren’t out to make political points or deliver a heavy-handed statement. Regardless of the “pro-torture” accusations from the left and the “inaccuracy” claims from the right, Bigelow and Boal throw out a lot of information and allow the audience to sort through it, process it, and come up with our own conclusions. I like that. Unlike so many Hollywood productions of this kind, I wasn’t beaten over the head with a political slant. Instead I was allowed to view the events through my eyes and interpret them accordingly. That’s one of the reasons there has been such a range of reactions and I think it’s a sign of brilliant filmmaking.

Before I move on let me address the “pro-torture” debate that surrounds this film. I think “pro-torture” is a self-serving term that doesn’t do the film justice. Yes the movie shows several scenes of enhanced interrogations and it does say bits of important information were gathered through them. But it also shows the heavy personal and emotional toll it takes and it asks the question ‘Was it worth it?’ Bigelow doesn’t gloss over the harsh and disturbing nature of the torture and it’s impossible to view those scenes in a “pro-torture” light. On the flipside, just when you’re questioning the at-all-cost approach to the search for Bin Laden, Bigelow injects a scene of savage terrorist violence that reminds you of the barbarism at the heart of the enemy. These scenes, along with the brief but sobering opening featuring 911 calls from the 9/11 attacks, really hit home with me and reminded me of the ruthless reality of terrorism. But I had to decide if the ends justified the means and the film makes that decision a challenge.

2012 has been the year of ensemble casts and “Zero Dark Thirty” may have the best of them. It’s a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of actors that I love. It all starts with Jessica Chastain. She plays Maya, a brash and determined CIA operative whose entire career has been devoted to finding Osama bin Laden. Early on she is assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan where she grows tired of the political wrangling and red tape. She may at times look like a supermodel but she’s really a firebrand who will stir things up to get results. Maya is devoted to her mission and at times she seems like the only one interested in succeeding. But as the movie progresses we see the physical and emotional toll the manhunt is taking on her. Chastain is simply phenomenal. There’s not one disingenuous moment in her entire performance and while 2011 was a great year for her, this was superstar making work.

And speaking more of that ensemble cast, there are several other standout supporting performances. Jason Clarke is fantastic as a tough and slightly unhinged CIA interrogator. Kyle Chandler is wonderful as Maya’s CIA boss in Pakistan. Joel Edgerton and Chris Pratt are perfect as members of the Navy SEAL team tasked with pulling off the final mission. I loved Edgar Ramirez as a skilled CIA ground operative. The great Mark Strong plays a CIA head caught in the middle of Washington politics and the mission at hand. James Gandolfini is a lot of fun as a heftier Leon Panetta. I also enjoyed Jennifer Ehle as Maya’s co-worker who starts as a rival but ends up a good friend. This is just an enormously strong cast from top to bottom.

Everyone knows how “Zero Dark Thirty” ends but that doesn’t keep it from being an intense edge-of-your-seat thriller. The story starts with the frustration of bad leads and dead ends but the intensity is ratcheted up to crazy levels once the first big break comes through. I was absorbed in what I was seeing. And then there is the finale, possibly the best 20 minutes of military action ever put on screen. Bigelow never Hollywoodizes the sequence. She makes it as grounded in reality as possible. But when it comes down to it Kathryn Bigelow likes to make movies about people. This is a movie about women and men who sacrificed their skills, their lives, and some may argue their humanity to accomplish a greater good. It’s a movie that’s not afraid of asking tough questions or of challenging popular sentiments. It’s also a movie made with impeccable filmmaking style and skill which all comes back to Bigelow. So Academy, you’ve got explaining to do!