Popular reviews

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★½ 10

  70

  I do think it's fair to say that James Gray overreaches a tad with this one, mostly in the intersection between race and class. There's just not enough nuance to Johnny's character depiction to fully contextualize Paul's guilt and privilege as a moral center. The short glimpses of what we do see of Johnny's living conditions doesn't quite live up to the detail of Paul's family struggle. This makes sense, as it is just as much a story of Jewish assimilation as it is a examination of public/private school systems and the racial inequality found within those barriers, but it still fails to fully encapsulate these ideas. Still, this is well-worth seeing despite my qualms. James Gray offers a…

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★½ 6

  devastating

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  Review by Robert Daniels ★★ 16

  Some movies are less than their best intentions. It’s difficult to fully parse writer/director James Gray’s white guilt manifesto Armageddon Time, his follow-up to his sad-dad opus Ad Astra, without falling under its well-meaning spell. But we’ve seen this movie before, the one where a white person learns about racism to the detriment of their Black counterpart. In this case, the familiar narrative takes place in 1980, in a corner of Gray’s childhood neighborhood in Queens. Serving as Gray’s autobiographical stand-in is Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a petulant, artistically misunderstood Jewish kid navigating the uneasy racial politics of his household.

  The film begins with Paul sketching a picture of his draconian sixth-grade teacher Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk) as a half-man,…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

  [this is a profile I did of James Gray during the days leading up to his hometown premiere of Armageddon Time, but it digs a bit deeper into some of the things I touched upon in my review of the movie last May]

  “I’m tired,” James Gray said over Zoom from Los Angeles, where he’d just returned from shooting a commercial in San Francisco. “We finished last night and I flew back late. As an aging Jew, I’m now in the habit of sleeping terribly. I don’t know what that is or what the solution might be. I wake up at 3:00 a.m. every day. It sucks, but anyway.”

  While anyone familiar with the self-conflicted richness of Gray’s work (and/or…

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  Review by SupremeLemon (지존레몬) ★ 24

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  "I'm a white Jewish boy but I'm not racist btw. I recognize that white Jewish people have a tenuous proximity to white privilege. My friends at school say bigoted slurs but I didn't say anything because this is actually a defense mechanism and a mode of self-preservation. See my family changed their name to avoid antisemitism so we can assimilate into whiteness just to feel safe, even tho this is at the expense of my foc (friend of color). Maybe I should make a movie about this one day when I become an adult, but first I gotta make a movie about daddy issues set in space. Speaking of daddy issues my dad said ching chang chong when I really…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 9

  Gray has time and time again proved to have an exceptional understanding of classical melodrama and seeing him clumsily apply this skill to autobiographical memory is certainly of interest. Its big writerly moments and performances frequently feel like they’re in search of a more conventional dramatic progression and shape than Gray is willing to give it because these are memories poisoned with history, ideology and guilt. 

  He deserves credit I think for not making the version of this about a kid who knew the right thing to do and stood up to the bad people and changed hearts and minds, etc, and instead a movie about the troubling mechanics and pressures of assimilation that (even if you truly desire to…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

  There are any number of memorable images from James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” a singularly introspective space adventure in which Brad Pitt journeys to the outer limits of our solar system just to hear Daddy Lee Jones tell him that he doesn’t care, but none have stayed with me quite like the shot of Pitt’s astronaut landing on the Moon — the very first stop on his interstellar voyage into the heart of darkness. Once the ultimate symbol of humanity’s possibility and the nearest proof of our species’ infinite reach, the Moon has since been reduced to a low-gravity version of Newark Airport, complete with American fast food restaurants and the general vibe of an upscale New Jersey outlet mall. The…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★

  Such a perfect other side of the see-saw with FABELMANS that it might as well have been on purpose.

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  Review by Kevflix And Chill ★★★ 8

  Featuring a tremendous cast that includes Sir Anthony Hopkins, Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong and Jessica Chastain (albeit more of a cameo), I actually think Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb steal the show with their on screen friendship. Though it’s central themes repeatedly touch on race, class, privilege and the pursuit of the American dream, it never really feels like it’s exploring these topics in a deep or meaningful way.  As a result, when the credits rolled I felt a bit underwhelmed. Even still, Armageddon Time was enjoyable as a slice of life / coming of age drama, just not the harder hitting drama I was kind of expecting. 

  2022 Ranked

  Degrees of Kevin Bacon: 1
  1. Jeremy Strong and Kevin Bacon in Black Mass

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 51

  Expectation enacts a violence on children that only draws more spiritual blood when suffered with blows dealt from the weapon of privilege. 

  James Gray’s “Armageddon Time” has one of the most unexpected jump scares in cinema this season; a sudden appearance by Fred Trump, father of the one-day U.S President. Taking the podium at a prestigious prep school, he gives a speech assuring its khaki uniform-wearing prodigies of power that they will one day run the world. Like the long prophesied Armageddon, he foretells of a fate that we brought upon ourselves. 

  Gray’s Queens-set coming of age drama begins in a familiar family setup that wouldn’t be uncommon to works of Neil Simon. Based on Grey’s own 80s-era childhood, the…

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  Review by Griffin Newman ★★★★ 1

  Everything is terrible, everyone's the worst.

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  Review by shookone ★★★

  James Gray really needed to get this off his chest, didn't he? good thing if you're that big to do a small cute autobiographical pic in Hollywood.

  America you beautiful, America you ugly.