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‘Armageddon Time’ Review: Hard Lessons About Life in America

New York in 1980 is the setting for James Gray’s brooding, bittersweet story of family conflict and interracial friendship.

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By A.O. Scott

Can you remember the first day of sixth grade? Would you even want to? James Gray, in the opening scene of “Armageddon Time,” his tender and lacerating new film, brings it all back with clammy precision.

We are at Public School 173 in Queens, New York, at our desks in Mr. Turkeltaub’s class. It’s 1980 — maybe you’re old enough to remember that, too — and two boys are about to get in trouble, one for mouthing off during roll call and the other for drawing a picture of the teacher (Andrew Polk) with the body of a turkey. It seems like if your name was Turkeltaub and you taught sixth grade you might be able to take the joke, but on the other hand, maybe not being able to take the joke is the whole reason you’re teaching sixth grade in the first place. This is a man, after all, whose job requires him to utter the words “gym is a privilege, people” with a straight face.

“Armageddon Time” isn’t about Mr. Turkeltaub, though his contempt for his students helps to propel its plot. It’s not about gym class either, but it is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.

The two troublemakers — Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) and Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) — become friends, bonded by their dislike of Turkey (as they call him when he’s out of earshot) and also by the kind of shared interests that connect boys on the edge of adolescence. For all their rebellious bravado in Turkey’s class, there is still something childlike in the way Johnny and Paul approach the world, and a sweet softness in the mannerisms of the young actors who play them.

Johnny collects NASA mission patches and dreams of becoming an astronaut. Paul thinks the Beatles will get back together soon. He also tells Johnny — matter-of-factly rather than boastfully — that his family is “super rich.” This isn’t quite true. Paul’s father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), is a boiler repairman. His mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is a home-economics teacher and P.T.A. officer who is considering a run for the local school board. With help from Esther’s parents (Anthony Hopkins and Tovah Feldshuh), they are sending Paul’s older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), to private school, where Paul will eventually join him.

In a fairly short time — between the start of school and Thanksgiving, with the election of Ronald Reagan in between — Paul will arrive at a clearer, harsher understanding of how power, status and money work in America, a lesson that will come at Johnny’s expense.

Johnny is Black, Paul is white, and even as they navigate the world together, they experience it in different ways. Mr. Turkeltaub may punish them both, but he is much harder on Johnny, calling him an “animal” and ridiculing him in front of his peers. Johnny, who lives with his grandmother, is one of a small number of Black students at the school, and their presence alarms some of the ostensibly tolerant adults in Paul’s family.

Interracial friendship is an old and complicated theme in American culture. Think of Ishmael and Queequeg bedded down at the Spouter-Inn in “Moby-Dick,” Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi in “Huckleberry Finn” or Dylan and Mingus tagging up Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude.” In almost every case, the white character’s perception is central (these books are all first-person narratives, and in a palpable if not literal sense, “Armageddon Time” is too). The Black character, however brave, beautiful or tragic he may be, is the vehicle of his companion’s moral awakening.

“Armageddon Time” plants itself in this tradition, but it is also honest about the limitations of its own perspective. Gray tells the story of Paul’s discovery of the iniquities of race and class, but doesn’t pretend that this painful knowledge might redeem him, much less rescue Johnny.

Nor does the cruelty of American racism come as news — certainly not to Johnny, and not in the Graff household either. They are Jews whose ascent into the American middle class is shadowed by generational memories of Cossacks and Nazis in the old world and less lethal brushes with antisemitism in their new home.

The moral center of the clan is Esther’s father, Aaron, who has a special fondness for Paul. He’s a gentle, playful, didactic presence in the boy’s life — Hopkins finds the essential grit hiding underneath the twinkle — dispensing gifts and jokes and hard nuggets of wisdom. He’s a comforting presence for Paul, who is terrified of Irving’s violent temper and at an awkward stage in his relationship with Esther.

Gray’s filmography — he has directed and written eight features so far, starting with “Little Odessa” in 1995 — can be understood as a series of inquiries into the meaning of home, which is usually somewhere in the outer boroughs of New York. After venturing further afield in his last two movies (the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” and outer space in “Ad Astra” ), he has swerved into deeply personal territory.

But even as Paul Graff is an unmistakable alter ego, his situation is a version of the predicament faced by the young men played by Joaquin Phoenix in “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers.” His curiosity may push him toward rebellion, adventure and the testing of taboos, but at the same time he is entangled in the warm, sticky tendrils of family obligation and tribal identity.

Gray surveys the Graff household with an eye that is both affectionate and critical. (The eye of the director of photography, Darius Khondji, finds the precise colors of coziness and claustrophobia, and the subtle shades of nostalgia and remorse.) A different filmmaker might have made Esther, Irving and Aaron avatars of liberal hypocrisy. They despise Reagan and root for the underdogs. They also send Ted and Paul to a school whose major benefactors include the Trump family, and drop toxic morsels of bigotry into their table talk.

But “Armageddon Time” is less interested in cataloging their moral failings than in investigating the contradictions they inhabit, the swirl of mixed messages and ethical compromises that define Paul’s emerging sense of the world and his place in it. He hears a lot — including from one of the Trumps — about hard work and independence, and also about the importance of connections. He is told that the game is rigged against him, and also that it’s rigged in his favor. He’s instructed to fit in and to fight back, to follow his dreams and to be realistic.

And Johnny? The messages he receives are much more brutal, though hardly less confusing. But what happens to him can only be guessed, by Paul and the audience, because one of the lessons Paul learns is that his friend’s story was never his to tell.

Armageddon Time Rated R. Bad feelings, bad behavior, bad language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Movie Reviews

A director critically reexamines his 1980s childhood in 'armageddon time'.

Justin Chang

Banks Repeta plays 11-year-old Paul Graff and Anthony Hopkins is his grandfather in Armageddon Time. Anne Joyce /Focus Features hide caption

Banks Repeta plays 11-year-old Paul Graff and Anthony Hopkins is his grandfather in Armageddon Time.

A lot of filmmakers these days seem to be in an intensely personal, self-reflective mood. There's a terrific movie in theaters right now called Aftersun , and it's based on the childhood memories of its first-time director, Charlotte Wells. Several upcoming films, like Steven Spielberg 's The Fabelmans and Bardo , from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, are also drawn from their filmmakers' life experiences.

Armageddon Time , the latest movie written and directed by James Gray, is an especially thoughtful and moving example. While it's a loving re-creation of a time and place Gray knows well — some of it was shot just blocks away from his childhood home in Queens — the director has more than a rosy nostalgia trip in mind. He's made an uncommonly tough-minded movie about race, class, assimilation and white privilege in America. And while it takes place in 1980, a few months before the election of Ronald Reagan, it has nearly as much to say about the present.

The story follows Paul Graff, an 11-year-old version of Gray played by a wide-eyed young actor named Banks Repeta. Paul wants to be an artist when he grows up. He's also a bit of a class clown at his public school, where his best friend is a Black classmate named Johnny, played by Jaylin Webb. They have fun hanging out and goofing off, and they take turns sticking up for each other when they get in trouble, which is often. But as Paul soon notices, it's Johnny who always gets the more severe punishment. He also knows that Johnny is poor and lives with his grandmother.

That places him in stark contrast with Paul and his comfortably middle-class Jewish family. Gray does a wonderful job of immersing us in the everyday bustle of the Graffs' home, where relatives are always coming over for dinner, none more beloved than Paul's grandfather, affectionately played by Anthony Hopkins .

Jeremy Strong is terrific — and very un- Kendall Roy -like — as Paul's father, a plumber with a big heart and a fierce temper. Anne Hathaway does her finest acting in some time as Paul's gentler but more resilient mother. Like any good parents, Paul's mom and dad only want what's best for him. They've worked hard to make a good living and earn a level of social standing in their community. Given their Jewish immigrant roots, they also know the challenges of assimilating into American culture. At extended gatherings, Paul's relatives share grim stories about the anti-Semitic violence their family fled from in Ukraine. But Gray doesn't shy away from exposing their own casual prejudice: We also hear some of those same relatives spout derogatory remarks about Black people around the dinner table.

It's been a while since I've seen a movie that captured family dynamics with this much unsparing honesty. It's also been a while since I've seen a Hollywood movie with such a layered understanding of how white supremacy pits people of different backgrounds against each other. That's a concept that feels painfully resonant now in a moment of heightened anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. And just to make the present-day parallels obvious, Gray throws in a sharp jab at the Trump family, a major presence at Paul's private school.

At its heart, though, Armageddon Time is about Paul and Johnny's friendship and how that friendship tragically changes. It's here that things get a little tricky: Some might see Johnny as a regrettable stereotype, the Black character who suffers grievously so that his white friend can learn a hard-hitting lesson. But I think that reading may be too easy, partly because the film is all about the limitations of Paul's perspective, and partly because Gray has no interest in dispensing reassurance or uplift. He's made an angry, despairing movie about one boy's disillusionment with the injustice of the world and his own silent complicity with it. What makes Armageddon Time so powerful is that Gray reserves his harshest anger for himself.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Armageddon Time

A deeply personal coming-of-age story about the strength of family and the generational pursuit of the American Dream. A deeply personal coming-of-age story about the strength of family and the generational pursuit of the American Dream. A deeply personal coming-of-age story about the strength of family and the generational pursuit of the American Dream.

• Anne Hathaway
• Jeremy Strong
• Banks Repeta
• 111 User reviews
• 179 Critic reviews
• 74 Metascore
• 3 wins & 18 nominations

• Esther Graff

• Irving Graff

• Johnny Davis

• Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz

• Mr. Turkeltaub

• Grandma Mickey Rabinowitz

• Uncle Louis

• Headmaster Fitzroy

• Topper Lowell
• (as Dane West)

• Chad Eastman

• Maryanne Trump

• Police Sergeant D'Arienzo

• Miss Hellman

• Edgar Romanelli
• (as Jacob Mackinnon)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia The film's title is a reference to the song "Armagideon Time" by The Clash, as well as a reference to Ronald Reagan , who James Gray said was "always talking about the armageddon." He said Reagan was, "always mentioning the world ending. It was cultural trauma. That weighed on kids in 1980. In the [Reagan interview] clip you see in the movie, he's actually talking about Armageddon as a result of homosexuality, which is crazy. He's talking about Sodom and Gomorrah."
• Goofs Paul is sent to Forest Manor School, which is overseen and financed by Frederick Trump. Trump never oversaw or financed a school. He sat on the board of Kew-Forest, which his children Maryanne and Donald attended. That said, this *goof* was likely intentional on the part of the filmmakers.

Paul Graff : Sometimes kids at school say bad words about the Black kids.

Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz : What do you do when that happens?

Paul Graff : Obviously, nothing, of course.

Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz : Do you think that's smart?

• Connections Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: The Most Theatre Walkouts I've EVER Seen | Cannes 2022 Explained (2022)
• Soundtracks Alley Cat Written by Bent Fabricius-Bjerre Performed by Bill Justis Courtesy of Mercury Records Under license from Universal Music Enterprises

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 54 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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‘Armageddon Time’ Will Put You in a 1980s New York State of Mind

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

James Gray’s Armageddon Time is a movie about a Queens, New York, childhood, inspired by the filmmaker’s own. It’s the 1980s, and Paul (Banks Repeta) is a redheaded middle schooler with an artistic streak, born to a hard-working Jewish family, raised and provided for by his lovably flawed parents (played by Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong ) and a grandfather, a survivor of the Holocaust, whom he adores (Anthony Hopkins). He’s a good kid who means well. He listens to the stories of his grandfather with sincere curiosity. He inspires his father’s anger, but knows to regret it. 

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Armageddon Time works because it hurts, not despite that hurt. The shame from behind the camera is hyperpresent. It’s disconcerting how steadily the movie hums along, pantomiming a well-crafted and thoroughly imagined family drama, until its final act, when its politics become unavoidable and the pain of identity rings clear. Privilege, as this movie examines it, is really a matter of leverage. The people denied that leverage will only hold it more firmly in their grip once they finally get a taste. Armageddon Time isn’t a movie about bad people or good people. It’s more shocking because it’s more mundane: It’s a movie about people. It doesn’t excuse peoples’ choices. But it knows that it cannot change them. 

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Armageddon Time Reviews

The connection between the past and the tumultuous contemporary times becomes undeniable, adding layers of meaning and demonstrating the director's ability to capture relevance in the essence of the past. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 8, 2023

I love this directors work and found the movie to be full of fantastic ideas & a slice of life film for touching on relationships of the youth. I just wish they would have doubled down on each one a bit more

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Gray appears to be making a big show of how bad he feels only so he can make a similarly big spectacle out of forgiving himself.

Full Review | Jun 14, 2023

The film oscillates between genuinely emotional moments and seemingly random scenes that have no clear relevance to the story. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 3, 2023

Gray’s indulgent exercise in self-reflection desperately grasps at any sign of meaningfulness to justify its existence, but simply can’t shake the limpness of what is a technically competent, inspiredly cast yawner.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

Compassionately disillusioning & soulful, it's James Gray's melancholy, semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age drama - pivoting around the fact that - while we're free to make our own choices - we can't choose the consequences that accompany them.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Apr 7, 2023

There are pockets of this film that touch upon something genuinely meaningful. But there are also plenty of stretches that feel ever-so-slightly muddled and directionless, preventing "Armageddon Time" from reaching its full potential.

Full Review | Mar 3, 2023

Gray finds a lightly arc-less rhythm that feels like the texture of the time, a legit New York story – like many of his films – with grit, detail and humor.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2023

James Gray, always an appealing and chameleonic filmmaker, returns with a fine psychological observation in the intimate tone of his first films. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jan 30, 2023

Mediocre as narrative, juvenile as social message and tremendously middle class in its satisfaction with its own awareness of the evils of the world. [Full review in Portuguese]

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 25, 2023

It's not that it's a terrible experience, but it never quite connects with the viewer, being too subtle at times, and quite depressing at others. Full review in Spanish.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 25, 2023

Reminiscent of both Woody Allen films like Radio Days and ‘80s Spielberg directed and produced tales like E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial and The Goonies, Armageddon Time is well worth seeking out.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 12, 2023

Gray's personal tale finds a great balance with its heavy themes and lovely, light moments that endear you to this family and movie as a whole.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2023

Webb is thus the one true standout. It's a deeply tragic role that deserves more than being present to absolve everyone else's guilt by assuring them that they wouldn't be able to change his fate anyway.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 6, 2023

The understanding of generational knowledge and the fight to make sure our kids learn from our mistakes is at the core of Anthony Hopkins role in this film & all his scenes I loved, outside of that a lot of characters I did not care for or connected with

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 1, 2023

Armageddon Time is executed flawlessly, with all of the cast at the top of their game.

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 27, 2022

Paul’s erratic behavior as he makes sense of the world and pursues his artistic dreams yields plenty of Holden Caulfield-like delights.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Dec 27, 2022

Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji paint the past with warm tones that turn even shadows into reflective statements on the passage of time.

Full Review | Dec 26, 2022

…Amageddeon Time might have seemed more prescient in pre-pandemic times; despite being reasonably clear-eyed and detailed, this eventually qualifies as self-indulgent nostalgia…

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 26, 2022

A full movie about people you just don't care about.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 25, 2022

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Anne hathaway and jeremy strong in james gray’s ‘armageddon time’: film review | cannes 2022.

The director returns to the setting of his 1980s childhood in Queens with this coming-of-age story about hard lessons and comforts in a fractious but loving family, also featuring Anthony Hopkins.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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After venturing far from the home turf that forged his reputation to visit the Amazon in The Lost City of Z and deep space in Ad Astra , James Gray returns in his most acutely personal film, Armageddon Time , to the Queens, New York, neighborhood where he grew up. An unvarnished family snapshot that traces the seeds from which the artist evolved and the tough lessons about life’s unfairness that helped shape his character, this is a refreshingly understated drama whose gentleness makes it all the more bittersweet. The same goes for the unimpeachably lived-in performances from Anne Hathaway , Jeremy Strong and Anthony Hopkins , along with two bright young newcomers.

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Bowing in the Cannes competition ahead of its release later in the year from Focus Features , this is clearly a work of great love, emotional authenticity and gratitude, qualities that breathe life into every widescreen frame of cinematographer Darius Khondji’s appropriately unflashy visuals, with their grainy textures and muted colors.

Armageddon Time

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Tovah Feldshuh, John Diehl, Andrew Polk, Ryan Sell, Jacob Mackinnon Marcia Jean Kurtz, Domenick Lombardozzi Director-screenwriter: James Gray

Seldom does a place and time — 1980, on the cusp of the first Reagan presidency — come alive so evocatively, eschewing the filters of nostalgia for more palpable sensations. Nothing is romanticized, and yet the drama is suffused with natural warmth, even when it depicts traumatic experience. It’s also keenly attuned to the cultural specificity of being a descendant of Jewish immigrants who fled Eastern Europe, of reaching an age when the long arm of history pierces and shifts your worldview.

Gray’s stand-in is Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth grader at PS 173 in Queens whose humorless teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk), is unimpressed by his art skills or his attempts to make the other students laugh. Paul is just beginning to savor the onset of teen rebellion, drawing him to one of the Black kids in the class, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), who’s been held back a year and is a frequent target of the animosity of “Turkey,” as they call the teacher.

While Paul coasts by for a while under the mistaken assurance that his mother Esther (Hathaway) has authority over Turkey in her role as PTA president, his smart mouth and openly defiant attitudes frequently anger both of his parents. His dad, Irving (Strong), is a tightly wound plumber who tends to prattle on whether or not anyone’s listening, about subjects as random as the perfect load-bearing qualities of a truss bridge. Paul is mostly at odds with his bullying older brother Ted (Ryan Sell), so his main connection in the family is with his big-hearted English grandpa Aaron (Hopkins), who buys the boy a model rocket kit and promises to take him to Flushing Meadows to launch it once Paul is done assembling the toy.

That scene, with the futuristic 1964 World’s Fair structures looming in the background, is among the movie’s most affecting moments, showing Hopkins’ consummate skill at conveying a deep emotional well with impeccable restraint. Aaron, whose quiet wisdom and unfailing calm make him the heart of the generally more volatile family, is about to go into hospital for major surgery, explaining to Paul only that he’s going away for a while. A quick shot of his daughter Esther watching the two of them from the car is steeped in a sadness that lingers over the subsequent action in a film that’s sincere but never sentimental.

Hathaway does her best work since Rachel Getting Married . Unlike most American movie moms, Esther is not a perfect vessel of love and understanding but a real, frazzled human being, her nurturing instincts often dulled by flashes of impatience. (She’s also just too busy to mollycoddle her sons — she teaches home economics and is running for a seat on the district school board.) What’s lovely though is that even the worst screaming arguments are invariably followed by small gestures of affection, signaling that quarrels are quickly forgotten.

The family scenes are gorgeous. Messy and alive, they’re notable for their seeming casualness in capturing moments where nothing of major plot import might be happening but the director nonetheless is subtly sketching in a whole complex dynamic of distinct personalities. Dinner table conversations are quietly hilarious in showing a bunch of people all talking at once and frequently not listening. And the unkindness between brothers at that age seems drawn directly from experience.

That gives the intimate conversations between Paul and his Grandpa real heft. Paul is just emerging from the incurious phase of childhood and perhaps for the first time is receptive to hearing about the pain of the past. Aaron tells the boy of the courage of his grandmother Mickey (Tovah Feldshuh), whose Ukrainian parents were murdered in front of her by Cossacks, and who got herself out through Poland and on to England. There she met her future husband and they traveled to America through Ellis Island.

But this is not a familiar count-your-blessings lecture. It seems intended more to trace a lineage, to prompt Paul to believe in himself and the possibilities that the world can hold for him. His Grandpa has a knack for getting through to Paul in a way that his parents often can’t. So when he gets caught at school smoking a joint with Johnny, and his parents decide to take him out of public school and put him in the same exclusive private school as Ted in wealthy Forest Hills, it’s only through his Grandpa’s firm reasoning that Paul accepts that miserable fate.

Even if they’re not averse to displays of casual racism, Paul’s family is liberal and open-minded, appalled at the rise of Reagan from being a terrible governor to a player on the national political stage. That makes Paul’s exposure to mean-spirited rich kids and their openly discriminatory views shocking, even if he’s too fearful to speak out against them.

Gray nods to the spiraling forces of hate and division in America via brief appearances from one of the Forest Hills school’s chief benefactors, Fred Trump (John Diehl), who snidely welcomes Paul on his first day, grilling the kid about the ethnic origins of the name Graff. Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain in a cameo) addresses the school assembly on the importance of earning their success and not looking for handouts. No sanctimonious emphasis is required to note the irony of that message coming from a family for whom nepotism is as natural as breathing.

The film’s title, rendered in subway-graffiti font in the opening and closing credits, comes from the late ‘70s Willie Williams reggae song covered by The Clash, one of two songs by the English rockers heard on the soundtrack. Armageddon is constantly predicted by politicians warning of the nuclear war threat, but for Paul, it’s his removal from the world he knows to be plonked down into an enclave of white privilege. Even the way success is defined suddenly seems alien to him in an environment in which students are being urged to shape themselves as future leaders in finance, business and politics.

“Both our boys will get a real seat at the table,” says Grandma Mickey, a retired public schoolteacher like her husband. Her disapproval of the Black kids being bussed in to overcrowded classrooms might have made her an abrasive figure in another writer-director’s hands. But Gray shows compassion in examining the contradictions and limitations in family members who would never see themselves as endorsing the thinking of Reaganite conservatives.

The main conflict stirred up by Paul’s move is the distance it opens up between him and Johnny, who lives alone with his grandmother and keeps dodging social services when her dementia progresses too far for him to remain in her custody.

There’s melancholy feeling in the gradual shift from the two boys’ caper-like adventures — skipping out on a school excursion to the Guggenheim Museum to go to Central Park and a pinball parlor — to the desperation of Johnny, hiding out in Paul’s backyard clubhouse. Johnny’s dreams of being an astronaut fuel the idea of running away to Florida to work at NASA, and Paul’s fascination with superheroes perhaps feeds the foolish belief that he can make that happen. When their plan inevitably fails, it confronts Paul with the harsh inequalities of a world in which “some people get a raw deal,” as Irving tells him in a devastating exchange.

Strong, with his rigid body language, is at his best in that scene. Irving makes moving acknowledgment that he doesn’t know how to talk to his son the way the boy’s Grandpa does; he all but begs for Paul’s understanding given his mother’s fragility after she has suffered a blow. That soft-spoken, grownup conversation provides a poignant contrast with an earlier scene in which Irving violently disciplines the boy. And in Repeta’s tender, watchful performance, it shows Paul taking loss on board, learning to think for himself and see the world for what it is.

This is a thoughtful film laced throughout with small ripple-effect moments that continue to resonate even beyond the end credits, their emotional effect delicately amplified by Christopher Spelman’s acoustic score. The mix of classical with period tracks like “Rapper’s Delight,” by Johnny’s favorite band, The Sugarhill Gang, also reinforces the meaning of a story about a past reflective of other pasts before it, but also tethered very much to our present.

“Don’t be nervous, be bold,” Grandpa Aaron urges Paul. While we see evidence only of the kid’s talent for drawing and painting — including a creditable Kandinsky copy that Turkey dismisses — it’s impossible not to see the fledgling filmmaker Gray embracing that guiding principle.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Distribution: Focus Features Production companies: Mad River Pictures, Keep Your Head Productions, in association with Spacemaker Productions Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Tovah Feldshuh, John Diehl, Andrew Polk, Ryan Sell, Jacob Mackinnon Marcia Jean Kurtz, Domenick Lombardozzi Director-screenwriter: James Gray Producers: Anthony Katagas, Marc Butan, Rodrigo Teixeira Executive producers: Alan Terpins, Marco Tulio Kehdi, Francisco Civita, Beto Gauss, Gustavo Debs, Lourenço Sant'Anna Director of photography: Darius Khondji Production designer: Happy Massee Costume designer: Madeline Weeks Music: Christopher Spelman Editor: Scott Morris Casting: Douglas Aibel

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In Armageddon Time , a Filmmaker Looks at His Life and Doesn’t Like What He Sees

James Gray’s films have always had a deeply personal kick — even the sci-fi thriller Ad Astra and the period adventure The Lost City of Z — but he has never made one quite as naked as Armageddon Time , his mournful family drama set in 1980 Queens. While the setting and the story this time are almost directly autobiographical, what makes the picture feel so confessional and exposed aren’t its narrative details but its structure and style. Gray has built into the form of the film a quiet exploration of generational failure and has zero interest in letting himself off the hook even now.

Gray’s surrogate is a young boy named Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a sixth-grader who seems incapable of paying attention or sitting still in class and bonds with fellow accused troublemaker Jonathan Davis (Jaylin Webb), with whom he’s usually singled out for punishment. Even though the two boys are often grouped together, we can see how Johnny, who is Black, draws an extra measure of contempt from their teacher. Paul is also a handful at home, where his boiler-repairman father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), and PTA-president mom, Esther (Anne Hathaway), try to keep him in line in their respective ways. The only family member Paul seems to listen to is his frail, kindly grandfather Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), who speaks of doing the morally upright thing and has terrifying stories about how their Jewish family fled pogroms in Ukraine.

There isn’t much of a central story in Armageddon Time . Instead, Gray relies upon the accumulation of small interactions and incidents to slowly form a portrait of an unforgiving world. He cuts from Paul and Johnny’s slowly developing friendship to life at Paul’s home, where the conversation encompasses everything from the structure of New York’s bridges to the Holocaust. Although they live in middle-class comfort, the memory and fear of victimhood is still very vivid for Paul’s family, as is the ongoing dream of a better life. Paul’s father and mother are each strivers in their own way, which we sense through their casual observations and asides. Along the way, we may notice that, while they may seem outwardly liberal, the family’s attitudes about those they see as beneath them, especially Black people, are rather reactionary.

Gray’s portrait of his family is damning but human. We see their racism, their classism, their self-absorption, but these people are not grotesques. Even Irving, whose abusive outbursts Gray films with the nausea-inducing suspense of a horror movie, is allowed moments of tenderness and insight. Strong portrays this driven man with a nervous, watchful energy, which not only means that we can never tell what he will do next but also that his moments of self-reflection stand out. Irving is not, fundamentally, a stupid or cruel person but someone trapped in his time and place — clever enough to get ahead but incapable of breaking free.

Ultimately, Armageddon Time becomes a tale about the dissolution of Johnny from Paul’s life. When the two boys are caught smoking pot in the school bathroom, Irving blows a gasket, and Paul is sent off to the private school his older brother is attending — a school that counts the Trump family among its patrons. (Jessica Chastain shows up for one memorable scene as Maryanne Trump, giving a speech in which she talks to the kids about the difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world. In other words, even she sees herself as a victim.)

All of these seemingly disparate elements are connected. The film is as much about class as it is about race. Paul’s parents, of course, are oblivious of Johnny, who lives with his ailing grandmother and doesn’t even own a phone. In truth, Paul is oblivious, too. Johnny has dreams of becoming an astronaut and collects NASA patches, which he shares with Paul. But when Paul’s grandfather finally buys him a long-promised model rocket, our protagonist doesn’t think to invite his NASA-crazy best friend to join him in testing it out.

What Gray does here is delicate and risky. He has never been a director to spell things out, preferring to let his works quietly unfold in their own odd, understated ways and for meaning to emerge subtly and organically. In Armageddon Time , we see Paul’s life in exquisite detail but are provided almost no insight into Johnny’s. Late in the picture, we get an extremely brief and heartbreaking flash of the latter at home with his grandmother, a moment whose dreamy brevity actually drives home the point: Paul can’t fully imagine Johnny’s life — and neither can Gray . The filmmaker grasps the limitations of his vision and has baked this awareness of his own inadequacy into the movie. Gray is telling his story and has fully reimagined his and his family’s world. But he sees that the fundamental tragedy of his story is that he failed to understand, or even think to understand, Johnny’s. The movie formally erases the young man, the way he was erased out of Paul’s life. As a result, a pall of shame hangs over the entire film.

This is rare. All too often, memory movies like this are encased in cinematic amber, lovely but remote and cool to the touch. Other times, they’re suffused and overwhelmed with connections to the present by the artist’s constant need to emphasize the lessons of the past. Gray instead charts the narrowest of middle grounds. He situates his film in 1980 and allows its stories to play out with the sensibilities of its era. But by letting the picture embody his failures — by turning Armageddon Time into a self-aware look at his own limitations — the director makes that necessary connection between then and now, between the characters onscreen and us watching. In other words, he denies us the one thing these types of movies almost always provide: reassurance. By refusing to let himself off the hook, he also refuses to let the audience off the hook.

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Armageddon Time review: Guilt and white privilege swirl in outer-borough triumph

Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins burn in intimate 1980-set family drama.

Senior Editor, Movies

Writer-director James Gray has a home turf: blue-collar pockets of Queens and Brooklyn, often Jewish, where his family dramas, never strictly autobiographical, play adjacent to more epic genre instincts like crime and romance. But at the center of his churning, hard-nosed latest, Armageddon Time , Gray has a boy, who, if not exactly him, seems pretty close.

Paul (the wonderful Banks Repeta, balancing mouthy precociousness against hesitation) is a sixth-grader living in Flushing, Queens. Over the course of a few months in the momentous fall of 1980 when we get to know him, Paul dreams of being an artist, though, aside from a class trip to the Guggenheim Museum, that seems far off. He clowns and suffers in public school, neither an ace student nor popular. His bickering household is intense.

None of this is played for cute nostalgia's sake, or even laughs. Gray is after something rarer, a tone that, apart from his recent trips to the Amazon jungle (2016's The Lost City of Z ) and deep space (2019's Ad Astra ), he summons with career-long authority: the tough desperation of middle-class Jewish families intent on preserving their limited momentum in a still-threatening America. Paul's mother, Esther (a sharp Anne Hathaway ), understands her son better than his stern, emotionally blocked engineer dad, Irving ( Succession 's Jeremy Strong , extraordinary in his quiet moments), a man more comfortable talking about truss bridges than feelings.

There's also a doting grandfather, but banish any Belfast twinkles from mind. In his fedora and boxy suit, Liverpool-born Aaron ( Anthony Hopkins , clearly in some kind of golden phase) is both an elegant symbol of the continent they've left behind not so long ago, and a constant reminder of why. Paul barely understands half of what he hears, but when he's told he'll have to change schools to a ritzier private one, it's Aaron who does the family's convincing, over bagels. Hopkins underplays the pain in his monologue, skipping ahead with a survivor's resilience ("The game is rigged.").

Armageddon Time loses a bit of that potency when straining for a larger, inchoate significance: Ronald Reagan on TV, nuclear anxieties, wisps of the Clash's strident reggae-rock (where the film's title comes from). But Gray makes up for it — impressively — by shading his characters in realistic, sometimes unflattering ways. Paul plays hooky with his new friend, Johnny (Jaylin Webb, marking the movie with open-heartedness), who's Black, and the boys get hard, curious stares on the subway, chatting away about rockets and NASA. The film is set at a moment, age-wise, when such natural affinities can fall away to uglier realities.

Will their friendship survive Paul's transfer to Forest Manor Prep (a stand-in for the real-life Kew-Forest School), where suited-and-tied mini-snobs casually hurl racial epithets in all-white playgrounds? Gray is too smart to snow us; his movie lunges into poetic moments of escape even as it curdles. Anticipate a shudder of revulsion when the script accommodates one of the academy's more famous families via a mandatory assembly speech given by then-prominent attorney Maryanne Trump, speaking about "handouts" and "good old-fashioned hard work" (the cameo, by a recent Oscar winner, is too good to reveal here). If it wasn't already clear, fairness is a myth in Gray's universe.

Shooting on the same block of modest row houses where the director was raised, genius cinematographer Darius Khondji ( Seven , Uncut Gems , and a longtime Gray collaborator) goes for a darkened, unromanticized burnish, somehow truer to 1980, that, for him, feels new: When Grandpa Aaron presents Paul with a back-to-school gift — a small case of oil paints — the gesture rings out, even in muted colors. Emotionally and dramatically, those are the colors Gray has used since Little Odessa , The Yards , Two Lovers , and The Immigrant , his run of personal, deep-seated work to which Armageddon Time feels attached, possibly even as a corrective. A nuanced exploration of situational ethics tinged with guilt, it's a small, near-perfect New York story. And while its director may not say as much out loud, it's also an act of atonement. Grade: A–

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‘Armageddon Time’ Review: A Heartbreaking Anthony Hopkins Lifts James Gray’s Exquisite Movie Memoir

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2022 Cannes  Film Festival. Focus Features releases the film in select theaters on Friday, October 28 with expansion to follow.

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 point is clear even before Pitt’s character double-underlines it: There is nothing truly new for man to discover among the vast ocean of stars, because we take ourselves with us wherever we go. The only real terra incognita in the universe is the human soul.

That moment is something of a skeleton key for Gray’s movies, most of which are a bit more earthbound, but all of which — from Coppola-inspired family tales like “The Immigrant” to Coppola-inspired Campbellian epics like “The Lost City of Z” — trace some kind of intimately circular journey into the unknown and right back out again. The same can be said of his muted but magnificent new “ Armageddon Time ,” which distills the director’s mythic sweep into an ultra-autobiographical coming-of-age movie that could easily have become the Jewish-American “Belfast” if not for its Talmudic moral streak and fierce aversion to sentimentality.

Only James Gray would saddle a modest self-portrait about his memories of sixth grade with a title that makes it sound more like “Apocalypse Now” than any other film ever has (a reference to candidate Reagan’s nuclear hawkishness, “Armageddon Time” borrows its name from a 1979 Willie Williams reggae jam famously covered by The Clash). Likewise, only James Gray would render that self-portrait into such a powerful story of post-war assimilation that a family outing to see “Private Benjamin” might resonate with the same cosmic scale as a trip to Neptune.

Pivoting away from the biggest production of his career with a melancholy return to the kind of small-scale New York stories (à la “The Yards” and “Little Odessa”) that first put him on the map, Gray revisits his childhood years and all of their related ghosts with a burnished memoir that hears echoes of 19th European pogroms reverberating through the Trump family — 100 years later and some 4,000 miles away — in much the same way as “Ad Astra” found an Applebee’s on the Moon.

On its surface, “Armageddon Time” is the unsparingly well-remembered story of a pre-pubescent Jewish boy named Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the slightly older Black kid he meets on the first day of school in September 1980 (Jaylin Webb plays second-time sixth-grader Johnny Davis), and the semi-guileless friendship these two space cadets form on the strength of their mutual interests: rocket ships and fucking with their racist asshole of a homeroom teacher. It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.

At heart, however, “Armageddon Time” is a story about Paul’s relationship with someone even older than Johnny: His maternal grandfather. Played by a heartbreaking yet unexaggerated Anthony Hopkins , whose brave twilight performances continue to mine raw honesty from the depths of human frailty, Aaron Rabinowitz was born in Liverpool because his Jewish mother had to flee Ukraine, moved to Queens in the hopes that he could outrun anti-Semitism if he kept going West, and became a patriarch capable of buying his family a conditional seat at the table of white society.

But in spite of his happy-go-lucky demeanor and “favorite grandpa” energy, Aaron is troubled by the country where he’s replanted his roots. He struggles (privately, wordlessly) to reconcile socioeconomic stability with the price of maintaining it. He knows the game is rigged, and he didn’t come all this way for his family to be on the losing end of it.

When Paul and Johnny get in serious trouble, it’s Aaron who threatens to doom their friendship by sending his grandson to the pricey Kew-Forest School in Forest Hills. At the same time, however, Aaron can’t unsee the various divides that America’s ruling class pretends to ignore. He’s not a saint — we Jews don’t really believe in them — but he was born with an obligation to recognize the violence that results from complicity.

Aaron’s PTA-president daughter, Esther (a nuanced, exasperated, passably “movie Jewish” Anne Hathaway ) and her upwardly mobile electrician husband ( Jeremy Strong , leveraging his natural implosiveness into the role of a well-meaning, short-tempered, obsessively aspirant second-generation father with such harrowing familiarity that I almost wondered if Gray and I might have shared the same dad) are hopelessly preoccupied with their fantasies of success, but the more playful and uncorrupted of his two grandsons still has the potential to become a real mensch.

Paul’s parents might see his artistic ambitions as an insurrection against their shared vision of WASP-certified affluence, but his grandfather is happy to nurture the kid’s spirit; to teach him the historical imperative of doing right by people, especially when benefitting from a system that’s designed to do them wrong. Where Paul’s dad encourages him to never look back, Paul’s grandfather cautions him to “never forget the past, because you never know when they might come looking for you.” Any Jew who lives long enough knows that permission to exist is typically granted on a temporary basis (some recognize what that means for others, and some choose to perpetuate it against them).

If this all sounds like the recipe for some blinkered Oscars bullshit, let me assure you that “Armageddon Time” will gross approximately $15 when it opens in theaters later this year. James Gray makes films that are meant to be watched, but they often ask you to meet them more than half-way, and this one isn’t an exception just because its main character is a kid with some capital “L” Lessons to Learn. “Armageddon Time” is beautiful and gently stirring in its own way, but it’s also about as warm and fuzzy as a prayer shawl.

Shot like a cold Sunday afternoon and colored with a million different shades of molted brown, “Armageddon Time” is chilled by the sadness of decay and the aching memory of days gone by in a way that allows it to cleave much closer to Terence Davies than Kenneth Branagh. On a similar tip, Gray’s Coppola fetishism assumes new meaning in a film that suggests he sees his own childhood through the murky shadows of Gordon Willis’ camera, especially when “Armageddon Time” uses the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky as a sly rebuttal against the director’s own supposed lack of originality.

Scenes set inside the Graff family’s musty Flushing row house — brought to life by Happee Massee’s time-machine production design — tend to prioritize the texture of Gray’s memories over the urgency of their underlying dramatic conflicts. Paul’s childhood home is remembered in the way that you might remember your own, not as a physical place so much as a bittersweet matrix of intersecting dreams and moral imperatives; a polyester snow-globe lined with old carpet.

That same approach informs the understated relationship between Paul and Johnny, which boasts all the trappings of a “One Black Friend” movie like “Green Book,” but sidesteps most of the potholes that make them so insufferable. It helps a great deal that Repeta and Webb give two of the best kid performances in recent memory (you might have to go back to “Moonrise Kingdom” to find another American movie that required a pair of pre-teens to do this much, and inspired them to do it so well). Repeta’s salamander poise and trembling self-scrutiny reminded me of Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement,” while Webb’s ability to complicate the last gasps of childhood innocence with a hard-earned sense of hopelessness allow Johnny to exist apart from his various disadvantages.

Yes, Johnny is an accessory to Paul’s story, and yes, their friendship builds to a moral dilemma so crystalline that it might as well have been lifted from a coming-of-age novel like “A Separate Peace,” but Gray’s film — so sharp about how it renders Paul’s dim awareness of the world around him, up to and including his own privilege in it — boasts a deep understanding of what kids are able to offer each other. And what they’re not. Gray is obviously haunted by his inability to rescue the real Johnny from the systemic injustices that pulled them apart, but “Armageddon Time” doesn’t find the director absolving himself of that helplessness with a back-pat of a movie about a nice Jew doing his first mitzvah. None of his characters are left off the hook.

While Gray’s nostalgia may be morally instructive to a certain degree, the desiccated little gem of a movie that he’s whittled down from it isn’t much convinced about the possibility of pure-hearted kindness. Not in a country of “no free lunches” — a country where privilege is so entitled that marginalization is made to feel justified.

“Armageddon Time” is more invested in the value of the pyrrhic victories that keep our heads on straight and our souls connected to whatever traditions they came from. In forgetting the kind of bullshit that Jessica Chastain’s Maryanne Trump tells Paul’s class when Fred Trump brings her to speak at Kew-Forest. In scoffing at candidate Reagan when he tells Jim Bakker that “we might be the generation that sees Armageddon” as part of an effort to scare his white Christian voter base into submission. Assimilation may seem like a necessary evil, but it’s not always a bad thing that we bring a part of ourselves with us wherever we go, especially when it’s a part of ourselves worth leaving behind.

“Armageddon Time” premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters later this year.

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Review: In the wrenching ‘Armageddon Time,’ a filmmaker powerfully confronts his own privilege

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It’s fitting that “Armageddon Time,” James Gray’s quietly anguished movie about events from his own childhood, begins with a kid arriving at a school and ends with him departing another. In between those bookending images, 11-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) receives an education of a cruel and costly order, though he isn’t the one who ultimately bears the cost — or the cruelty. Set in Queens, N.Y., in the autumn of 1980, with an uneasy chill in the air and the first Reagan administration on the horizon, the film is an epic of boyhood disillusionment, what you might call a coming-of-rage story, in which Paul’s eyes are opened to the hard realities of systemic injustice and his own silent complicity.

That might make this movie, Gray’s eighth feature as a writer-director, sound like a predictable exercise in liberal hand-wringing — a chance to shake our heads at another ugly spectacle of American racism from a safe, sanctimonious distance. But if “Armageddon Time” seems to hew to a familiar playbook, it also avoids trafficking in the complacency, reassurance and false equivalencies that most Hollywood explorations of race and class are eager to peddle. It doesn’t evade every trap or trapping of convention, but its tenderness of touch is matched by a remarkable toughness of mind.

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For the close admirer of Gray’s work, this should come as no surprise. Often hailed as an old-fashioned Hollywood classicist, he has also become an increasingly sly and subversive one. His lush melodrama “The Immigrant” (2013), very much a companion to this movie, dismantled the romantic foundations of the typical American Dream narrative, in much the same way that “The Lost City of Z” (2016) turned the triumphant conventions of the hero’s journey on their head. In “Armageddon Time,” there’s nothing especially rose-tinted about the lens through which he peers back at his early life, and not just because of the heavy shadows and muted colors that abound in Darius Khondji’s widescreen images.

Paul makes an endearingly plucky, red-haired stand-in for Gray’s 11-year-old self, and his creative temperament is already apparent in his passion for drawing, his goofball humor and his reckless curiosity. On the first day of sixth grade he befriends a fellow misfit, Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), someone to slack off and share big dreams with: Johnny longs to be an astronaut, while Paul wants to be a famous artist. And practically from the first scene, the close bond that forms between Paul, who’s Jewish, and Johnny, who’s Black, is both a bulwark against a harsh world and a living, dispiritingly persuasive demonstration of how inequality operates.

Repeta’s wide-eyed gaze captures Paul’s flickering moments of awareness, his confusion as to why, whenever they get in trouble (which is often), it’s always Johnny who’s singled out for harsher punishment. He’s less sensitive to other differences, like the fact that he hails from a comfortably middle-class family while Johnny lives with his poor, sickly grandmother. All this might suggest the setup for one of the morally nourishing, dramatically thudding “ABC Afterschool Specials” that flourished especially with young viewers of Paul and Johnny’s ’80s moment, if Gray didn’t deepen the story with an ever more intimate weave of the political and the personal.

Johnny’s defiance of their humorless sixth-grade teacher (Andrew Polk) arises from, among many things, a long, unwarranted history of being dismissed as a troublemaker and a lost cause. Paul’s acting out, by contrast, is a product of the relative freedom he’s enjoyed, and also his misguided belief that his mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), being the school’s PTA president, will always bail him out. Esther and her hard-working plumber husband, Irving (Jeremy Strong), fret about Paul and wish he’d be more like his responsible older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell). The only family member who can break through to Paul is his maternal grandfather, Aaron (a touching Anthony Hopkins), a benevolent, stabilizing presence at their raucous family dinners, where laughs and anecdotes commingle with sobering reminiscences.

You register a lot in these busy sequences, from Irving’s dopey humor and fierce temper to Esther’s hold-it-all-together energy as she rushes food to the table. (Perhaps above all, you note Gray’s skill at guiding even actors as well known as Hathaway and Strong to distinctive, lived-in performances.) The affection streaming through the camera is palpable; so is the empathy, the exasperation and the occasional shame. Gray brings the laughter to a standstill when Aaron speaks about their heritage, recounting the antisemitic violence his own mother witnessed and endured in her Ukrainian hometown, which prompted her flight to England and eventually the U.S. But then Gray will introduce a different note of unease, as when some of Paul’s relatives spout casually derogatory remarks about Black kids and public schools (or the odd mock-Chinese slur).

That people can both experience and perpetuate racism hardly counts as a startling insight. Still, it’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie embed that truth within such an emotionally generous — and unsparingly honest — portrait of a family. “Armageddon Time” acknowledges the painful cost to Paul’s family of their assimilation, the dilution of their Jewish identity (Graff wasn’t always their surname) in order to blend in and gain standing among their white neighbors. But the movie also evinces an acutely layered understanding of privilege, from the dubious benefits conferred on the Graffs to the insidious way white supremacy pits people of all backgrounds against each other.

These ideas would resonate beyond the story’s Reaganite setting even if “Armageddon Time” weren’t being released now, during another fraught election season, and amid renewed national furor over antisemitic and anti-Black rhetoric. At times those contemporary parallels are made explicit, never more sharply than when Paul is sent to a private school that counts several Trumps among its alumni and trustees. When Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain, in an acid one-scene cameo) arrives on campus to deliver a fatuous speech about working hard and not expecting a free lunch, the irony is almost as rich as she is.

The implicit linking of a future U.S. president to an earlier era of Republican ascendancy is hardly an accident, and “Armageddon Time’s” refusal to shy away from politics or polemics is just one thing that sets it apart from its message-movie ilk. (The title — a reference to “Armagideon Time,” the Willie Williams reggae song recorded by the Clash in 1979 — also invokes Reagan’s mid-campaign warnings of nuclear disaster .) But it’s the focus on Paul and Johnny’s friendship that provides the movie with both its greatest emotional force and its trickiest dramatic maneuvers. And if the story falters in these moments, it’s due to not only the sliver of contrivance at play, but also the question of perspective.

There is, by my count, exactly one moment in “Armageddon Time” that unfolds purely through Johnny’s eyes: a blip of a scene with him at home with his ailing grandmother, a glimpse of a precarious domestic existence that’s about to get shakier. It’s the only such moment Gray will allow himself; everything else plays out from Paul’s vantage, a choice that risks turning Johnny into a narrative pawn or, worse, a retrograde stereotype. As you watch you may wonder, with mounting dread: Is Johnny the latest of cinema’s many Black sacrificial lambs, someone who suffers grievously so that a well-meaning white friend can learn a valuable lesson? Or could Johnny’s lack of agency — and the limitations of Paul’s perspective, and even of his empathy — in fact be the entire point in a movie that’s too pessimistic, and finally too honest, to intervene?

“You’ve gotta say something,” Paul’s grandfather tells him in an earlier scene, urging him to stand up to bullies and be a mensch to those who need it. But the film’s most wrenching moments play out in the face of Paul’s silence, his inability to muster words in those moments when it most counts. You could argue that Gray’s ability to make a movie about this moral agony — especially a movie as polished and frequently powerful as “Armageddon Time” — is just another manifestation of his privilege, a sign of how little he knew then and how much he still has to learn now. Or you could argue that he’s finally learned, however imperfectly, to follow his grandfather’s advice, and to speak with an anger that is all the more forceful for being directed at himself.

‘Armageddon Time’

Rated: R, for language and some drug use involving minors Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 28 at AMC Burbank 16; AMC the Grove 14; AMC Century City 15

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Armageddon time, common sense media reviewers.

1980s-set drama looks at privilege, prejudice; pot, cursing.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Themes about family and striving to achieve/improv

Main character Paul is flawed: He steals, he's dis

White main character is Jewish; his best friend is

An enraged father beats his child with a belt. Ref

Middle school boys make a sexual comment about a f

Strong language, some said by kids, includes "ass,

Kids smoke a joint at school; it's depicted as fun

Parents need to know that Armageddon Time is a coming-of-age dramedy based on writer-director James Gray's experiences growing up in 1980 New York City. While it's about the strength and complexity of family, it also paints a picture of what it was like for Gray to be an 11-year-old kid in that time and place…

Positive Messages

Themes about family and striving to achieve/improve your circumstances. Be grateful for what you have, and make the most of the opportunities given to you. Stand up for those who are less privileged than you. Film aims to show how targets of prejudice can and do shift in different circumstances.

Positive Role Models

Main character Paul is flawed: He steals, he's disrespectful, he allows his friend to take the fall. Other characters also express problematic viewpoints. But Paul's grandfather is a stabilizing force in his life, someone the family respects for his wisdom, kindness, and generosity.

Diverse Representations

White main character is Jewish; his best friend is Black. Stories reflect the historical prejudice and persecution the Jewish people faced, as well as the assumptions people made about Jews in 1980. Also reflects the racism of the time: White characters use the "N" word and suggest that Black people are inferior.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

An enraged father beats his child with a belt. References to historical persecution of Jews, including a story about the brutal murder of parents. Paul's older brother picks on him from time to time, flicking his ear, punching him, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Middle school boys make a sexual comment about a female teacher.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language, some said by kids, includes "ass," "a--hole," "bulls--t," "goddamn," "retard," "s--t," "hell," "my God," and a few instances of "f--k." A student threatens his teacher, saying he's going to "f--k him up." Wealthy White kids use the "N" word in reference to Black kids. The same kids make a sexual joke about a teacher ("boobies"). "Jesus Christ" used as an exclamation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Kids smoke a joint at school; it's depicted as fun, although they face consequences when they're caught.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Armageddon Time is a coming-of-age dramedy based on writer-director James Gray 's experiences growing up in 1980 New York City. While it's about the strength and complexity of family, it also paints a picture of what it was like for Gray to be an 11-year-old kid in that time and place, including the frequent expression of racist attitudes, kids being harshly disciplined (a father beats his son with a belt in an intense scene), and the idea that the only measure of success was your bank account. White adults and kids refer to Black people with the "N" word and talk about them as if they're inferior. This alarms the main character, Paul (Banks Repeta), a White kid whose best friend is Black. Paul's beloved Jewish grandfather ( Anthony Hopkins ) enlightens him on what it means to be a part of a persecuted community and tells him to stand up against prejudice. Kids curse ("s--t," "f--k," "a--hole," etc.) and use derogatory language to and about teachers (there's also a joke about a student getting intimate with a teacher). Kids smoke pot at school, and it's made to look fun. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (1)
• Kids say (2)

Based on 1 parent review

Depressing movie about 1980's New York City

What's the story.

In ARMAGEDDON TIME, it's 1980, and artistic 11-year-old Paul (Banks Repeta) is struggling to succeed in school. Believing his behavioral issues and low grades are the result of the quality of the education he's getting in the public school system, Paul's close-knit family decides to find the funds to enroll him in a private school attended by the kids of New York's wealthiest residents.

Is It Any Good?

For teens, the underlying messages in writer-director James Gray's slice-of-life period piece may be murky, but its example of privilege is literally black and white. Using his 11-year-old self as main character Paul, Gray authentically depicts the shock and wonder of a child starting to understand the larger world around him. And it's not pretty. Paul's older Jewish relatives are wringing their hands about how "the Blacks" are being bused into his school and how that's negatively affecting his education. For some viewers, it may be startling to hear that kind of casual racism, especially coming from survivors of attempted genocide. But that's really the point of the film: showing the shifting targets of prejudice. Since the tide had turned considerably for Jews in America by 1980, Paul's wealthy new classmates don't treat him differently, other than assuming he's rich. But his Black best friend, Johnny (Jaylin Webb), is treated very differently, something Paul isn't really aware of until he's enrolled in an elite private school.

The movie's title -- taken from a speech by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan -- indicates that the film is both a reflection and an indictment of the United States in 1980. The '70s and early '80s fostered a nostalgic perspective of the 1950s. Similarly, in the 2020s, we see an embrace of the '80s as an ideal, carefree time. When the world feels especially chaotic, viewers look for entertainment that gives them comfort. This tendency leads to narratives about past eras that simply aren't accurate. Gray aims to set things straight. For example, Armageddon Time is a great reminder that part of what made Gen X "tough" was that adults believed a "good whipping" was necessary to get kids "in line." Hitting your kid wasn't just acceptable, it was expected. Schools weren't invested in discovering and building on a student's individual strengths and interests, but rather to mass-educate -- and those who couldn't keep up were left behind. Women may have been theoretically liberated, but the patriarchal system wasn't quite ready for them. And men were given the entire load of providing for their family: The money, the education, and the discipline. The whole system was a pressure cooker. Gray's choice to lay bare his childhood experiences will hopefully help audiences remember that the 1980s were a different era, not a better one.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Armageddon Time spotlights attitudes that are now largely considered wrong or unacceptable. From spanking to racism to persecution, how does the film show the damage that occurs when society agrees mistreatment is acceptable?

Paul is far from perfect. He steals, he's disrespectful, and he allows his friend to take the fall. How does the director position it so that viewers are rooting for him? What are we rooting for ?

Paul's grandfather and father each give him a memorable speech about how to use your privilege. How can we use advantages we may have to help others?

Paul's friend Johnny doesn't have a caregiver who can actively advocate for him. What consequences does that have? How can kids learn to advocate for themselves in challenging circumstances as they grow up?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 28, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : November 22, 2022
• Cast : Anne Hathaway , Jeremy Strong , Anthony Hopkins
• Director : James Gray
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , Middle School
• Run time : 155 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language and some drug use involving minors
• Last updated : May 25, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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• Pop Culture

James Gray Shoots for the Stars—From the Ground This Time

The director’s latest, ‘Armageddon Time,’ is full of stark performances and his trademark feeling, but the film is overworked in places

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As the B-side to “London Calling,” the Clash’s 1979 cover of Jamaican singer Willie Williams’s “Armagideon Time” is a crucial footnote to pop history: a righteous, opportunistic fusion of punk snarl and reggae rhythm aimed squarely between the eyes of the powers that be. In it, Joe Strummer doubles down on the apocalyptic anxieties of “London Calling,” with its intimations of “nuclear era” and a metropolis tumbling into the Thames, and advocates for guerilla class warfare. “Remember to kick it over,” he sings, his appetite for destruction justified by the track’s weary, wary refrain: “A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.”

The cruel elusiveness of justice—legal, poetic, or otherwise—is the subject of James Gray’s new drama, Armageddon Time , which returns the filmmaker to the cloistered, personal mode of his early work after forays into big-budget dream project territory (2019’s explicitly Kubrickian Ad Astra , which was inevitably subject to studio meddling). The film takes place in the fall of 1980, in the glory days of the Clash and on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election: the dawning of Morning in America , sunny skies with a warning of potential mushroom clouds. For high schooler Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), the then-governor of California is just another politician for his liberal Jewish parents to scoff at around the television; Chicken Littles clucking that the sky is falling. But the anxiety around his campaign is still palpable. And when you’re a teenager, everything feels like it’s the end of the world as you know it.

The trick of beefing up a coming-of-age story by setting it against some kind of familiar historical hinge point is an old one (one recent example: Licorice Pizza ’s gas shortage subplot). The key question of Gray’s semi-roman à clef , the latest of the director’s real-life Queens Boulevard equivalents, is not whether it’s accomplished, but whether it fills out such a grandiose conceit. What, if anything, do the adventures of a gifted but wayward wannabe artist have to do with a society’s encroaching rightward tilt? Does Gray earnestly conflating the ethical struggles of his youthful surrogate with the state of the nation suggest humility, hubris, or something even more outrageously overwrought? Or, thorniest of all, considering Armageddon Time ’s tragic themes of racial profiling and institutional favoritism and its maker’s status as a brand-name auteur free to tackle whatever material he wants on big studio budgets: What is the best way for a winner to write his own history?

The main relationship at the heart of Armageddon Time is between two preadolescent boys: Paul , who lives comfortably with his family in a detached house in Queens, and his African American classmate Johnny (Jaylin Webb), whose parents are no longer in the picture. At school, the two share a sacred bond as troublemakers; soon after Paul has been disciplined for passing around a sketch of their hateful homeroom teacher (Andrew Polk), Johnny ups the ante with an even wilder display requiring even more severe discipline. Each time one messes up, the other starts running interference. The mutual respect that develops between two kids working through their respective anti-establishment impulses is real, but their solidarity is riddled with invisible fissures. When Johnny says he can’t afford to go on a class trip to the Guggenheim, Paul—who’s excited to sample some modern art—offers to front him the money because, as he explains, his family is rich, and his mom runs the school to boot.

Esther Graff (Anne Hathaway) doesn’t run the school. But she is angling for a spot at the head of the PTA, a campaign that speaks to some sublimated second-wave feminism at odds with her homemaker persona. Nor are his parents rich: It’s more accurate to say that Esther’s father, Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), whose family emigrated from Ukraine to Liverpool before arriving in the U.S. in the ’60s, is extremely rich, and only selectively stingy about it. It’s implied that Aaron and his wife Mickey (Tovah Feldshuh) have used their wealth to prop up Paul’s electrician father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), during fallow periods, as well as to send their elder grandson Ted (Ryan Sell) to a high-end private school—a status he lords over his sibling at every opportunity.

Paul’s confusion about the precise nature of his privilege is sketched excellently by Gray, who excelled, even in his early, crime-themed films, in conveying ethnic and economic details. The dimly lit mealtime sequences in The Yards and We Own the Night carry some of the lived-in energy of Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Paul’s bratty habit of ordering takeout dumplings in the middle of Shabbat dinner works hilariously as shorthand for his assimilation, as does Irving’s sneaky post-meal claim on the leftovers. One night, after taking in a screening of Goldie Hawn’s star vehicle Private Benjamin— and having a spirited family debate outside the theater about the nomenclature of the class-based Jewish slur “Jap,” which Aaron, for all his expertise on antisemitism, has never heard before—the Graffs drive through neighborhoods more prosperous than their own, making self-deprecating (and ultimately disingenuous) jokes about the high cost of living, and about their inability to keep up with the proverbial Joneses.

Gray, who is perhaps the most conscientious dramatist in contemporary American cinema, likes to build movies around broad, tragic dichotomies. In We Own the Night , it was brothers working on both sides of the thin blue line; in The Immigrant , it was a woman trapped between the Old World and the New World. Here, he’s setting up the difference between Paul, who’s lazy and distracted mainly because he knows (however unconsciously) that he’s got ample resources to fall back on, and Johnny, who defiantly prods his teacher’s racism because he has absolutely nothing to lose. The first act climaxes with an object lesson in inequality, which sees the boys busted for smoking weed in the boys’ room—a minor transgression with major consequences, although we’re only privy to the fallout on Paul’s end. The irony is thick: After absorbing a torrent of verbal and physical abuse from his parents in brutal, matter-of-fact scenes, Paul’s grand punishment is to be sent—on his grandfather’s dime—to his brother’s private school. It’s a case study in failing upward.

It’s also a comeuppance that could have easily been a plot point in some early ’80s big-goof-on-campus comedy with a snobs-versus-slobs story line. But Gray, who’s exponentially funnier in conversation about his movies than in his movies, plays it instead for ominous allegory. Showing up on his first day, Paul is shepherded to assembly by one of his new school’s pockmarked, sour-faced old patrons, who as it turns out is none other than Fred Trump (John Diehl); the keynote speaker is the Donald’s older sister Marryane (Jessica Chastain), who urges the trust-fund sucklings in the audience to go out and overachieve even beyond their station—a speech encoded with its fair share of xenophobic dog-whistling. In attempting to protect their son from the imagined menace of an integrated public school, the Graffs have abandoned him to the proto-fascistic ghouls, and most damningly of all, they’re determined to see him fit in at any cost. The only exception is Aaron, who remains thoughtful and attentive about his grandson’s experiences (even if it was his generosity that facilitated the switch in the first place).

There’s a beautifully written and acted sequence in which Paul meets his grandfather in the park to launch a model rocket and the old man delivers a tender, heartfelt speech about the importance of tolerance and standing up against bullies. Here, Hopkins flashes his master technique so winningly that the bluntness of the address—both from Aaron to Paul and from filmmaker to audience—is obviated; we’re drawn into the urgency of an aging patriarch who’s trying to reach across a multigenerational divide while he still can. In a movie by a less intelligent filmmaker, it’d be either way more obvious that Paul gets the message or way more obvious that he doesn’t. Instead, Gray pulls back, away from the heart-to-heart and to a touchingly scaled image of ecstatic, boys-at-play triumph that’s too vivid to be scripted—it has the lingering, fine-grained specificity of a long-held memory.

The toy rocket that Aaron and Paul send up is a wonderfully polyvalent symbol of American ingenuity and technological power: It reaches back toward the glory days of Neil Armstrong and forward toward Reagan’s quasi-apocalyptic Star Wars initiative (and, in an auteurist sense, toward Gray’s deep-space adventure Ad Astra ). When Gray is at his best—as in The Yards , We Own the Night , and Two Lovers , which stand up among the best American dramas of the 21st century—it’s because he’s so good at this kind of compression. He finds a way to filter his classical, cause-and-effect storytelling through images and staging that reveal hidden layers and depths. It’s only in retrospect that the films reveal themselves as fables about the inescapability of fate: The ending of We Own the Night , which finds black sheep Joaquin Phoenix coaxed back into his NYPD-dynasty-family’s fold, is as bleak and devastating as melodrama gets, the erosion of a man’s soul cinched by a sincere yet self-negating pledge of brotherly love.

But there’s also such a thing as too much architecture, and, possibly because he’s so close to the material, Armageddon Time can feel overworked. By the time Hopkins departs the narrative (in another scene that burrows through cliché into something like real, terrible experience), it starts to buckle beneath the heavy weight of its own deterministic design.

The smaller flaws here have to do with casting: Hathaway and Strong are good actors who don’t scan immediately as Jewish American, and end up stretching a bit in the direction of caricature (the same way Michelle Williams does in Steven Spielberg’s similarly autobiographical The Fabelmans ) . The larger problem is that for how clearly Gray sees Paul—and how sensitively he directs Repeta in a delicate, alert performance—he can’t get much of a read on Johnny, and thus falls back on well-intentioned but grating clichés. The kid loves Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang; he dotes on his dying grandmother; he’s ducking child services in between after-hours visits to Paul’s house. The tension between the Graff family’s ostensibly progressive attitudes and their barely closeted disdain for African Americans—or, specifically, for the Black kid they fear is dragging their son into drug use—is undermined by the film’s own lack of imagination in this area. While a generous reading might say that Johnny’s vagueness is a byproduct of Paul’s own myopia—the way he’s been conditioned to see everybody else as a supporting player in his narrative—that’s a bit too convenient. Rather, Johnny is what he seems to be: a plot device, and nothing more. For all the skillful engineering Gray does in bringing the boys together again for another, even more dangerous act of petty criminal ingenuity, the ending and its message are visible from a mile away.

Predictability isn’t inherently a bad thing, and the moment of reckoning that tests whether Paul has actually learned his grandfather’s lessons is powerfully conceived; nobody does close-up, dawning, Dostoevskyian guilt like Gray, whose movies almost always build to scenes of characters paralyzed in mute helplessness against events beyond their control. But the malevolent, systemic unfairness of the final scenes doesn’t resonate the way it’s supposed to. The events don’t tear your guts out. That Paul gets off easier than he should because—to paraphrase Strong’s for-your-consideration final monologue—that’s just the way the world works is, in the end, less an observation of some cosmic imbalance than a sideways justification for the movie’s existence. It’s only by losing his innocence that Paul will, it’s implied, gain the clarity to live up to his ambitions as an artist; the final shots suggest that Paul will eventually break faith with all of the flawed institutions that birthed him and walk his own path toward a nobler kind of self-actualization. The troubling, ambivalently nostalgic Armageddon Time is the upshot of those aspirations—a movie that evokes and soothes its own pristinely guilty conscience.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Armageddon Time Review: America Comes of Age in James Gray's Triumph

The personal is political in James Gray's beautiful, soulful movie Armageddon Time, which shows a boy and a country coming of age in different ways.

James Gray is a fascinating director with a range wider than the Amazon River but a consistent aesthetic which makes each film feel truly his. Whether it's historical adventure epics ( The Lost City of Z ), introspective sci-fi quests ( Ad Astra ), tense crime dramas ( We Own the Night, The Yards ), or quiet character studies ( The Immigrant ), Gray usually finds a way to incorporate his very personal themes of family, ancestry, politics, and morality.

Now he's made his most personal film yet, the semi-autobiographical Armageddon Time , which is loosely based on his own youth in New York as a child of Ukrainian-Jewish descent. Gray employs his typical subtlety in exploring complicated moral and political themes without getting didactic or expositional, using the election of Ronald Reagan and a private school funded by the Trump family as the backdrop to a quiet character study. With a phenomenal cast, brilliant directing, and a perfect ending, Armageddon Time captures a very specific moment not just in a boy's coming of age , but in American history. It's one of the year's best films.

A Great Cast Supports a Boy's Coming of Age in Armageddon Time

Armageddon Time chronicles an important shift in the life and mind of Paul Graff (played by Banks Repeta), a boy who is not just a quasi-avatar for Gray but for many young people who benefit from privileges they're not aware of. Paul is a bit of a brat, the kind of boy who will leave the table and order Chinese food when he doesn't like his mother's cooking. He can misbehave and be a bit obnoxious, but there's no malice to him; he's just a kid enjoying the many things that were given to him through the suffering, toil, and risk of his elders (played by an incredible cast).

Anne Hathaway plays his put-upon mother Esther and is wonderful at balancing exasperation and annoyance with deep love. Jeremy Strong is amazing as Paul's father Irving, a stern man who nonetheless has a good sense of humor and an abundance of love, but refuses to be walked over like his wife.

The only person who really gets through to Paul and has the power to sway his mind and influence him is his grandfather and Esther's father, Aaron Rabinowitz, played by Anthony Hopkins in one of his great late performances. A magisterial man who is simultaneously funny and sad, Aaron is the kind of person who will suffer silently for decades without an ounce of resentment if it brought joy to his loved ones.

That type of suffering is apparent throughout much of Paul's family — these are people who struggled, surviving pogroms and World War II, bigotry and hatred, poverty and ostracization in order to give subsequent generations a better life. Paul, like so many people, is mostly ignorant of this, and enjoys his life as if it was simply natural, rather than the hard-won result of his ancestors' lengthy trials and tribulations. When Paul develops a friendship with a Black boy at his school, he gradually comes to realize how the world works, how it treats other people, and how lucky he is, even if it's all so confusing and sad.

Class, Privilege, and Politics in Armageddon Time

Armageddon Time is magical in the way that it feels like nothing is really happening, and yet emotional and political threads are being sewn without much conscious awareness. Paul's friendship with Johnny (played by Jaylin Webb) is threatened when their fun times and truancy leads to the fury of Paul's parents. Using his grandfather to convince him, they send Paul to the private prep school his brother attends. There, he sees the real world of privilege, where the children chant Reagan's name and attend speeches given by Fred and Maryanne Trump (yes, those Trumps; Fred served on the board of directors for the Kew-Forest School). These kids will likely never come of age.

Related: Best James Gray Movies, Ranked

Paul will, though. That's because true coming of age requires some melancholic mix of tragedy, suffering, and regret, things that are generally hidden away from rich kids and the world's elites. Without ever becoming miserable, and always retaining a sense of joy and fortitude, much of Armageddon Time is about becoming aware of suffering, inequality, power structures, and genuine warts-and-all tragedy. By putting Paul's transition toward maturity in the spotlight, Gray effectively shines a light on America's transition toward something else.

Though it's set four decades ago, Armageddon Time is hauntingly timely, not simply because of its use of the Trump family, but by showing the seeds of how we got to where we are today. Tacitly using Reagan, policing, income inequality, immigration, and racism in tangential yet important ways, Gray depicts how America came of age in a very different way from Paul.

Armageddon Time is Musically and Visually Beautiful

Cinematographer Darius Khondji paints a complete world in Armageddon Time ; whether he's filming claustrophobic house scenes or sprawling exterior montages, the film just feels visually whole. Everything connects, the same way Khondi has been able to create a distinct palette for a variety of very different films ( Se7en, The Ninth Gate, Panic Room, Funny Games, Uncut Gems, Woody Allen and Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies , and so on). He applies his genius to Armageddon Time without ever being flashy, instead balancing the warmth of Paul's home life with the coldness of the world with seamless grace.

Related: Unconventional Coming-of-Age Films Worth Watching

The film itself is named after a song, originally from Willie Williams but later covered by the political punk band The Clash, titled Armagideon Time . These are some of the lyrics:

A lot of people runnin' and a hiding tonight A lot of people won't get no justice tonight Remember to kick it over No one will guide you Armagideon time

The film uses this great needle drop and music in general very well, with Christopher Spelman's delicate score complementing the use of dub-style reggae and rock. The music mirrors Paul's introduction to empathy as he observes the way his Black friend is treated differently by everybody (teachers, police, the wealthy) despite displaying the same behavior as Paul. His eyes open to the actual world around him, and he grows as a human being as a result.

The Personal is Political in James Gray's Coming of Age Movie

Armageddon Time is masterful at showing just how precarious this growth and humanity is. It's only because of his friend Johnny, his own caring family, and especially his kind but morally strong grandfather, that Paul is able to escape from the narcissism and amorality of privilege. Many other kids in his position didn't and won't get that chance, because they're surrounded by elitist, racist, uncaring, and/or selfish family and friends. That's who tends to rule the world.

Gray's film is a portrait of Paul's escape from that world, and a call for others to run from the immoral, hateful, greedy sectors of a society that favors economics and social position over humanity itself. Armageddon Time beautifully conveys the personal and political power of walking away from the institutions that privilege some and expel others and prioritizes family and real human connection over success, proper behavior, and obedience. It ultimately carries one of the strongest political messages there is — opt-out.

Produced by RT Features, MadRiver Pictures, Keep Your Head, and Spacemaker Productions, Armageddon Time will be released in theaters from Focus Features on Oct. 28th.

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Armageddon Time Movie Review: Semi-Autobiographical Film from James Gray Cuts One Notch Deeper Than Its Contemporaries

Directed by james gray and stars banks repeta, anne hathaway and anthony hopkins.

In any profile you read or listen to with James Gray , the sincerity reigns true about his passions. As a craftsman that’s been working as a filmmaker since the 1990s, Gray is now a staple of the art world and a veteran of the profession. While his settings can range from his own personal stomping grounds to international terrain to even intergalactic expeditions, the clear and penetrating humanity that is on display with each outing grows heavier and heavier, so when it was announced that Armageddon Time would be a semi-autobiographical story about a critical point in Gray’s own childhood, it felt like both an inevitability and a slam dunk.

And then as the casting choices for his newest film slowly started to trickle out, anticipation only grew and grew. He’s never short on pulling great performances from established actors and actresses (he resurrected my own opinion on Charlie Hunnam in The Lost City of Z ) so to see the ensemble grouping of Anne Hathaway , Jeremy Strong and Anthony Hopkins was a signal that I should create an empty spot in my calendar for the moment I was able to get my hands on Armageddon Time .

So, anticipation was high. Monumental, to say the least. Did it deliver on these hopes? For the most part, Armageddon Time certainly does and continues the winning streak for Gray. It isn’t nearly as ambitious as his previous two films ( The Lost City of Z being a decades-spanning, inward-focused dissection of ambition itself, and Ad Astra taking visionary filmmaking to new heights), but it carries every bit of the heart and weight his films generally offer.

It’s as if Gray looks at the landscape of current auteur filmmaking and decides he wants to follow in the footsteps of his contemporaries but make a film that punches one notch deeper and lasts with you for weeks longer. I adored Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood – but neither of these films, or ones in the same self-indulgent nature, manage to overshadow their own stylistic ambition with rich context about humility and enduring. I’m stoked to lay my eyes on Spielberg’s The Fabelmans but the pressure only grows higher after sinking into Armageddon Time .

Like many films that center on children growing up, the actor or actress chosen to carry the burden of the film contributes to or diminishes the quality of the film immensely. In the case of Armageddon Time , not only do Banks Repeta (as Paul Graff) and Jaylin Webb (as Johnny Davis) hold their own, they elevate the scenes that generally center around their own personal connection. Gray’s scripts usually carry a handful of weightier set pieces, and both Repeta and Webb prove they are capable of working with the best.

Every theme packed within this film’s runtime is effectively handled. The American dream on paper sounds beautiful and utopian, but the means to which middle class Americans have to go to get there are tragic. The class divide is as textured and layered as they are in other modern classics – Parasite came to mind numerous times throughout due to its pinpoint commentary on fighting your own to gain a leg up. Racism is a semi-regular topic throughout, but it isn’t battered constantly in a way meant to enrage a viewer from the film’s opening to closing credits.

Reviews for Films like Armageddon Time (2022)

But the most notable theme that flows through smoothly is the bond of family and the toll that actions take on those around you. Anthony Hopkins is the soul of Armageddon Time , and every monologue he’s tasked with stands as some of the best moments on film this year. Perhaps one of the best aspects of Gray’s script is the lifelike connections family members have. Hathaway and Strong (as the Graff parents) are contentious at times, and empathetic at others. Outside pressures can strain a family, and Gray is unflinching at showing the flaws his family members had from his own recollections.

After only one viewing, it’s tough to say where Gray landed with this one in his own filmography. It’s obviously his most personal project, but also one of his most deeply resonating ones. He’s on a hot streak very few people have been on in the industry in quite some time. He’s been outspoken about the disservices that production and distribution companies have performed by backing one genre of filmmaking so heavily compared to others (specifically Marvel and other superhero entities) and it seems he’s on a solo mission to restore balance to the industry – one film at a time.

Armageddon Time delivers on the humility and humanity that comes with nearly every James Gray film. Combine that with an ensemble cast for the ages, and a healthy bit of film grain and aesthetic flourish, and you get one of the year’s best releases. Many films leave your consciousness soon after you finish your screening, but not this one. This one will last.

Genre: Drama

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Armageddon Time Movie Cast and Credits

Banks Repeta as Paul Graff

Anne Hathaway as Esther Graff

Jeremy Strong as Irving Groff

Jaylin Webb Johnny Davis

Anthony Hopkins as Aaron Rabinowitz

Andrew Polk as Mr. Turkeltaub

Director: James Gray

Writer: James Gray

Cinematography: Darius Khondji

Editor: Scott Morris

Composer: Christopher Spelman

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Armageddon Time Review

18 Nov 2022

Armageddon Time

“You just want me to be like you,” says 12-year-old Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) in  Armageddon Time , unenamoured with his posh new school uniform for the posh new school his parents are making him go to. “No,” says his father ( Jeremy Strong ), “I want you to be a whole lot better than me. That’s what I want.”

There’s a world of pain there, as there is throughout  Armageddon Time , a semi-autobiographical melting-pot that explores much of what made the young James Gray a man. That line – “I want you to be a whole lot better than me” – which mixes a father’s protectiveness with a self-loathing inseparable from his Jewishness, is delivered with heartbreaking humanity from Strong, whose uniquely troubled eyes deliver desperation, insecurity, disappointment. Having gone to space with  Ad Astra , Gray is very much back on Earth here, with a film that goes to town on disappointment – in people, in politics, in ourselves. It’s about dealing with it and building from it.

Many of Gray’s films are introspective, interior personal journeys –  Two Lovers ,  The Lost City Of Z  and  Ad Astra  all feel disarmingly intimate. But here he has doubled down, taking a trip into his own childhood with a soulful drama that follows his young avatar, Paul, as he navigates adolescence within that white middle-class Jewish upbringing.

It’s warm but not rose-tinted, sweet but not sentimental.

The Jewish kid befriends a Black kid, and it’s the best of times and the worst of times, as Paul is treated to a succession of wake-up calls, his eyes slowly opening to the reality of the social structure propped up around him. Politics are never far away: Paul’s left-leaning parents, gently aghast at the barely disguised bile coming out of Ronald Reagan’s mouth as he campaigns to be President, are not quite as enlightened as they’d like to think. Gray gets into the cracks, tackling morality, class warfare and racism, but never with too heavy a hand, as Paul begins to see things from different perspectives.

So, it’s warm but not rose-tinted, sweet but not sentimental. At worst it feels slightly contrived towards its conclusion, with things dramatised a little bit more than they maybe needed to be. But still, it’s a means to an end, with the young Paul learning – the hard way – about hypocrisy, injustice and privilege. Never, though, at the expense of the film remaining a touching character study. It’s a plaintive piece of self-reflection – it yearns and aches.

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Armageddon Time review – Hopkins and Hathaway can’t save this stagy tale of a quasi-Trump

A middle-class boy capitalises on his privilege in Reagan-era New York in James Gray’s uncharacteristically syrupy movie

A fter his brilliant space adventure Ad Astra in 2019 , James Gray has come heavily back to Earth. This slightly laborious and self-consciously acted family coming-of-age drama features some perfunctory plot resolutions, and dinner-theatre performances from its all-star cast, including Anthony Hopkins, Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway.

It is set in Queens, New York in 1980 – the time in which US presidential candidate Ronald Reagan solemnly announced that the US was facing a moral “Armageddon”.

But more to the point, Queens is, in 1980, the heartland of the increasingly wealthy and influential Trump family, to whom oblique references are made: Fred Trump (Donald’s dad, played by John Diehl) makes an appearance as does US judge Maryanne Trump (Donald’s sister, played in a steely cameo by Jessica Chastain). But not Donald himself.

Banks Repeta plays Paul, a sensitive, creative kid from a hardworking Ukrainian Jewish-descended family: dad Irving (Jeremy Strong) is a careworn, quick-tempered paterfamilias who has done well in the plumbing business: mum Esther (Anne Hathaway) is president of the parent-teacher association at the public (ie, state) school that Paul attends. Irving can only afford one set of school fees, so Paul’s wise-ass elder brother, Ted (Ryan Sell) gets to go to the elitist private institution favoured by the Trump family. And grandad Aaron (Anthony Hopkins), who brought his family from the old country to the US via Liverpool, is a great pal of Paul’s.

Paul is keen on art. He is dreamy and inattentive in lessons and has nascent class-clown tendencies, like his natural friend and ally Johnny (Jaylin Webb) – a smart kid who, because he is black, gets into way more trouble than Paul – despite doing pretty much the same things. When Paul and Johnny are caught smoking a joint in the boys’ toilets, Irving gives Paul an old-fashioned, quasi-Goodfellas beating with a belt, and he and Esther decide they just have to find the money to send Paul to the same posh school that Ted goes to, with all its snobs and racists. And so the awful, gradual betrayal of Johnny is under way.

In some ways, Paul’s boyhood in Armageddon Time shows us a quasi-Trump, a kid who was brought up around the same time (a little later), from a comparable background facing comparable pressures, but who didn’t become the same guy – or not quite the same guy. Paul does, after all, wind up going to the top Trump school and, sadly, lets Johnny take the rap for some wrongdoing: Paul can use his privilege as a get-out-of-jail-free card. His grandpa tells him always to call out and confront the bigots at that preppy school and this is an emotional moment for them both. But Paul is not shown carrying that through and just starts to fit in at the new school. Maybe the point is that muddled, unhappy, well-meaning Paul could well be a Trump voter a few decades down the line.

Gray has given us tough, sinewy and memorable New York movies in the past such as The Yards and We Own the Night , but this is weighed down with a sentimental and self-regarding staginess.

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Armageddon Time

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In Theaters

• November 4, 2022
• Banks Repeta as Paul Graff; Jaylin Webb as Johnny Davis; Anthony Hopkins as Grandpa Aaron Rabinowitz; Anne Hathaway as Esther Graff; Jeremy Strong as Irving Graff; Ryan Sell as Ted Graff; Andrew Polk as Mr. Turkeltaub; Tovah Feldshuh as Grandma Mickey Rabinowitz; Marcia Haufrecht as Aunt Ruth; Teddy Coluca as Uncle Louis; Richard Bekins as Headmaster Fitzroy; Dane West as Topper Lowell; Landon James Forlenza as Chad Eastman; John Diehl as Fred Trump; Jessica Chastain as Maryanne Trump

Home Release Date

• January 3, 2023

Distributor

• Focus Features

Movie Review

Paul takes a lot for granted.

Because his mother is the head of his school’s P.T.A., he feels he can get away with misbehaving. Because his brother attends an expensive private school, he believes his family is rich. And because he’s never personally been the victim of racial profiling, he doesn’t think it’s necessary to stand up for those who have experienced that treatment from others.

But Paul’s about to face a reckoning. Because he’s about to realize that all those things he thought were true are completely false.

It’s the ’80s, and yes, Paul does have some advantages in life, but those didn’t come easy. They were paid for by the hard work and perseverance of his parents, his grandparents and even his great-grandparents before him.

Paul may have been too young to understand these realities before. But now, he’s finally growing up.

Positive Elements

Paul’s family is dysfunctional, to say the least. His dad is abusive, his mom is in denial, his aunt is racist, his brother is a jerk, and his grandfather (the one person in his life whom Paul actually respects) is terminally ill.

Their poor behaviors, while inexcusable, are born from difficult lives. But it’s clear they want something healthier for the next generation. Paul’s dad tells his son that he wants Paul to be “better” than him. His mom tells him that he and his brother are her “angels” and that all her hopes rest with them.

But it’s Paul’s relationship with his grandpa that has the greatest impact on his life.

Grandpa tells Paul about their family’s past: how his own grandparents were murdered in Ukraine because of their Jewish heritage; how he was rejected from college for the same reason; and how Paul is lucky to have the surname “Graff” instead of “Rabinowitz,” since it’s less obviously Jewish.

Grandpa explains to Paul that he and Paul’s parents have worked hard their whole lives so that Paul and his older brother can truly have the American Dream. And he says it’s up to Paul to remember the sacrifice made by those who came before him and to honor them by not taking those advantages for granted.

Furthermore, Grandpa emphasizes to Paul how important it is to use those advantages to help others. When Paul tells his grandpa that he heard some kids using racial slurs at school, Grandpa tells Paul to stand up for the Black and Hispanic kids. “Be a mensch,” Grandpa says, “because they don’t have your advantage.”

Later, after Grandpa’s passing, Paul worries that he didn’t do enough to help Jonathan, a Black boy who, unfortunately, becomes the catalyst for Paul’s growing understanding of racism’s presence in his school. But he imagines what Grandpa would say to him: Never stop fighting, and never give in .

Paul starts to show consideration for others as the film progresses. When he and Jonathan get caught in some wrongdoing, he tries to take full responsibility to protect his friend. And when Grandpa passes away, Paul worries more about his mother than he does about himself.

We hear that Grandpa was the only member of Paul’s maternal family not to turn his nose up at his father’s profession as a plumber.

Spiritual Elements

Obviously, the title of the film references its setting at the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was (and still is) compared to the end-times battle of Armageddon as referenced in the biblical book of Revelation.

We hear America compared to Sodom and Gomorrah. A rabbi officiates a funeral.

Sexual Content

A boy is crudely told that if he cries to the school counselor, she’ll let him “plant” his face in her chest. We see a teenage boy in his undergarments.

Violent Content

People fear a nuclear war when Reagan is elected President in 1980.

When Paul disrespects his mother, she grabs him by the chin and tells him that she’ll no longer defend him from his father. After she releases him, Paul flees to the bathroom to hide. His dad screams for Paul to unlock the door. When Paul refuses, his dad breaks the door down and beats Paul with a belt. Paul cries that he hates his dad and his family, and his dad responds by slamming Paul’s head into the wall. (It’s clear that Paul’s older brother is used to this treatment since he similarly flees when their dad issues a threat and since he finds Paul’s punishment amusing.)

We hear that Grandpa’s grandparents were stabbed to death in front of his mother because they were Jewish.

When Jonathan shows up at Paul’s house shoeless with cut and bleeding feet, Paul offers him some bandages. But Jonathan declines, claiming his feet are almost healed.

Paul and his brother repeatedly horse around and hit each other (and Paul hates this). Paul expresses a desire to hit his teacher.

Crude or Profane Language

There are eight uses of the f-word and twice as many of the s-word. A boy at Paul’s school uses the n-word derogatorily. God’s name is abused 16 times (six paired with “d–n” or “d–mit”), and Christ’s name is abused once. We also hear a few uses each of “a–,” “a–hole,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “d–k,” “h—” and the Yiddish crudity “schmuck.” When Jonathan is transferred to a special needs class, he refers to it as a class for “retards.”

Paul’s grandfather curses twice in front of him, explaining that he is using the harsh words to emphasize how serious he is.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Paul and Jonathan get caught smoking marijuana in their school bathroom and are nearly expelled for the illegal offense. The film suggests that neither boy truly understood the magnitude of what they were doing, since Jonathan’s cousin (who had given him the drug) had only told him that it makes you laugh after you smoke it. However, the boys’ unwise decision has the collateral consequence of Paul’s mother being unable to run for the school board.

Other Negative Elements

Paul, plainly put, is spoiled . He thinks his family is rich because his older brother attends private school. In reality, they work hard for their limited money; and his grandparents (who also have limited funds) helped to pay for his brother’s schooling (and eventually Paul’s as well).

Paul behaves pretty badly at several points. He steals cash from his mother’s jewelry box. When he doesn’t like what his mom cooks, he either demands something different or orders food from a restaurant.

And his parents enable this self-centered behavior. When Paul gets up from the dinner table to order food—right after his mom explains that ordering out is too expensive, no less—his parents yell at him from the dining room to stop. And when he disobeys, rather than physically stop him or even discipline him for his actions, they let him continue and go unpunished. In fact, the only time Paul actually listens to his parents is when his grandpa requests it (though sometimes not even then) or when he is physically threatened by his father.

So, it’s no surprise that these behaviors extend outside the home as well. Paul is disruptive in school (and this forms the basis of his friendship with Jonathan). But when a teacher suggests that Paul’s inability to pay attention might be the result of him having special needs, Paul’s mother insists it’s the school’s fault.

Granted, the school is overcrowded and underfunded. But even when Paul transfers to a much better private school, his parents refuse to listen to the educators who tell them that he might have some sort of learning disability. Worse still, Paul operates under the belief that if he gets into trouble, his parents will simply use their money and power to get him out of it (an entitled attitude which has significant consequences later on).

Paul and Jonathan’s friendship, while genuine, is built on their mutually disruptive behaviors. They are rude to their teacher, distract their classmates with their silly antics and talk about running away from their families.

Jonathan, for his part, doesn’t actually want to leave his family , he just doesn’t want to be put into foster care since his elderly grandmother (and caretaker) is too sick to care for him anymore.

Paul’s brother, meanwhile, completely disregards him. He’s unhelpful when Paul transfers to his school, essentially telling Paul not to embarrass him and then abandoning him. He also watches and laughs when Paul is physically punished by their father. And it’s clear he thinks his younger brother is inept.

Kids commit truancy. A boy drops out of school when he is transferred to a special needs class. A teacher implies a student is dumb (and so do other adults). Paul fears that his new classmates are ingenuine and will desert or mock him if he says anything “stupid.” Some boys throw spitballs at each people.

A woman speaks at Paul’s new school (Maryanne Trump, to be exact) and offers two contradictory statements. She says that there are no handouts in life even for the privileged, so they’ll have to work hard. But she also suggests that they are the elite and will lead in all fields because they attend this privileged school.

[ Note: The rest of this section contains spoilers. ] Eventually, Paul and Jonathan do decide to run away together. Paul hatches a plan to steal and sell a computer from his new school (his parents transferred him to a private school after he was nearly expelled from the public school system for drug use) so he and Jonathan can move to Florida and live with Jonathan’s older brother.

But the boys get caught when the pawn shop they try to sell to decides to call the police instead. And it’s through this incident that Paul finally realizes how bad racial profiling can be.

Paul had already seen bits and pieces of racism: His old schoolteacher tended to blame Jonathan for class disruptions even when Paul was responsible; his aunt and even his parents had made comments about Black people being dangerous somehow; his new classmates used racial slurs; and people informed Jonathan that he wouldn’t be able to pursue his dream of becoming an astronaut since he is Black. But when Paul tells the police that stealing was his idea and that he forced Jonathan to go through with it, they don’t believe him.

Moreover, Paul realizes that he isn’t invincible either. When Paul’s dad arrives at the police station, he is able to secure his son’s release because he happened to have fixed a water heater for free for the officer on duty.

Afterwards, he explains to Paul that he’ll probably never see Jonathan again. “We got lucky,” he tells Paul. And even though it’s unfair for Jonathan to take the heat, life is unfair, he says. We have to survive, so be thankful when you get a leg up, he continues.

It’s a difficult concept for Paul to grasp. And by the end of the film, it’s hard to say whether he truly understands or not.

Paul is the kind of kid you probably don’t want your own kids emulating. He’s rude, disobedient and makes some really bad decisions that affect those closest to him. (His mom loses a job opportunity, and his best friend gets arrested as a result of his actions.)

And if Paul were more apologetic or even just less bratty, perhaps the film would be more encouraging.

Instead, Paul’s transformation in this coming-of-age tale is left open-ended, leaving audiences wondering whether he truly understood what his family repeatedly tried to convey to him: that he shouldn’t take anything for granted.

Additionally, this R-rated film is filled with harsh language. A Black child is called the n-word, and we see multiple examples of racism. A father beats his son with a belt. Two middle-school-aged boys are nearly expelled from school after getting caught smoking marijuana; later, they’re both arrested for stealing a school computer and trying to sell it.

All of that makes for a film that isn’t inspiring or wholesome. So even though it’s about a family pursuing the American Dream, families should probably steer clear.

Emily Tsiao

Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.

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O utside of Atlanta, a creaky white van weaved down a highway lined with abandoned cars. A helicopter sat in the parking lot of a charred JCPenney. Armed guards in military fatigues patrolled checkpoints. A death squad dumped corpses into a mass grave. Artillery boomed in the offing. 

It was all part of a movie set, but to the actors starring in Civil War, felt all too real. The new film, opening in theaters April 12, takes place in a near-future United States ravaged by conflict. California and Texas, which make up the so-called Western Forces, have seceded from the union in response to an authoritarian third-term President who has jettisoned the Constitution, disbanded the FBI, authorized airstrikes on his own citizens, and now aims to “eliminate the final pockets of resistance.” To create as credible a dystopia as possible, director Alex Garland and the crew turned parts of the Atlanta region into a soberingly plausible hot spot.

“It felt very disturbing,” says Kirsten Dunst , one of the leads, of the film’s blurring with reality. “Toward the end, it was all the noise and the gunfire, and then just looking at the news and seeing that there’s another school shooting.”

By the time Civil War premiered at the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival in mid-March, it had already generated some heat online. Reddit commenters debated whether invoking such severe domestic turbulence is irresponsible at a time when the nation’s political divisions have reached a fever pitch. One person worried it “might be interpreted as a role model to MAGA groups if not portrayed carefully.” Garland, the British science-fiction ace who made Ex Machina and Annihilation , anticipated polarized reactions. In a sense, they’re why he made Civil War in the first place. “It’s really a film about why polarization is not a great thing,” he says. “It’s trying to have a conversation. It’s trying to find common ground.”

On top of everything else, Civil War is also an intimate character study. Dunst plays Lee, a jaded photojournalist traveling with three colleagues—two reporters ( Wagner Moura of Narcos fame and Lady Bird ’s Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a novice photographer ( Priscilla ’s Cailee Spaeny)—from New York City to Washington, D.C., which Moura’s grizzled ringleader predicts is on the cusp of falling. There, they hope to question a President ( Nick Offerman ) who hasn’t given an interview in more than a year. The journey through a nation at war with itself is a circuitous, 857-mile odyssey, much like a video game in which the hero must evade death or capture by antagonists. In this case, those foes are power-hungry goons wielding carbines. Garland based these threats and detours (which, if you’re doing math, nearly quadrupled the length of the journey) on real-world analogues, like a thug, played by Jesse Plemons , whose MO is loosely inspired by the Khmer Rouge, the totalitarian movement that took over Cambodia in 1975.

Budgeted at $50 million, Civil War is the most expensive movie A24 has released, teeing up a more commercial era for the trendy indie studio that built its renown on auteur-driven projects like The Zone of Interest , Everything Everywhere All at Once , and Moonlight. But unlike some sweeping apocalyptic blockbuster or The Last of Us –style genre hybrid, its psychodrama doesn’t incorporate fantasy tropes. You won’t find any zombies here. Lee becomes a reluctant mentor to Spaeny’s Jessie, who quickly notes that she shares a name with distinguished World War II photojournalist Lee Miller (soon to be portrayed by Kate Winslet in a biopic).

Garland drafted the film during 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns . He’d contracted the disease early on. Upon emerging from quarantine in Gloucestershire, England, he stepped into what he calls a “reverse Narnia.” The world around him felt strange, paranoid, and divided. He wrote the script that spring, anticipating a future further riven by sectarian strife. He mapped out a fictional backstory to the film’s events but omits most of it from the screen. The year Civil War takes place is unspecified, and although the President seems to have a Trumpian view of the Constitution’s impermanence, there is no firm left-vs.-right ideology at play. Even the actors say they weren’t given much context. “We kind of built what happened before in our own minds,” Moura recalls. “We never really spoke about it.” Even though Civil War forgoes Garland’s usual sci-fi lens, it shares with his previous work a sense that life has spiraled beyond our control. Withholding the how and why is kind of the Garland way.

De-emphasizing the political ticktock lets Civil War home in on its conflict’s human toll. As the quartet gets closer to D.C., their steely exteriors crack—and yet their pursuit remains steadfast, even if it could result in death. It’s a higher calling, and perhaps an adrenaline addiction. Garland made the arduous choice to shoot the movie chronologically, so the intensity the actors experienced was constantly mounting. “I’ve never been scared like that before, and I’ve never felt more alive,” Jessie declares after an especially harrowing chapter.

Garland’s crew bolted eight small cameras to the protagonists’ van. Because so many scenes occurred in the car, the production felt profoundly intimate. Spaeny likens the road scenes to a play. But unlike theater, or even a typical movie shoot, Civil War changed locations every few days as the characters’ trek progressed, introducing constant logistical puzzles for the producers and craftspeople to solve. 

The third act, filmed at Tyler Perry’s 330-acre Atlanta studio, which contains a replica of the White House, is explosive—literally. Choppers drop bombs, buildings catch fire, Humvees roll in, smoke clogs the night sky. Garland used visual effects to blow up the Lincoln Memorial as the journalists face guerrillas closing in on the capital. To prepare, the cast watched the 2018 documentary Under the Wire, which chronicles war correspondents in Syria. Dunst and Spaeny trained with photographers to master camera functions so they’d seem seasoned even as chaos erupted. “That was my biggest fear: not looking comfortable or like this is something that’s a part of my body,” says Dunst, who studied under Austin-based shutterbug Greg Giannukos. Garland also enlisted Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, as a military adviser; Mendoza choreographed the final sequence and hired veterans as extras.

The movie’s verisimilitude is what got the internet commentariat buzzing when Civil War ’s trailer debuted in December. Some, upon learning the conflict’s origins aren’t more explicit, might accuse the movie of pulling punches. But Garland sought to avoid a “lecture” about the state of the nation. “If you’re honest, you don’t need to be told because you already know,” at least vaguely, what caused the turmoil, he says. “There’s a lot of films that tell everything to everyone and make everything completely digestible. I’m not particularly interested in doing it because it feels oppositional to engagement. ‘Left vs. right’ closes down the conversation. That is the problem with polarization.”

Even the idea that Texas and California, which rarely agree on anything, would both secede is a rebuttal to the disunity that Civil War critiques. Why, Garland asks, is it so hard to believe that two disparate states would rebel against a fascist government remaking America in the President’s image? Secession movements in both Texas (dubbed “Texit”) and California (“CalExit”) have sprung up recently, with the latter conceptualizing an “alternative to potential civil violence and civil war in the country.” 

If the movie preaches anything, it’s a pacifist gospel. Hollywood sometimes struggles to separate the repugnance of war from the glorification of it. Here, the thesis is unmistakable. “It’s an antiwar film, which is problematic to do because cinema doesn’t necessarily want to be antiwar,” Garland says, reflecting a not-uncommon concern among pundits that the thrill of seeing warfare on a big screen numbs audiences. But from where Garland sits, at least, it demands to be seen. As the subhead on Rolling Stone’ s SXSW review blared, "No, it’s not a documentary—yet."

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20 facts you might not know about 'Armageddon'

Posted: March 22, 2024 | Last updated: March 22, 2024

It’s the end of the world as we know it…or is it? Maybe the end of the world can be avoided by sending oil drillers to an asteroid in space. That’s the premise of the absurd but popular action film Armageddon . Michael Bay went from directing The Rock to directing an even-bigger, dumber movie about a rock in space. You don’t want to miss any of these 20 facts about Armageddon .

Some accusations were thrown around about this movie

Memorably, Armageddon and Deep Impact, two films about an asteroid heading toward Earth, were both released in 1998. They may have had a connection, at least according to Deep Impact screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin. To hear Rubin tell it, he was talking about the plot of the movie he was working on while at lunch with an executive at Disney. Soon thereafter, this executive went back to Disney and began production on Armageddon as a counter.

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The movie had a lot of writers working on it

Armageddon was certainly not a singular vision. Five different screenwriters are credited, either for the screenplay or the story or for an “adaptation by” credit. One of those writers is J.J. Abrams. On top of that, though, four other writers reportedly worked on the script without receiving credit, including Chinatown scribe Robert Towne.

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Bruce Willis starred in the movie to make amends

Willis was supposed to produce and star in a movie called Broadway Brawler for Disney. However, Willis was apparently immensely difficult to deal with on set — so much so the film just stopped being in production and was never finished. Willis was sued over his actions related to the film, so to avoid that, he made a deal with Disney. He would star in three movies for Disney at a greatly reduced salary. The first of those was Armageddon , which he received $3 million for, instead of his usual $20 million.

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Steve Buscemi tried to avoid typecasting to no avail

Buscemi was in a run of playing sleazeball characters, and he was looking for a change of pace. That’s why he signed on to play Rockhound in Armageddon . As it was written, he was a stand-up guy. After Buscemi was cast, though, they started rewriting the script to make the character, well, sleazier.

Michael Clarke Duncan almost lost his breakout role

Prior to Armageddon , Duncan had only been in a few movies, with roles like Bodyguard and Bouncer . This was his chance for a breakout role in a big movie. Evidently, the pressure got to him a bit. Duncan reportedly was having trouble with his performance early on, until Bay and Willis pulled him aside and said that they might have to replace him if he couldn’t replicate the energy of his audition. Apparently, this was the kick in the pants Duncan needed, and he kept the role and had his breakout performance.

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The love story was added late

Armageddon ends with A.J. and Grace getting married, and their love story is a big part of the movie. That wasn’t the case in the original screenplay, though. A love story was written into the film after the success of Titanic , hoping to glean some of that audience.

A few other actors were considered for Grace

Liv Tyler ended up in the role of Grace, but she wasn’t the only actress considered. Robin Wright, Denise Richards, and Milla Jovovich were all in the running as well. Tyler also reportedly turned the role down originally before decided to accept it.

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They shot on actual oil rig

Instead of building a set, the movie filmed on a real oil rig down near Galveston, Texas. This was practically unheard of, given that oil rigs are both expensive ventures and also dangerous places. Bay surmised that since the film features oil drillers as the heroes, it may have helped convince the folks in charge to let them on the rig.

There’s a bit of a meta moment

The character of Max asks the question, “Have you ever seen  Pulp Fiction ?” in the movie. That means Quentin Tarantino’s film exists in the world of Armageddon , which may raise some questions. After all, both Willis and Buscemi are actually in Pulp Fiction .

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Bay has a cameo

The director makes an appearance as a NASA scientist, but he’s not the only cameo in the film. Real-life astronaut Shannon Lucid makes a brief background cameo in the movie as well.

Affleck had the idea for the end of the movie

Bay and Affleck both thought that Armageddon should end with A.J. and Grace’s wedding. It was Affleck, though, who suggested they shoot it with Super 8 cameras like it was a home movie. Affleck even had a Super 8 camera that was used for filming.

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Apparently, one unexpected thing from the film is actually real

When Rockhound goes a bit batty in space, the crew wraps him in duct tape. This may seem like yet another Bay invention or a break from reality. In truth, though, it is indeed evidently NASA protocol to wrap erratic, dangerous crew members in duct tape in order to immobilize them.

Bay has an explanation for the movie’s central premise

So, why did they train oil drillers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to be oil drillers? This is a fair question, and one Ben Affleck asked Bay while working on the movie. He recounted this on the DVD commentary track for Armageddon . Affleck then gave us Bay’s airtight reasoning: “He told me to shut the f—k up, so that was the end of that talk.”

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It was hugely successful

Armageddon had a massive budget, even with Willis taking a salary cut. The movie cost $140 million, a massive number for a movie at that time. It all paid off, though. Armageddon made $201.6 million domestically and $553.7 million worldwide. This made the movie the highest-grossing film in the world, and the second-highest-grossing film in the United States. Yes, that means it made more than Deep Impact .

The soundtrack was massive

Armageddon may be a big action flick, but it’s in many ways defined by a power ballad. The soundtrack for the movie is laden with Aerosmith songs, including “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” which was written by Diane Warren but performed by the band. The soundtrack became the No. 1 album in the United States based on the strength of that single, which became Aerosmith’s first No. 1 hit in the U.S. as well.

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'Deep Impact' beat it in one way

Armageddon made more money than Deep Impact  — and had a greater cultural impact. In most ways, it won the battle between the two asteroids films of 1998. However, Deep Impact did best Armageddon on one front. Bay’s movie is considered wildly scientifically inaccurate, and Deep Impa ct is credited with having more scientific accuracy.

A famed critic loathed it

Armageddon was a box-office giant, but critics were less kind. Gene Siskel gave it a thumbs up, but his longtime counterpart Roger Ebert hated it. In reviewing it, Ebert wrote, “The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained.” He named it the worst movie of 1998, and would later include it on his list of the worst movies ever made.

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Bay himself is not that big of a fan

In a 2013 interview with the Miami Herald , Bay actually “apologized” for Armageddon . He said they had to do the movie in only 16 weeks and that he would redo the entire third act if given a chance. After that, Bay tried to walk his statement back, even claiming he was misquoted, but audio of the interview provided by the interviewer proved that the quote was accurate.

And yet, it’s in the Criterion Collection

In spite of its 38 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, Armageddon was included in the Criterion Collection’s list of DVD releases. Criterion is best noted for releasing arthouse films, critical darlings, and movies they consider “cinema at its finest.” Needless to say, Armageddon was an unexpected choice. For the essay paired with the release — a Criterion staple — the company chose film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who had taught Bay in college.

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It was all over the awards slate

Armageddon appealed to a few different awards bases. It was nominated for six MTV Movie Awards, winning for Best Action Sequence and Best Movie Song. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” was also nominated for an Oscar, along with three other nominations from the Academy. However, that song was also up for one of the seven Razzies Armageddon was up for. It won one of those, with Willis taking home Worst Actor.

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It’s recess at a small school in Nigeria and the boys are kicking around an empty water bottle in an improvised game of soccer. Except for one. Anthony Madu on the far side of the playground, is performing a private ballet. One of his classmates asks, “Why is he dancing like a girl?” 

Anthony is dancing because that is who he is. When he is not dancing, his body is shy, uncertain. When he dances, he is sure, elegant, graceful. “Madu” is a documentary about what happened when a brief 2020 video of Anthony dancing barefoot in the rain went viral, leading to an invitation to study in a seven-year program at an elite British ballet academy. As the film begins, he is packing and saying his farewells. He receives his passport, where he is described as a “child student.” His mother is proud, happy for him, but painfully aware of how much she will miss him. We see him silhouetted against the train window, an unfamiliar landscape outside. When he arrives, he calls home and like all mothers, her first question is “Have you eaten?” 

In their call a few weeks later, she says Anthony is adopting a British accent and his brother says, “You’re speaking like a white person.” We see the poignance of Anthony’s missing his family but feeling that the shared dedication to dance is a different kind of home, equally precious. “Home is a place where you feel like you belong,” he says, meaning the world of dance, but then he says home is also where your family is.

We might have expected that Anthony might feel isolated or even bullied for being from another country and culture, but his classmates are all friendly and inclusive. Some of the film’s sweetest moments are watching Anthony completely comfortable as he is laughing with his friends or hugging them goodbye as they leave for summer break. Some of the most touching are when we see his parents watching his performance as one of the stars of the end of school year production, via FaceTime, in Nigeria.

The entering class is told they are the select few of over 500 who applied. But this is not like the many other dance films about demanding teachers. The presence of the documentary cameras may be a factor, but the kindness, sensitivity, and compassion of everyone Anthony meets is so pervasive that it is clearly the culture of the community around him. A teacher tells the students that a warmth in the muscles during practice is good, but if it ever burns, they should stop. And when a serious health issue arises, the school and the doctors are sympathetic and supportive.

The style of the documentary is “fly on the wall.” Filmmakers Matthew Ogens and Joel Kachi Benson include occasional interviews with Anthony and his parents but no talking head experts. Cinematography by Charlie Goodger and Motheo Moeng is intimate and lyrical, with contemplative music that contrasts with the classical pieces accompanying the dance lessons and performance. An opening scene shows us Anthony dancing near a fire, his movements in the flickering light showing the fiery spirit that impels him. Near the end, he is on the beach, wading into endless water stretching all the way to the horizon, indicating the larger, more centered sense of himself and his passion for ballet made possible by access to teachers and other dancers, and a sense of possibility. But, as with the boys at the center of documentaries like “ Hoop Dreams ” and “ The Wolfpack ,” the focus on those who are too young to have a nuanced understanding of what is happening to and around them can make us feel both unsatisfyingly removed and uncomfortably intrusive. Maybe the only solution is to require any documentary about those who are underage to be locked away and then brought out again when the children are old enough to watch it and make up their minds about whether they are willing to have it seen.

Anthony’s eloquence is in his movement. A telling moment is his assignment to create a dance performance. Even to an untrained eye, his extraordinary gifts are unmistakable. His grace, balance, and control are exceptional, and his leaps are breathtaking. The teachers who are evaluating him are warmly encouraging, complimenting his love of movement. They gently ask whether he had a story in mind. When he says no, they suggest he try to imagine a narrative. Given the complexity and near-fairy tale improbability of his real-life story, it is not surprising that Anthony is comfortable taking a break from plot to revel in the pure abstraction of movement. With this documentary, we can appreciate his story, and his relevé and pirouette.

On Disney+ now.

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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Madu (2024)

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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Review

A spectacular (if hollow) clash of kings.

You’ve gotta respect when a movie knows its audience. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is effectively what would happen if you took a thread from r/Godzilla and put it up on screen: a visually stunning, sensory extravaganza that’s all crescendo and no build-up. The stakes are high – though not quite firmly established – and the entire film presents action payoff after action payoff. It’s utterly breathless – unless that breath is bellowing out a massive stream of ice or fire. Especially in IMAX, it’s a 1-hour-and-55-minute amusement park ride; I was oohing and ahhing through the entire thing, wondering what was lurking around the next corner – or, as this outlandish universe would have it, behind the electrified plasma wall. I just couldn’t take it too personally when it all didn’t quite add up.

This story is pretty clearly made with MonsterVerse novices in mind – which would be great if that were the case for anyone who’s going to see the fifth film in the series, but that person is difficult to envision. (Maybe Godzilla Minus One served as their introduction to kaiju movies, and now they want to check out The Big G’s noisier, flashier American output.) We know that not one, but both of these titular alpha titans come with decades of built-in lore, and those who will be first in line are superfans who have memorized every. single. detail. To have the human characters once again experience shock and confusion from yet another “electrical anomaly” – in a universe where seismic waves and electric currents have factored into Godzilla’s appearances since time immemorial – infantilizes the most passionate audience members and presents a missed opportunity for some more imaginative writing. Sure, going back to these basics keeps The New Empire aligned with the classic mythology, but at this point, our characters should be recognizing these signals from the get-go. There’s a chance to build here – we don’t have to play stupid and lose respect for the characters out of the gate.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Gallery

The New Empire sets up its “Godzilla above, Kong below” dynamic early, so we know that after 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong the two frenemies have come to an understanding of mutually assured destruction should they stray from their respective lanes. But, as a shock to no one, that fragile peace doesn’t last for long. Kong serves as the main monster throughout The New Empire, which immediately casts him in a more human, sensitive light that’s easy to empathize with. Showing clear signs of aging through graying fur, the leviathan is weaker and more vulnerable than ever before – at one point, he’s taken out by a toothache.

His sense of mortality is what sells a desire for familial connection, and that drives most of the plot for both monkey and man. It’s also what sees Rebecca Hall’s Dr. Ilene Andrews disappointingly go from the strong, intelligent protagonist of Godzilla vs. Kong to a mother-like figure softened by love for adopted daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) and… an old college buddy? It doesn’t help that, though she is arguably the main human character, Ilene’s opportunities to shine suffer under the heavy weight of the Titans. Kong's emotions, and those of the other apes he seeks out, come across stronger than hers do.

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On top of all of that, Andrews takes a back seat to new addition Trapper – a monster veterinarian played by Dan Stevens – only serving the purpose of pushing certain plot points forward by reading them aloud from ancient ruins. There are a few feigned moments of emotion that fall flat – the question is, why even bother presenting the idea of a mother/daughter connection in a monster movie?

There’s no time for emotions! A new, more intellectually-advanced villain spurs the team of world savers to – what else? – come together to save the world. While small details are brushed under the rug, Wingard’s imagination for non-stop action and awe-inspiring visuals is at an all-time high. There are textures in Godzilla x Kong rarely seen on the big screen, with brightly oozing guts, frozen meat blasts, and glowing plasma veils.

While that’s all certainly impressive, and the worldbuilding is literally out of this world, there are far too many elements at play in The New Empire. It’s sensory overload. Wingard, an avowed fan of both title characters, has perhaps gone overboard, quickly plunking us down in a world that blends ancient wisdom, advanced technology, and primeval lands. It all looks great, but because we’re rushing through many of these environments it’s hard for any of them to make a lasting impression. Before we can even ask ourselves, “How does Brian Tyree Henry’s Bernie figure everything out so fast?” we’re on to the next location. The only depth we’re getting is that of Hollow Earth – though The New Empire goes deeper on the Titans’ subterranean home turf than either Godzilla vs. Kong or the Apple TV+ Monarch series .

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The New Empire borrows heavily, creating a mash-up of fan-favorite bits and pieces from past sci-fi hits. There’s a sprinkle of Jurassic Park in every acre of Hollow Earth, a near doppelganger for the orcs from Lord of the Rings , Game of Thrones ’ Night King in Titan form, and a straight-up Stargate . And did someone order a new volume of Guardians of the Galaxy ? I’m not just talking about the classic rock hits on the soundtrack: Trapper makes for an unlikeable leader in the snarky Chris Pratt mold. Think Star Lord with an Australian accent and more irritating.

The new villain, on the other hand, is a fierce adversary beyond compare. The Skar King is ruthless, terrifying, and grotesque, and he’s enslaved Kong’s species into doing… what, exactly, is unclear, but it’s rendered Hollow Earth into a Mordor-esque hellscape, and that alone establishes him as a threat. In addition to his sweeping reach and a gnarly whip made out of bones, Skar King’s most fearsome weapon is the control he wields not only over the ape race, but also over Shimo, an ancient creature said to be the most powerful Titan of them all.

Backup comes in the form of an evolved Godzilla, who takes on a shocking pink hue after a battle that I wish we got to see more of. Kong, fitted with a fresh beast glove, teams up with his new ride-or-die to face off in an outrageous battle with Skar King. It’s absolutely incredible to watch, taking monster-on-monster action to new heights. Is it worth slogging through the human-drama undercard leading up to this royal rumble? Sure. I could’ve done without Hall and company, but boy is it fun as hell if you don’t think about it too much.

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a textbook visual thrill ride punctuated by brief moments of forced emotion and little else. Director Adam Wingard has a lot of fun with textures, colors, and camera work, and he’s adept at giving fans the over-the-top monster action that they demand via an imposing new villain. Unfortunately, there’s no time to spend on making things make sense or even matter all that much, and what few emotional punches are thrown lack the necessary wind up to connect, save for some very well done moments between Kong and his Hollow Earth kin.

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‘Mothers’ Instinct’ Review: Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain Primly Do Battle in a Loopy Suburban Psychodrama

Benoît Delhomme's remake of 2018's nifty Belgian shocker nestles blood-red horror in pastel-perfect domestic melodrama, but hasn't the tonal control to keep us from snickering.

By Guy Lodge

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First-time feature director Benoît Delhomme, however, doesn’t have much command over this strange, wriggling story, which really calls for an assertive stylist to choose a pitch (in this case, probably the higher the better) and stick to it with gusto. A gifted cinematographer whose credits range from Tran Anh Hung’s “The Scent of Green Papaya” to Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” Delhomme also assumes camera duties here, contributing a consistent visual quality to proceedings — the whole film appears to play out in a permanent middle-American springtime, all shimmery young greens and soft sunlight — that never quite binds into atmosphere. Imagine Todd Haynes directing a reboot of “Desperate Housewives” and you’re perhaps in the ballpark of what “Mothers’ Instinct” would like to be, though the film feels too worked-over, its humor too erratic, to say for certain. Already out in multiple international markets, the film will be released Stateside (at an as-yet-unspecified date) by Neon.

The differences between Céline (Hathaway) and Alice (Chastain) first emerge subtly in their parenting of their respective young sons Max (Baylen D. Bielitz) and Theo (Eamon Patrick O’Connell) — both only children, and both the same age, prompting a friendship that mirrors that of their mothers. Céline is the more fun, indulgent mom, her generosity reflective of the difficulty she had conceiving in the first place; Alice’s relative uptightness relates to a discreetly concealed history of mental health trouble. Are they pals because they genuinely understand each other, or because, in this housebound, pre-feminist era, they’re simply the nearest allies they have? We begin to wonder after Max, in a dreadful accident, falls to his death from his bedroom balcony, and the women grow apart, even as their hitherto distinct personae are muddled and merged.

From behind her almost inordinately chic black mourning veil — let no one accuse costume designer Mitchell Travers of failing to understand the assignment — Céline seems to silently blame Alice, who witnessed the fall but was too late to intervene. Alice, in turn, begins to wonder if she did all she could, and even as the women return to their former social routine, this push-pull dynamic of tacit reproach and self-doubt keeps them from their former closeness. Alice’s ineffectual husband Simon (a curiously miscast Anders Danielsen Lie) prefers to stay aloof, while Céline’s distraught husband Damian (ensemble standout Josh Charles, in an underwritten part) retreats into boozy isolation. In the men’s relative absence, it’s the guileless, confused Theo who becomes the point of contention between these two otherwise friendless foes.

As Céline launches a charm offensive — a kind of maternal seduction, even — on the boy, Alice grows ever more anxiously protective: Is her bereft neighbor merely seeking an outlet for her grief, or enacting some kind of covetous revenge? Conradt’s screenplay plays a lengthy second-act game of who’s-gaslighting-who, pitting one character’s rising paranoia against the other’s overstepping, and then swapping those positions for good measure, resolutely refusing to take sides until the story vaults itself to a new plane of absurdity. Even then, as victim and villain emerge in this scenario, our sympathies remain neutral — it’s so hard to read either woman’s inner life, or believe her outward behavior, by this point that “Mother’s Instinct” invites nothing so much as coolly morbid fascination, and perhaps more dry laughter than it intends.

Reviewed at Charlotte Street Hotel screening room, London, March 7, 2024. Running time: 94 MIN.

• Production: A Neon (in U.S.) release of a Studiocanal (in U.K.) release of an Anton presentation of a Freckle Films, Mosaic, Versus production. Producers: Kelly Marmichael, Jessica Chastain, Anne Hathaway, Paul Nelson, Jacques-Henri Bronckart. Executive producers: Sebastien Raybaud, John Zois, Jolian Blevins, Olivier Masset-Depasse, Matthew Gledhill.
• Crew: Director, camera: Benoît Delhomme. Screenplay: Sarah Conradt, based on the film "Duelles" by Olivier Masset-Depasse, Giordano Gederlini, François Verjans, based on the novel "Derrière la haine" by Barbara Abel. Editor: Juliette Welfling. Music: Anne Nikitin.
• With: Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Eamon Patrick O'Connell, Anders Danielsen Lie, Josh Charles, Baylen D. Bielitz, Caroline Lagerfelt.

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