armageddon movie review 2022

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In “Armageddon Time,” people keep trying to wake up 11-year-old Paul Graff (a sensitive performance by Michael Banks Repeta ). Paul is a slight, dreamy sixth grader in 1980 Queens, New York. Over the span of two months, from the first day of school until the family watches the returns of the Presidential election in November, we repeatedly see Paul in a deep sleep as various family members try to get him out of bed. His father, Irving ( Jeremy Strong ), dances in Paul’s bedroom. His older brother Ted ( Ryan Sell ), jumps on his chest. His mother ( Anne Hathaway ) tells him to get ready for school. 

These awakenings punctuate Paul’s other awakenings, some he recognizes at the time, some seen only in retrospect by writer/director James Gray , who based “Armageddon Time” on his own experiences. Like “ Aftersun ” this is a movie by an adult bringing a deeper understanding to memories of the past. And like many other stories about 11 to 12-year-olds, from Dorothy in “A Wizard of Oz” and Riley in “ Outside In ” to Harry Potter and Tom Sawyer, these last moments of childhood are opportunities to explore the ineffable tenderness of the time when the world seems filled with endless possibilities; when we are just beginning to discover how much of it is also filled with complications, disappointment, and loss. As in another autobiographical memory movie about schoolboys, Louis Malle ’s “Au Revoir Les Enfants,” “Armageddon Time” is the story of childhood innocence as remembered with regret and a sense of responsibility, with adult recognition of history’s vilest bigotries and injustices

Paul lives with his parents and older brother. He spends a lot of time with his supportive grandfather ( Anthony Hopkins ). They adore each other, and Paul considers him his greatest ally and wisest advisor. When Paul tells his parents he wants to be an artist, they tell him he has to do something less risky. But his grandfather gives him a set of grown-up paints. Paul overhears his parents say he is not as smart as his brother and will not have the same opportunities for what they most want for their sons, “a seat at the table.” But his grandfather encourages his dreams.

Paul makes a new friend at school. He is Johnny Davis ( Jaylin Webb ), the only Black student in his class, bigger than the other kids because he is repeating the sixth grade. They bond over both getting in trouble on the first day, Paul for drawing a caricature of the teacher, Johnny for being disrespectful to the teacher who constantly belittles him. The next week they escape a school field trip and have a blissful day in Manhattan. But they get into more trouble. Paul’s parents switch him to a private school, the posh Kew-Forrest. It's where Fred Trump sent his children, future judge Maryanne, and future President Donald. On Paul’s first day, Fred Trump sits in the audience as then US Attorney Maryanne Trump ( Jessica Chastain ) lectures the students on ambition and achievement. 

Paul’s grandfather tells him that he must be “a mensch,” a person of integrity and character. A mensch always stands up for those who are being abused. He tells Paul about his own mother, who was a teenager when Cossacks killed her parents because they were Jewish. But Paul feels pressure from his parents, who do not want him to see Johnny because they got in trouble together, and from the casually bigoted students at his new school. He wants to fit in. And he is presented with increasingly complicated and difficult situations that present challenges to mensch-iness.  

The sincerity and good intentions of the movie are palpable, as are its ambitions in bringing in the election of Ronald Reagan and the future prospect of Donald Trump as connected to the difficulties faced by Johnny and the challenges of being a mensch. The film creates a vivid and evocative sense of its time and place and many scenes, especially those with Repeta and Hopkins, are touching. Hathaway as the mother is affectionate, amused, and sometimes indulgent with Paul. The shift as she defends him to the principal and then once they are out of his office, when she can say what she really thinks, is one of the movie's best scenes. And she is deeply affecting when it is clear to us, if not to Paul, that she has had some very sad news.

But the film is less than successful in creating other authentic characters. Strong's father is abusive or gentle and understanding as the storyline needs, a change not adequately justified by what he has experienced. The brother and public-school teacher roles are near caricatures. 

Most troubling is the script’s failure to give us a fully realized, authentic character for Johnny. The movie is in large part an apology to Johnny and to all of the other kids like him who were not adequately cared for at home and who were constantly mistreated by all of the people and structures that should have been supporting them. It is heartbreaking to see Johnny insulted by his teacher and by older Black kids who scoff at him for dreaming of working for NASA. Why wouldn’t he want to get as far away from this planet as he could?

Webb is an affecting young performer, and he says a lot just with his eyes. His face lights up in those few moments when Johnny has a sense of hope and connection. But Johnny’s character is underwritten, a collection of attributes more than a personality. He is not given the same interiority we see in other characters and that feels like just another way of letting him down.

Now playing in select theaters, with a wide release on November 4th. 

Nell Minow is the Contributing Editor at RogerEbert.com.

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Film Credits

Armageddon Time (2022)

Rated R for language and some drug use involving minors.

114 minutes

Banks Repeta as Paul Graff

Anne Hathaway as Esther Graff

Jeremy Strong as Irving Graff

Anthony Hopkins as Aaron Graff

Jaylin Webb as Johnny Davis

Ryan Sell as Ted Graff

Teddy Coluca as Uncle Louis

Tovah Feldshuh as Mickey Graff

Jessica Chastain as Maryanne Trump

Cinematographer

• Darius Khondji
• Scott Morris
• Christopher Spelman

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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
• 112 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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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.

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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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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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‘Armageddon Time’ Review: James Gray’s Deft 1980 Coming-of-Age Memoir Is an Old-School Liberal Message Movie in Progressive Drag

In his autobiographical drama about the dawn of the Reagan era, Gray works with boisterous skill.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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When I watch a movie by the writer-director James Gray , I often have the sensation that I’m seeing two films in one: the story being told and the one hovering offscreen — the one that’s all about his aspiration to be something larger than a mere storyteller. Early Gray films like “The Yards” (2000) and “We Own the Night” (2007) were modest tales suffused with his desire to be making “a ’70s movie.” “Ad Astra” (2019) was a lavishly scaled outer-space thriller suffused with his desire to be making “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“Armageddon Time,” which takes its title from a dub reggae cover by the Clash released in 1979 (and from the fact that Ronald Reagan, in a TV interview clip we see, drops a reference to “Armageddon” into his presidential campaign), has a strikingly different tone from Gray’s other work. Set largely among kids, and also in the home of Paul’s scruffy and combative Jewish family, the movie is bustling, personable, anecdotal — and also something that Gray hardly ever is, which is funny. The tone is sometimes reminiscent of the one struck by Barry Levinson in his memory films (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon”), with Gray, in this case, trying to present his experience of growing up in as genuine a way as possible, as if he were ripping pages from his diary.

The opening scene, set on the first day of school, is a small marvel of observational staging. The teacher, the addled Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk), is trying to establish what a tough-love disciplinarian he is. The reason he feels he needs to do this is that right here, at the dawn of the 1980s, we can already feel the students’ attention wandering. Fifteen years of counterculture, channeled by popular culture, have worn down their respect.

What we once called “race relations” are at the center of “Armageddon Time.” Paul, who thinks he comes from a family that’s “superrich” (actually, they’re just dowdy denizens of the middle class, though his maternal grandparents, who live with the family, have saved the money to help send Paul’s obnoxious older brother to private school), is a kid who drifts through life, getting by on his wits and his talent and his propensity to dream, and not really worrying about anything. Johnny, on the other hand, is a poor kid who lives with his grandmother, and his status as the only Black kid in class makes him an outsider. He and the teacher get into an ongoing psychological war, but Johnny, unlike Paul, doesn’t have the support system that’s going to flick away his mistakes.

Gray stages the scenes set in Paul’s home in a boisterous, everyone-talking-at-the-same-time way, but he’s also cueing us to see the value systems at work — in this case, the crusades and prejudices of outer-borough New York Jewish liberals of the late 20th century. Paul’s grandparents escaped from Europe before the Holocaust but live every day with the awareness of it, as do his folks: his mother, Esther ( Anne Hathaway ), a high-strung PTA president who’s planning to run for school board, and his father, Irving ( Jeremy Strong ), a mole-like home repairman who seems like a decent and even corny guy until his famous “temper” bursts out. (When it does, you think: This man has a problem.)

The actors inhabit these roles — Hathaway makes Esther at once affectionate and blinkered, and Strong is meticulous in how he plays the father as a charmless noodge with those pockets of rage, yet if you look hard enough you can see his love there too. Anthony Hopkins , as Paul’s grandfather, brings the film a note of crusty benevolence, though I couldn’t watch his performance without thinking: Why does an actor as great as Hopkins play this aging mensch with the same Welsh purr you’d expect to hear from him on a talk show?

Paul, in his way, is an entitled kid — too entitled, to the extent he feels like he can just pick up the phone and order Chinese dumplings because he doesn’t like what’s being served for dinner that night. But entitlement, as we see, runs in this family. The Grafs pride themselves on being good liberals — they think Ronald Reagan’s candidacy is a horror show — and much of that comes from what they view as their legacy of being Jewish victims of oppression. Yet they’re still the sort of people who think of Black Americans as “the Blacks.” They’re as racist, in their way, as Mr. Turkeltaub. They just don’t know it. We’ve seen plenty of movie scenes, over the years, with noisy ethnic families, but the disorder of this household reflects something — maybe the culture at large starting to come apart.

His first day in the gothic hallways, a man in a wormy  mustache stands in the corridor and asks Paul his name. Is this the assistant principal? Actually, it’s Fred Trump (played by the redoubtable John Diehl) — yes, Donald Trump’s father, who susses out that Paul, despite his generic last name, is Jewish. We may think the stage is being set for a junior version of “School Ties,” especially when Paul, in his clip-on tie and insignia jacket, is approached by Topper (played with a scene-stealing smirk by Dane West), a kid who looks like he’s biding his time before he joins a fraternity. But Gray mostly uses the brief scenes at the private school to establish his larger theme: that there are two Americas in place, and that Paul has suddenly been thrust into the elite one. (Fred Trump is a school benefactor.) Whatever he himself believes or thinks he stands for, he’s now part of the corrupt system.

There are ways that things have gotten better since 1980. Yet Gray uses the dawn of the Reagan era (and, in a way, the Trump era) to try and paint a portrait of systemic oppression, with an awareness that hooks into that of our own time. But here’s the trouble with that.

At heart, “Armageddon Time” is an old-school liberal message movie — it’s all about how Paul and Johnny get into trouble, but Johnny is the one who gets thrown under the bus, and we’re supposed to feel bad about that. Yet as a filmmaker, Gray wants to have his compassion and eat it too. Given the fair amount of screen time that Johnny gets, there’s something a little cavalier about how the story just kind of tosses him away. He’s there, in effect, to provide a lesson for Paul — to make him a better person. The story doesn’t so much care about Johnny as use him. Throughout the film, we hear snatches of the title song, which I always found to be a monotonous and preachy latter-day Clash anthem, with Joe Strummer singing about how “A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.” It sounded au courant back then, but now it sounds like a song driven by a white-savior consciousness, and so, in its way, is “Armageddon Time.” The movie ends with a rebel gesture that feels too much like…a gesture. It’s the perfect sign-off for a drama that cares, but maybe not enough to see that this kind of caring actually became part of the problem.

Reviewed at Universal Screening Room (Cannes Film Festival, in Competition), May 13, 2022. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 114 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features release of a Mad River Features, Keep Your Head Productions, RT Feature production. Producers: Anthony Katagas, Marc Butan, Rodrigo Teixeira. Executive producers: Alan Terpins, Marco Tulio Kehdi, Francisco Civita, Beto Gauss, Gustavo Debs, Lourenço Sant’Anna.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: James Gray. Camera: Darius Khondji. Editor: Scott Morris. Music: Christopher Spelman.
• With: Banks Repeta, Jaylin Webb, Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Tovah Feldshuh, John Diehl, Andrew Polk, Ryan Sell, Jacob MacKinnon, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Domenick Lombardozzi, Dane West.

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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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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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 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 | Original Score: 7/10 | 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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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 casts Anne Hathaway, Anthony Hopkins and Jeremy Strong as director James Gray’s real-life Jewish immigrant family

Graffiti on the subways, early hip hop on the radio, Reagan on the campaign trail: the new film from New York-born writer-director James Gray ( Ad Astra ; The Immigrant ) unfolds at a transitional moment in American popular culture, catching a nation at the dawn of a decade where exciting new art forms emerged against fraught promises of economic prosperity and the threat of global apocalypse.

Gray has long threaded elements of his Russian Jewish family experience through his films, but Armageddon Time – its title pulling double duty as a play on The Clash song and the 40th president's predilection for doomsaying – is the 53-year-old filmmaker's most autobiographical work to date, a coming-of-age tale centred around the exploits of a pre-teen dreamer on the streets of New York in 1980.

The filmmaker's avatar is Paul Graff (Banks Repeta), a 12-year-old redhead from a lovingly noisy home in suburban Queens, where his hardworking, middle-class parents – home economics teacher Esther (Anne Hathaway) and plumber Irving (Succession's Jeremy Strong) – are a source of domestic friction, and his elderly grandfather (Anthony Hopkins) is something of a mischievous, tale-spinning confidante.

Paul is a talented artist, which doesn't do him any favours at his Queens public school, where his comical sketches of uptight sixth-grade teacher Mr Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk) land him in detention. It's here that he bonds with Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb), a Black student from a less fortunate background who shares Paul's taste for cheerful disruption.

The easy camaraderie between Paul and Johnny is the soul of the film, as the two friends – wonderfully played by Repeta and Webb – bond over a shared love of space exploration (Johnny aspires to work for NASA), groove to Sugarhill Gang's Rapper's Delight, and giggle while smoking a joint in the school bathroom stalls.

The latter incident gets Paul dispatched to his older brother's private school, where obnoxiously preppy, all-white Republican spawn are in abundance, and the opening assembly is welcomed by a power-suited speech from then-Assistant US Attorney Maryanne Trump (Jessica Chastain) – an episode drawn directly from Gray's own experience (Trump visited Gray's school).

Gray's eighth feature film marks a return to form for the director, after two uneasy forays into bigger worlds with 2016's period jungle adventure The Lost City of Z and 2019's space-dad epic Ad Astra – movies whose genre canvases didn't always gel with the filmmaker's brand of emotional sincerity.

The new film's success reflects the tender, lived-in worlds of Gray's earlier We Own the Night, The Yards and Two Lovers , whose nuanced, New York immigrant experience has always been the writer-director's specialty.

Armageddon Time is a classic coming-of-age film, setting the forging of a personal identity against the social and political climate of the era – the emergence of both a young artist and a nation crawling uneasily out of a turbulent 70s into a dubious "morning in America" .

At times, Gray's screenplay can map the sociopolitical element a little too neatly – Johnny's seemingly dead-end trajectory, on the lam from social care workers, sketches a familiar analogy for America's race issues – but these moments are imbued with a deep sense of the personal, of details and emotions that can only be drawn from the filmmaker's lived experience.

Bathed in the warm, autumnal hues of Darius Khondji's cinematography – an evocation of memory that never tips into fraudulent nostalgia – Armageddon Time captures the complexity of a kid's perspective refracted through time and distance, where adults are both loving and monstrous, larger-than-life and fallible.

Bolstered by expert supporting performances from Hathaway and Strong, the film offers us a portrait of parents whose contradictions only enhance our empathy toward them – despite their flaws, their abusiveness and violence, which are products of the culture they've been raised in, they're trying to make a better life for their kids, the only way they know how.

It's a fascinating depiction of ostensibly liberal, progressive parents who nonetheless carry traces of systemically inherited – of American – racism, which the film holds in contrast to grandpa, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant whose life experiences have forged a deep, unshakable empathy for outsiders. (It's a credit to Hopkins, and his presence as an actor, that he can convey all of this so effortlessly, and largely through irascible, comedic banter.)

Armageddon Time's sense of foreboding spikes its coming-of-age glow with a bitterness that's hard to shake. For some, circumstances of class and race meant that things would turn out OK, whatever the missteps; for others – especially young Black men in Reagan's America – the future would be far less welcoming, even as their culture became assimilated into the mainstream. (Even the film's title card – rendered in the hip hop tag typeface that would become shorthand for urban cool in the years that followed – could be seen to acknowledge Gray's own complicity.)

The soon-to-be-president-elect appears early on in a televised interview, his presence – and the new American conservatism it would usher in – looming like a gathering cloud over the film's cultural melting pot.

"We might be the generation that sees armageddon," Reagan declares, a line that was – shockingly – addressed at what he saw as the threat of homosexuality , rather than an example of the Cold War fearmongering he otherwise seemed to enjoy.

Paul's dad's reply, directed at the television set, is to the point: "What a schmuck."

Armageddon Time is in cinemas now.

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Movie Review – Armageddon Time (2022)

November 17, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Armageddon Time , 2022.

Written and Directed by James Gray. Starring Banks Repeta, Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, Anthony Hopkins, Jaylin Webb, Ryan Sell, Teddy Coluca, Tovah Feldshuh, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Andrew Polk, Lauren Yaffe, Dane West, Dupree Francois Porter, Griffin Wallace Henkel, Marcia Haufrecht, Eva Jette Putrello, Landon James Forlenza, John Dinello, Jacob Mackinnon, and Jessica Chastain.

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

Writer/director James Gray’s Armageddon Time is an autobiographical reminiscence of 6th grade and all the complicated social and racial dynamics specific to Ronald Reagan’s road to election as US president. There’s nothing wrong with that, but for most of its duration, one desires spending time with the disadvantaged minority characters on the other side of that equation, or at least a better balance.

Growing up in Queens, New York, young Jewish boy Paul Graff (the stand-in for James Gray, played by Banks Repeta) is friends with Black boy Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb). Both are prankster troublemakers (introduced by disrupting the first day of class), with Johnny being held back a year. None of this is helped by a prejudiced teacher quick to assume Johnny is the one responsible for disrespectful shenanigans, but he is clearly a bright and intelligent child with a loving affection for astronauts and space exploration.

Meanwhile, Paul appears to have ADHD and no interest in traditional learning (some tests are run on him as family and teachers wonder if he is slow in the head), but he loves drawing and wishes to be an artist someday. It’s a hobby that his grandfather Aaron (a whimsical and warm Anthony Hopkins quick to launch into justifiable cheer-worthy antiracism tirades whenever Paul is conflicted about his current friendship with Johnny and new friends that casually drop racial slurs) supports, much like he does everything about his son’s choices (whereas his wife is worried about the integration of Black children into the public school system).

There is unmistakably a divide in social status between these families (Johnny is looked after by his grandmother, apparently losing her memory) and an interest in examining the differences between public and private schools (Paul’s brother Ted, played by Ryan Sell, is enrolled in one, and cinematographer Darius Khondji subtlety captures the differences without the period details drawing too much attention to themselves).

It’s also understandable why James Gray is fixated on centering his Jewish family (this is pulled from his past, after all), but Armageddon Time is far more intriguing whenever Johnny is on screen. When he claps back at the teacher, saying, “you’re the one teaching me,” after being criticized for failing sixth grade the first time or provides care for his grandmother (who bafflingly only appears for 30 seconds), there’s a stronger sense of the inequality on display through a character more worth spending time with. 

That’s not to say Jewish people had it easy, but this particular family is privileged and, in some instances, aware of that. Jeremy Strong’s Irwin is a complex father figure (the actor also delivers a multilayered performance that ranks as the best here), freaking out upon hearing that Paul got into trouble for smoking alongside Johnny, kicking down the bathroom door, and violently whipping the boy with a leather belt before explaining that he is not allowed to remain friends with him. Anne Hathaway’s Esther (who barely has anything to do despite receiving top billing, which is not a criticism but more of an observation) assures Paul that it’s not because Johnny is Black, but we have our suspicions.

It also doesn’t help that there is something off about the rebellious Paul as if Banks Repeta is getting too cutesy with the performance, even if that ship is righted once James Gray swerves into the dramatic and emotional heft of this story. Jaylin Webb delivers lines more naturally and engages viewers into his struggles that somewhat worsen the more he spends time with Paul, but not necessarily because of all, but rather the systems in place.

Across some dysfunctional family antics, a death in the family (lacking the emotion James Gray is going for, and then played off of as a cheesy manipulation tactic), and switching Paul from private to public school, Armageddon Time arrives at a fitting admission of this family benefiting from the way the world works.

As far as coming-of-age stories go, Armageddon Time is much bleaker and wants to wrestle with complex social and political factors, how one’s privilege and place in the world affects the surroundings, somewhat successfully doing so, but it never escapes the mind that maybe James Gray should have pulled back on the autobiographical focus to allow other elements of this place and time and characters to breathe. However, that might be what devotees of James Gray as a filmmaker and person crave, which would make the shortcomings easier to overlook.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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‘Armageddon Time’: Privilege and punk rock in 1980s Queens

James Gray’s deeply personal coming-of-age tale illuminates our own times with surreal prescience

In “Armageddon Time,” James Gray’s evocative portrait of his early years growing up in Queens, Banks Repeta plays Paul Graff, a boy entering sixth grade in 1980, when punk rock, disco, rap, national politics and New York City itself were changing and sometimes converging with apocalyptic force.

Gray takes his title from “Armagideon Time,” a reggae song covered by the Clash. But it gets to the bad vibes that Paul is picking up, in speeches by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (“Morons, from sea to shining sea,” one of his parents sniffs on election night) and in his own household. That boisterous ecosystem is watched over by Paul’s mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), a smart, no-nonsense educator, and his authoritarian father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), whose bespectacled quietude belies volcanic anger.

“Watch out or you’ll catch your father’s temper,” Esther warns at one point, and from Paul’s terrified reaction we sense that it’s a real threat; later, we’ll see what happens when it comes to pass. But “Armageddon Time” isn’t a trauma narrative: Moments of warmth and contagious joy suffuse Gray’s memories, especially when it comes to Paul’s maternal grandfather Aaron, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins with avuncular directness. “Armageddon Time” dramatizes a pivotal year in Paul’s life, when he strikes up a friendship with a Black classmate named Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and begins to learn firsthand how racism operates on the most subtle and unspoken level. That he happens to be the beneficiary of a system that routinely gives him the benefit of the doubt begins to chafe against what he’s been told about his own Jewish heritage of survival against oppressive odds. Privilege, in Paul’s case, feels both hard-won and unearned. “Life is unfair,” his grandfather explains at one point. “You make the most of your break, and you do not look back.”

Gray explores his own budding awareness of injustice in “Armageddon Time,” which like “ Jojo Rabbit ” and “ Belfast ” navigates daunting moral calculations through the eyes of an intuitive but also uncomprehending child. That implicit naivete can be a dodge, and there are times when Gray slips into sentimentality and self-congratulation. But “Armageddon Time” also presents an alternately tender and candid glimpse of what it feels like to be told one thing while knowing the opposite is true deep in your bones. Paul and Johnny bond over a shared sense of humor and taste in music (“Rapper’s Delight” and “The Hustle” pop up in the soundtrack alongside the title cut and a song by Boz Scaggs), but their friendship indirectly leads to Paul getting transferred from his public school to the militarylike institution his brother attends. There, he has an encounter with larger-than-life figures who give “Armageddon Time” yet another layer of cognitive dissonance — Jessica Chastain appears in a cameo, delivering an aria of entitled resentment in which her character camouflages the realities of her inherited wealth with rhetoric about “good old-fashioned hard work” — as well as a frisson of surreal prescience.

Paul instinctively recoils from the hypocrisies around him, and late in “Armageddon Time,” his grandfather gives him an invaluable tutorial in how to be a mensch rather than a passive bystander. But Paul is not above profiting from his own place in the pecking order he’s beginning vaguely to understand: When his friendship with Johnny grows more complicated, at one point involving a misguided scheme involving some school computers, the stakes of his life lessons in how Whiteness works become exponentially higher. “Armageddon Time” is a pungent, disarmingly honest evocation of love and loyalty, striving and struggle, and how identity morphs from one generation to the next. In revisiting his own coming of age, Gray has managed to illuminate a much larger one that hasn’t stopped.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language and some drug use involving minors. 114 minutes.

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• DVD & Streaming

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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There’s something to be said about James Gray’s ability to infuse emotion into his features with little to no effort. In the acclaimed Ad Astra , he intertwines an intergalactic journey with passion, style, and a deep connectivity to humanity when all sentimentality feels lost. Hoping to seep these latter concepts into his next project, Gray turns to his own childhood to reflect on prejudice, privilege, and the eye-opening dangers of silence and complacency. But where Ad Astra succeeded , his latest fails, as it takes on too much without acknowledging the nuances of such complicated topics. Armageddon Time excels at capturing naiveté but under-commits to sharing the truths of racial disparity when it comes to the American dream.

In 1980, the Graff family settles into another year of celebrations, changes, and the challenges of life in their Queens, New York home. The youngest of the family, Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) is ready to take on a new year in public school, where he faces behavioral challenges, enhances his artistic proclivities, and befriends the apparent troubled Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb). While his family at home struggles to understand his hopes and desires, besides his grandfather Aaron Rabinowitz ( Anthony Hopkins ), Paul finds comfort in Johnny’s free spirit and shares a bond with him like he’s never felt before. Together, the two dream big and plan adventures that result in unfortunate truths about life and the root of all its inequities.

Related: Armageddon Time Trailer Reveals Racial Drama From Ad Astra Director

Armageddon Time explores class and race issues through the eyes of a child and interlaces them with innocence and growing perspective. At the precipice of his childhood and light awareness of these topics, Paul experiences sudden exposures to them through his friendship with Johnny. For example, their teacher, Mr. Turkeltaub (Andrew Polk) frequently calls out Johnny on his behavior and almost expects delinquency out of him, even when he’s not the culprit of classroom disruptions. Moments like this give rise to the stereotype that Black children misbehave more often than their white counterparts. These examples often come in Gray’s script and grow larger in scale as the film progresses. Yet, nothing ever comes from them besides growing pains for Paul and his family, which is the inherent problem of the film.

One might imagine that this framing is partly due to Gray’s ignorance when it comes to Black issues, but if that were the case, he could have benefited from an additional writer to keep his implicit biases in check. In the grand scheme of its storytelling, Armageddon Time feels irresponsible. The script lacks the depth it needs to fully acknowledge how privilege paves the way to power and race contributes to various levels of playing fields in pursuit of the American dream. If this was Gray’s attempt to criticize systemic issues in education and economy, it unfortunately came off as lazy and uninspiring, stumbling through its themes and leaving very little impact in the process.

The film’s saving grace is the chemistry between Repeta and Webb. As Paul and Johnny, the young duo performs with such a calming comfort and innocence that captivates from the time of their first interaction onscreen. Their juxtaposed experiences serve as a central point of the themes embedded through Gray’s feature. But when Gray finds difficulty expanding upon Johnny’s livelihood (even though it is central to the plot), the script wanes, and he leaves it up to his cast to overcome the hurdles that could have been mended had the script had more focus. Thankfully, they were up to the task, which ultimately saves the film from completely plummeting in quality.

Anthony Hopkins also breathes exceptional life into Gray’s script, acting as the heart and soul of the film as much as his character is for the Graff family. Yet, his performance, along with the exceptional work by most of the cast goes wasted on a script that refuses to say what it truly needs to about privilege in the context of racial, economical, and social differences. If anything, Armageddon Time is like a watered-down version of these issues to alleviate residual guilt the filmmaker appears to have regarding his early childhood. Either that, or Gray’s latest is a weak attempt to educate audiences on a topic that he refuses to dive deeper into to actually say something meaningful. Simply put, it’s a disappointment, and he can do better.

Next: Aftersun Review: Charlotte Wells' Debut Feature Is Poignant & Powerful

Armageddon Time played during the San Diego International Film Festival. The film releases in theaters on November 4. It is 115 minutes long and rated R for language and some drug use involving minors.

Key Release Dates

Armageddon time, our rating:.

• 2 star movies
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Michael Bay's Most Divisive Movie Is Also His Most Underrated

Quick links, what is ambulance about, why is ambulance so controversial, ambulance remains michael bay's most underrated film.

• Ambulance offers a compelling and unique story, showcasing Michael Bay's experimental side.
• The film features complex characters, including conflicted villains who are victims of society.
• Despite mixed reviews, Ambulance stands out with inventive storytelling and well-developed characters.

Ambulance is one of Michael Bay's lesser-known films, but it is far more compelling than many critics and audiences give it credit for. The 2022 film is a stark departure from most of Bay's other films, sparking some heated discussion among his fanbase. Ultimately, the film bombed at the box office and faded into obscurity before too long. Nevertheless, two years after its release, Ambulance remains one of the most underrated films in Michael Bay's filmography.

Best known for his work in blockbuster franchises like Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , Michael Bay has generally become recognized as an action-thriller director with an affinity for explosions. Nevertheless, Bay has also tried his hand at mixing the action genre with other forms of cinema, most notably in films like Pearl Harbor and Armageddon . While these experiments have had mixed results, one must at least admire the creativity with which Michael Bay approaches his various projects, especially those that aren't already tied to a pre-existing franchise. Despite its lukewarm reception, Ambulance remains the best example of Bay's experimental filmmaking, as the director delivered one of his most unique and entertaining films yet.

Ambulance Remixed 2 Fast 2 Furious' Hail Mary Play - With a Dark Twist

Ambulance follows two brothers , Danny, and Will Sharp, living in Los Angeles, California. Will is a veteran struggling to meet his financial needs after leaving the army, especially after his wife Amy gets sick. Desperate and unable to get the money he needs, Will turns to his adoptive brother Danny to help him out. Danny convinces Will to take part in what he promises will be an easy bank heist, but things go awry, leading to a shootout with the cops. The brothers are forced to flee the scene of the crime with as much money as they can carry, eventually hijacking a nearby ambulance in an attempt to escape. However, they are forced to take paramedic Cam Thompson hostage, dragging her along in a drawn-out and high-speed chase with the police. To complicate matters even further, they also drag along the wounded Officer Zach, whom Will accidentally shot during the heist.

Ambulance 's two wayward robbers spend the rest of the film in the ambulance attempting to avoid police capture as things get more and more heated. In the back of the vehicle, Cam works desperately to save the life of the wounded police officer and formulate a plan of escape. The police do eventually catch up to the Sharp brothers, cornering them in the film's epic climax. As tensions mount, Cam manages to get her hands on a gun and shoots Will, despite knowing that he is the more reluctant of the two robbers. Distraught over his brother's apparent death, Danny attempts to kill Cam and himself in front of the crowds gathered to watch the violent affair. A barely alive Will shoots and kills Danny before he can do any further damage. Will is saved by the paramedics and eventually exonerated after Cam and Zach tell the authorities that he has saved them. Cam also manages to sneak some of the stolen money to Will's wife for her surgery, undoubtedly saving her life.

The Contractor & Ambulance Reinforce a Sad American War Trope

By the end of Ambulance , viewers are left with differing feelings regarding the film. The film earned middling reviews from critics, particularly on Rotten Tomatoes, where it holds a 67% approval rating. While this is not a devastatingly low score, it is certainly lower than most filmmakers would want. Ambulance 's IMDb rating mirrors this emotion, with a 6.1 rating, indicating generally mediocre reviews of the film. Interestingly, in contrast to these other two ratings, the Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes is much higher, sitting at a lofty 88% approval rating . This is far higher than many of Michael Bay's other films, including the Transformers movies, half of which have audience ratings in the 50s. Ambulance 's reactions are far more divisive than those of Michael Bay's other films.

The negative reactions to Ambulance note that it makes some of Michael Bay's same mistakes , focusing heavily on action and repeating the same filmmaking techniques over and over again. For example, the film's constant drone shots, while sometimes inventive, become quite tiresome over time, proving to be heavily overused throughout. The story was also criticized for not always making sense, though this isn't uncommon for Bay's other action-thrillers. Despite these flaws, many viewers and even some critics recognized that Ambulance was a breath of fresh air for fans of Michael Bay, delivering a movie that is a good sign for his future as a filmmaker.

Ambulance Paid Tribute to Breaking Bad's Deadliest Move

Despite being a box office bomb , Ambulance has merit that other recent Michael Bay films simply do not. The film is surprisingly complicated when it comes to its characters, particularly Will Sharp, who doesn't want to turn to crime but feels cornered with no other options. His relationship with his brother Danny is also quite compelling, as the two brothers are shown to truly love one another. Nevertheless, Will comes to see that Danny is too dangerous to be left alive and must do the unthinkable and kill his brother before he hurts anyone else. Eiza Gonzalez's Cam is also a trailblazer when it comes to Michael Bay films. While Bay has often been criticized in the past for oversexualizing female characters in his movies, Cam stands apart as a well-developed character whose contributions to the film are just as important as those of Danny or Will.

In a more complex twist than Michael Bay films can typically muster, Ambulance 's villains are also its victims , as Danny and Will are both products of a broken society that failed them. Will in particular feels betrayed by the country that he risked his life to protect, leading him to commit the heinous crime that kicks off the main storyline of the film. Michael Bay has dabbled in social and political commentary before, particularly in films like 13 Hours , but rarely does it land as well without being heavy-handed, as it does in Ambulance . The film is a stark contrast to much of Michael Bay's recent work, suggesting that he may yet have some new ideas after decades working in Hollywood.

Ambulance may not have been the raging success that Michael Bay and his partners had hoped for, but it deserves far more credit for its inventiveness and interesting characters. The film is far from perfect, yet remains a breath of fresh air for fans of the famous director.

Two robbers steal an ambulance after their heist goes awry.

Director Michael Bay

Release Date April 8, 2022

Cast Eiza Gonzlez, Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II

Writers Lars Andreas Pedersen, Laurits Munch-Petersen, Chris Fedak

Runtime 2 Hours 16 Minutes

Main Genre Action

Genres Drama, Crime

Production Company Universal Pictures, Endeavor Content, New Republic Pictures.