In the pantheon of great directors, Kathryn Bigelow has a special place carved out for me. As a kid, I grew up watching Point Break over and over. It’s one of the all-time greatest action films, and a masterpiece. Were that her only great film, it would earn her a place among the greats, but she also made one of the best indie horror films of the eighties (Near Dark), a shamefully out of print sci-fi epic (Strange Days), a badass femme action flick (Blue Steel), as well as two little movies you might of heard of called The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She hasn’t directed a movie since 2017’s underrated Detroit, but now she’s back with one killer thriller – A House of Dynamite, which kind of fits into an unofficial trilogy with Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, with them each being a vivid depiction of modern warfare.
A House of Dynamite tackles nuclear war, with it centring around the nightmare scenario that would emerge if one rogue power sent a nuclear missile hurtling towards the United States. In the view of most, such an act would instigate a nuclear war, and Bigelow’s House of Dynamite finds a disparate group of characters, including Idris Elba as the President, and Rebecca Ferguson as a situation room officer, grappling with that notion, with no margin for error.
I reviewed A House of Dynamite recently and meant it when I wrote that it was the scariest movie of the year. While on a critic’s group trip to New York recently, I had a chance to sit down with much of the cast, including Ferguson, Jason Clarke, Anthony Ramos, Tracy Letts, writer Noah Oppenheimer, and Bigelow herself. I was in awe speaking to the director, who – off camera – was amused and flattered by my undying devotion to Point Break, and proved to be an incredibly nice person (as was everyone in the cast, really – this was a really fun junket as opposed to how hardcore the movie is).
Check out the interviews above and watch A House of Dynamite – which is now streaming on Netflix!
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