Kathryn Bigelow is back with her first movie in eight years, the nuclear missile thriller “A House of Dynamite,” which premiered to raves at Venice, having already been acquired by Netflix in advance. The trailer for “A House of Dynamite” is here, and it is gripping. Watch it below.
Senior situation room duty officer Rebecca Ferguson (here doing such a great American accent you’ll forget about Ilsa Faust immediately) receives shocking news: An intercontinental ballistic missile has appeared over Asia with a trajectory that appears to take it to a Midwest city in the U.S. And, given how fast ICBMs travel, reaching suborbital altitudes, it’ll reach that target in 18 minutes. The entire film that follows plays out by toggling back and forth among myriad different perspectives, including Idris Elba as POTUS, in an ever-growing ensemble during those 18 minutes.
The cast also includes Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, and Jonah Hauer-King, with Greta Lee and Jason Clarke. It comes from a script by Noah Oppenheim, the former president of NBC News who also wrote Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie” as well as co-created the Robert De Niro-led Netflix series “Zero Day,” about a devastating cyberattack on the U.S.
IndieWire Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio wrote in his review that the “horrifically gripping and hopeless” film “will ruin your day.” In the best possible way, as he also gave it an A- score and a Critic’s Pick, when reviewing it out of the 2025 Venice Film Festival earlier this month.
“‘A House of Dynamite’ moves at a whirring gradient with an ever-widening ensemble — which includes Greta Lee, Jason Clarke, and Moses Ingram as various cogs — that can be challenging to keep track of,” Lattanzio continued. “The film essentially takes place entirely within an under-20-minute timeline, showing the same events from a shuffling deck of points of view. Bigelow’s grindingly focused direction is peerless here, with her already established as a frank and fearless chronicler of American political ambiguity in films like ‘The Hurt Locker’ and ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ and with ‘A House of Dynamite’ seemingly completing a trilogy about the collapse of the American dream in war times.”
“Hardly mere agitprop due to the stylistic intensity of its filmmaking, this gun-to-your-head engrossing movie — with its eardrum-piercing and death-rattling sound design and a score by Volker Bertelmann so oppressive it could swallow you whole — also wants to shake you out of your slumber.”