Review: 'A House of Dynamite'

Sometimes movies reach us in a place beyond mere assessment: you walk away from the thing you’ve just seen not really knowing if you’d call it good or bad, or even great, but you know something has shifted inside you. That’s the effect of A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and premiering at the Venice Film Festival . The picture is precise, potent, and ingeniously constructed. But even though it focuses on the nuts and bolts of how the United States government might respond to a nuclear attack, there’s something ghostly and unreal about it too. Without spelling anything out in detail, it lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about. Who wants to contemplate the unthinkable? Bigelow has made a modern-day real-world horror movie that’s unsettling f