House of Dynamite (2025)

Once again, I find myself moaning about a tiny release from a superb director whose latest film has been bankrolled by a streaming giant. Katherine Bigelow this time is the person behind the camera, and once again I'm thankful that she's been given the money to make A House of Dynamite. However, just like Paul Greengrass's The Last Bus, this should be screening on the biggest screens, to the widest possible audience.

Bigelow is, like Greengrass, one of the finest directors working today. She's been Oscar nominated many times, winning for her 2008 masterpiece The Hurt Locker, and her recent work has tackled politics and war- a couple of which were based on true life stories for which she was granted access to previously unseen files (Detroit [2018], Zero Dark Thirty [2012]). Bigelow’s latest film plays on a lot of themes that she’s spent the last decade or so of her career refining. But while her film making has become more and more refined, the state of the world has arguably become substantially more chaotic. So it makes sense to some extent, that A House of Dynamite might be her most terrifying film to date.

The plot revolves around a nuclear weapon heading for U.S soil, and we track the missile’s progress through the eyes of various factions of the U.S military and political leaders, getting the same story strands from different sides of the crisis. It’s seemingly headed towards Chicago, but no amount of intel or tracking can tell where it’s been launched from, or who has launched it.

Of course the film is a grim and timely warning of the state of the world and how close we seemingly are to destruction at any given moment, but Bigelow ensures that this potential disaster is a white-knuckle ride of tension from start to finish. Ironically, it sometimes feels like a Paul Greengrass vehicle, and that’s credit to Bigelow- she nails the pacing as well as the technical jargon; it doesn’t matter that we don’t understand it all, what matters is how terrifying and real it all seems. The performances are all solid, especially Rebecca Ferguson as Captain Olivia Walker, and the decision to not reveal Idris Elba's President until the final third works from a narrative point of view- this is a more serious day in the life of the American presidency than an episode of 24.

I won't give away the ending but suffice to say it's split opinion; for me, it made complete sense, and went in line with everything that had happened before. A House of Dynamite may well be told from the point of view of America, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're watching the good guys- this is a film where morals go out the window, and nothing is black and white politically. Of course in terms of the plot itself, it's very much one through line. There's a nuclear missile heading the U.S, and if it's not stopped, the world changes forever.

Some have taken against the film, and of course it’s subjective- but with A House of Dynamite Bigelow ensures that she’s lost none of her relevance, either as a brilliant film maker or as someone who tackles the difficult real life terrors head on and shows us just how real they are. 8.0/10