ARMAGEDDON TIME (James Gray 2022) - NYFF

[Chris Knipp]

Some reviews of ARMAGEDDON TIME that I also liked.

I loved Jordan Hoffman's warm and affectionate description of the film in his review for AV Club.

This is James Gray’s eighth feature and, in the end, its simplest. It may also be his best.

A particularly sensitive take on the film that I found soon after seeing it, and with a Jewish point of view, is David Katz's for The Film Stage. Katz notes that ARMAGEDDON TIME is "a deeply observed New York story airing a middle-class Jewish family’s dirty laundry for all to see. . ." He notes the link to "a certain mode of American literary fiction, e.g. Philip Roth and John Updike)," and he notes that the film can be seen as either grandiose or myopic. He notes its "biforcated" structure - the Jewish family vs. the school friendship. Katz sees the complexity of the film, " funnier and lighter than anything Gray has made to date, but undergirded with mournful tragedy."