| Focus Features | Release Date: October 28, 2022 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
42
Mixed:
10
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Oct 28, 2022
By letting the picture embody his failures — by turning Armageddon Time into a self-aware look at his own limitations — the director makes that necessary connection between then and now, between the characters onscreen and us watching. In other words, he denies us the one thing these types of movies almost always provide: reassurance.
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Oct 27, 2022
It asks more questions than it answers, and doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s also a great movie for anyone who grew up in New York City area in 1980, with the right needle drops and art direction. This is James Gray’s eighth feature and, in the end, his simplest. It may also be his best.
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IndieWireMay 19, 2022
It’s a story about the invisible fault lines of inequality, the moral compromises demanded by the American Dream, and the very practical ways in which remembering the past can be the only legitimate defense against the social forces that keep trying to repackage it as a vision of the future.
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The PlaylistMay 19, 2022
Nov 18, 2022
Oct 28, 2022
If Armageddon Time simply recounted Paul’s coming-of-age, complete with a hefty serving of family spats, it wouldn’t have the resonance it often exhibits at its best. The friendship between Paul and Johnny, even more than Paul’s relationship with his grandfather, is the film’s emotional core.
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May 23, 2022
You could compare Armageddon Time to autobiographical reflections like Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma or, to a lesser extent, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, both stories in which kids’ eyes are suddenly opened to the unfairness of the world. But for all its tenderness, this isn’t a movie that allows you to make peace with yourself, or with our highly imperfect world.
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May 21, 2022
What elevates Armageddon Time to something more than a piece of indulgent navel gazing is the way that Paul’s coming-of-age is reflected in the national story which closes a chapter on Jimmy Carter to turn a new page into Reaganite 1980s selfishness, reactionary politics and feral capitalism.
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The TelegraphMay 20, 2022
Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.
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May 20, 2022
May 19, 2022
Exceedingly thoughtful and self-critical rather than lazily nostalgic, this well-acted coming-of-age tale can sometimes be predictable and muddled, but is steeped in the filmmaker’s sorrow for not recognising the ways in which he and those he loved contributed to an inequitable society that shows no signs of becoming less stratified.
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Nov 3, 2022
It’s not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the film. Some of the individual moments are impactful or effective at evoking nostalgia. But, as they say, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. It feels like a watered-down replica of other, better coming-of-age stories.
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Nov 3, 2022
As Armageddon Time proceeded, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the way Johnny’s story only served to stoke Paul’s (and the movie’s) moral consciousness—to be ground zero for the film’s white guilt. Yes, in some ways Johnny is a supporting character much like any other, serving a particular purpose in the narrative. But the racial realities add a significant wrinkle.
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Nov 2, 2022
There are times when this film feels absolutely real and lived-in, as when Paul’s extended family gathers for dinners where everyone talks at once and nobody is listening, and you can feel the tensions but also the enduring and abiding love at the table. Unfortunately, Gray’s central young character isn’t as sympathetic or likable as the talented filmmaker must have intended, and the constant lecturing about white guilt among liberals is delivered in all caps, with exclamation points.
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RogerEbert.comOct 28, 2022
Oct 13, 2022
Gray’s many fans will probably love Armageddon Time, and it may even win over some more neutral viewers who respond to his decidedly non-nostalgic look at a pivotal (and not especially promising) moment in U.S. history. But anyone who has found his movies less articulate than the ideas behind them will only get occasional respite here.
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Nov 11, 2022
The movie glows. And yet, something about this coming-of-age tale feels transparently self-preserving, trapped in an adolescent’s point of view. It offers a story about race where everyone gets off too easily, where it seems the most important thing a white person can do is to acknowledge that racism exists while carrying on.
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