John Powers

The latest to do so is A House of Dynamite, a white-knuckle Netflix movie that opens first in cinemas and hits the streamer itself on October 24th.

I encourage you to see it in a theater, because it's directed by Catherine Bigelow, who's not merely the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar.

She's unsurpassed at action and suspense.

Although I normally try to avoid clichés, A House of Dynamite literally did have me on the edge of my seat.

The action begins when a military tracking station spots a single nuclear warhead, origin unknown, heading toward the U.S.

mainland.

If not shot down, it will hit in 20 minutes.

For the rest of the movie, we leapfrog among the characters who are trying to stop that missile, figure out who launched it, Putin, Iran, North Korea, China pretending to be North Korea, and to come up with a response that won't lead to Armageddon.

If the premise is straightforward, the telling is not.

The film loops back and repeats the same 20-minute period three times over, as we watch different people confront the threat.

In the first, which is about trying to stop the ICBM, we flip between a major and an Alaska missile outpost, that's Anthony Ramos, and the military officer running the White House Situation Room.

She's played by Rebecca Ferguson, who you'll know from Mission Impossible.

The second part centers on two tacticians, a deputy national security advisor played by Gabriel Basso, who's urging a cautious response, and the general played by Tracy Lentz, who fears that caution could lead to America's destruction.

Finally, the third part centers on the Secretary of Defense, played by Jared Harris, and President Idris Elba.

He's presented with a menu featuring different levels of retaliatory slaughter, and has the agonizing task of deciding who, if anyone, to nuke.

Here on a conference call with Basso and others, Letts as general lays out the situation.

While all the characters are defined by their jobs, Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim give each a hint of their human dimension, be it the complacent charisma of Elba's president, Ferguson fighting back tears then soldiering on, or Harris, an actor of great vulnerability, falling into despair when he grasps that the bomb will hit the city where his daughter lives.

All are honorable and good at their jobs.

Lutz's general is not one of those hair-trigger Strangelovean psychopaths familiar from most thrillers.

He's a rational man and baseball fan trying to do the right thing.