John Powers

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.

Like that 60s warhorse Failsafe, A House of Dynamite reminds us that America's nuclear defense is based on elaborate protocols that offer an illusion of control.

Yet once that unexplained missile shows up on the radar, the system instantly starts dissolving.

The missile defenses don't work.

It's like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet, as they say here.

You can't get Putin's guy on the phone.

And our North Korea specialist has the day off.

The encrypted video conference starts breaking up.

Endless planning can't tell you what to do when the choice is between surrender and suicide.

While all of this is unnerving, it's also thrilling to watch.

Bigelow directs with a maestro's lucid precision, perfectly orchestrating the complicated shifts from person to person, time frame to time frame.

We can follow exactly where we are and what's going on.

Every moment pops, from Barry Ackroyd's alert cinematography to Kirk Baxter's jittery but controlled editing to Volker Bertelsmann's score, whose shifts keep ratcheting up the tension.

While the script's ending is a tad too oblique for my taste, the movie still packs a wallop.

And rightly, Bigelow is tackling something important, especially now when the world's nuclear arsenals are increasingly controlled by aggressive nationalists.

Yet it's unlikely that her warning about all the world's nukes will have any greater effect on the real world than the scads of cautionary movies that came before.