ARMAGEDDON TIME
★★★★
OUT 18 NOVEMBER / CERT TBC / 115 MINS
DIRECTOR James Gray
CAST Banks Repeta, Jeremy Strong, Anne Hathaway
Many of James Gray’s films are interior personal journeys — Two Lovers, The Lost City Of Z and Ad Astra all feel disarmingly intimate. But now the director takes a trip into his own childhood with the more than semi-autobiographical Armageddon Time, a sometimes plaintive, always soulful drama that follows young Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) as he navigates adolescence within his white, middle-class Jewish upbringing. Gray tackles morality, class warfare and racism, but never with a heavy hand, as his younger avatar befriends Black kid Johnny (Jaylin Webb) and begins to see things from different perspectives. Every cast member is superb; cinematographer Darius Khondji gives the film a poetic, soft sheen; and Gray directs a film that yearns and aches.