Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear-showdown thriller A House of Dynamite is a hyperrealistic political procedural, shot with a documentary-style hand-held camera that embeds the increasingly tense viewer in the situation rooms and military outposts and presidential helicopters where the action unfolds. Yet the world in which this explicitly present-day story takes place can sometimes feel oddly retro, as though Bigelow were transporting us back to an age when imagining doomsday scenarios at least came with the comforting assumption that the government officials whose job it is to prevent the worst from happening were all, at some basic level, competent and sane enough to agree on what the worst would be.

Every character in A House of Dynamite seems to feel the immense moral and historical weig

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