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Simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished, frantic and meandering, “Amsterdam” is one big, star-studded, hot mess of a movie.

Christian Bale , Margot Robbie , John David Washington , Robert De Niro , Anya Taylor-Joy , Rami Malek , Chris Rock , Michael Shannon , Zoe Saldana , Alessandro Nivola and many more major names: How can you amass this cast and go so wrong? Simply putting them in a room and watching them chit-chat for two-plus hours—or say nothing at all, for that matter—would have been infinitely more interesting. Alas, David O. Russell has concocted all manner of adventures and detours, wacky hijinks, and elaborate asides to occupy his actors, none of which is nearly as clever or charming as he seems to think.

Over and over again, I asked myself as I was watching “Amsterdam”: What is this movie about? Where are we going with this? I’d have to stop and find my bearings: What exactly is happening now? And not in a thrilling, stimulating way, as in “ Memento ,” for example, or “ Cats .” It’s all a dizzying piffle—until it stops dead in its tracks and forces several of its stars to make lengthy speeches elucidating the points Russell himself did not make over the previous two rambling hours. The grand finale gives us some interminable, treacly narration, explaining the importance of love and kindness over the film's images of bohemian rhapsody we’d just seen not too long ago.

As is the case in so many of the writer/director’s other movies, we have the sensation as we’re watching that anything could happen at any moment. He typically employs such verve in his camerawork and takes such ambitious tonal swings that you wonder in amazement how he manages to keep it all cohesive and intact. This time, he doesn’t. Because “Amsterdam” lacks the compelling visual language of “ Three Kings ” or “ American Hustle ,” for instance, and it lacks characters with heart-on-their-sleeve humanity like he shows us in “ The Fighter ” or “ Silver Linings Playbook .” Despite the prodigious talent on display here, not a single figure on screen feels like a real person. Each is a collection of idiosyncrasies, some more intriguing than others.

To put it in the simplest terms possible, Bale and Washington play longtime best friends suspected of a murder they didn’t commit. While trying to uncover the truth about what’s going on, they stumble upon an even larger and more sinister plot. Russell’s script jumps around in time from 1933 New York to 1918 Amsterdam and back again, but he’s using this time frame—and the fascist ideologies that rose to prominence then—to make a statement about what’s been going on the past several years in right-wing American politics. Ultimately, he hammers us over the head with this point. But first, whimsy.

Bale’s Burt Berendsen is a folksy doctor with a glass eye that keeps falling out. He’s hooked on his own homemade pain meds, which cause him to collapse to the ground—which also causes his eye to fall out. Bale is doing intense shtick throughout; he is committed to the bit. Washington’s Harold Woodman served with him in the same racially mixed Army battalion in France during WWI; he’s now an attorney, and the more levelheaded of the two. When their beloved general dies suspiciously, his daughter (a distractingly stiff Taylor Swift ) asks them to investigate.

But soon, they’re on the run, inspiring a flashback to how they met in the first place. This is actually the most entertaining part of the film. Russell luxuriates in the duo’s wistful memories of their post-war years in Amsterdam with Robbie’s Valerie Voze, the nurse who cared for them when they were injured and quickly became their co-conspirator in all kinds of boozy escapades. The celebrated cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki , a multiple Oscar winner for his work with Alfonso Cuaron (“ Gravity ”) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (“ Birdman ,” “ The Revenant ”), eases up on the sepia tones that often feel so smothering in an effort to capture a feeling of nostalgia. There’s real life and joy to these sequences in Amsterdam that’s missing elsewhere. Robbie, a brunette for a change, looks impossibly luminous—but her character is also a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a secretly wealthy heiress who turns bullet shrapnel into art. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor for the healing presence she provides in Burt and Harold’s lives.

That’s what’s so frustrating about “Amsterdam”: It’ll offer a scene or an interaction or a performance here or there that’s legitimately entertaining and maybe comes close to hitting the mark Russell is trying to hit. Several duos and subplots along the way might have made for a more interesting movie than the one we got: Malek and Taylor-Joy as Valerie’s snobby, striving brother and sister-in-law, for example, are a bizarre hoot. (And here’s a great place to stop and mention the spectacular costume design, the work of J.R. Hawbaker and the legendary Albert Wolsky . The period detail is varied and vivid, but the dresses Taylor-Joy wears, all in bold shades of red, are especially inspired.) Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts as mismatched cops who can’t stand each other can be amusing, and it seems like they’re really trying to infuse their characters with traits and motivations beyond what’s on the page. Shannon and Mike Myers as a pair of spies are good for a goofy laugh or two, nothing more.

But despite these sporadic moments of enjoyment, “Amsterdam” is ultimately so convoluted and tedious that it obliterates such glimmers of goodwill. It’s so weighed down by its overlong running time and self-indulgent sense of importance that its core message about the simple need for human decency feels like a cynical afterthought. And whispering the word “Amsterdam” throughout, as several of the characters do, doesn’t even begin to cast the magic spell it seeks to conjure.

Now playing in theaters.

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Amsterdam (2022)

Rated R for brief violence and bloody images.

127 minutes

Christian Bale as Burt Berendsen

Margot Robbie as Valerie Voze

John David Washington as Harold Woodman

Robert De Niro as General Gil Dillenbeck

Anya Taylor-Joy as Libby Voze

Rami Malek as Tom Voze

Chris Rock as Milton King

Zoe Saldaña as Irma St. Clair

Mike Myers as Paul Canterbury

Michael Shannon as Henry Norcross

Timothy Olyphant as Taron Milfax

Andrea Riseborough as Beatrice Vandenheuvel

Taylor Swift as Liz Meekins

Matthias Schoenaerts as Detective Lem Getweiler

Alessandro Nivola as Detective Hiltz

Ed Begley Jr. as General Bill Meekins

David O. Russell

Cinematographer

Emmanuel Lubezki
Jay Cassidy
Daniel Pemberton

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‘Amsterdam’ Review: A Madcap Mystery With Many Whirring Parts

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington lead a crowded cast of zanies in David O. Russell’s latest screwball outing.

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By Manohla Dargis

For much of “Amsterdam,” the latest David O. Russell Experience, the movie enjoyably zigs and zags, rushing here and there, though sometimes also just spinning in place. It’s a handsome period romp, a 1930s screwball pastiche filled with mugging performers who charm and seduce as they run around chasing down a mystery, playing detective, tripping over their feet and navigating an international conspiracy that is best enjoyed if you don’t pay it too much attention — which seems to be the approach that Russell himself has taken.

Like all of Russell’s movies, this one is by turns loosey-goosey and high strung. At its center are three American comrades who met in Europe during World War I, formed a tight friendship and — as you see in an extended flashback — lived for a while in Amsterdam, where they recovered (more or sometimes less) from the war and rhapsodically played bohemians until reality called them back home. A dozen or so years and much personal drama later, it’s 1933, and the three have settled into their respective lives. And then Taylor Swift pops up in a fetching hat and red-alarm lipstick, sending everyone and everything scrambling.

The pieces click into place with Burt (Christian Bale), a down-and-out doctor with dubious habits who announces that he lost an eye in France. That’s also where he met a nurse, Valerie (Margot Robbie), and found his best friend, Harold (John David Washington), now a lawyer with a healthy practice and endless patience. Soon, the men are roped into an intrigue via Swift’s Liz, one of those mysterious dames who always stir up trouble. Her father has died under suspicious circumstances, and she’s enlisted Harold for help, which is why Burt soon performs an autopsy alongside Zoe Saldana’s Irma, another Florence Nightingale.

Bale also starred in Russell’s 2013 neoscrewball “ American Hustle ,” a dizzily funny comedy set mostly in the 1970s about a quartet of scammers. For that film, Bale’s good looks were obscured by a furry beard, a monumental gut and a doleful comb-over; for his role here, the actor has slimmed down and effectively come out of hiding, so you can see the planes shifting under his narrow, expressive face. Burt has a small web of scars under one eye and a nest of hair that at times rises to Barton Fink-esque tumescence, and while he slouches and hunches a lot, it’s the face that draws you in with its insistent brow-furrowing, head-bobbing and jaw-dropping.

It’s a suitably showy performance (with an accent that’s pure old-studio cabby) for a brash movie with many whirring parts. If you spend a lot of time scanning Bale’s face, noting how it slackens and tightens, it’s partly because the movie keeps inviting you to do so. It’s an engaging landscape, certainly, and you can feel Russell’s affection for the character (and actor) every time the camera cozies up to him. There’s feeling in Burt’s ravaged countenance, sadness and bewilderment and dark shadows, too. He has been wounded both in battle and in life, you are regularly reminded, even as the movie barrels deeper into nonsense.

“Amsterdam” is a funny movie, though more curious than laugh-laced, despite some energetic slapstick and soft-landing jokes. The humor can feel strained and overly worked to no particular end, as when Mike Myers and Michael Shannon pop up as a pair of tag-teaming spies. Like Robert De Niro’s upstanding, big-daddy general, who enters late to help tie up the messy loose ends, the spies belong to the least satisfying part of the movie, the political intrigue that ensnares Burt, Harold and Valerie. A lot of this really happened, the movie announces early, yet while that’s eye-poppingly true it tends to feel irrelevant.

That truth claim reads almost identically to the one that introduces “American Hustle,” which was inspired by the Abscam scandal, a bizarre episode dating back to 1978 involving corrupt American politicians, fake Arab sheikhs and a con man enlisted by the F.B.I. The historical chapter that “Amsterdam” borrows from isn’t, oddly enough, as well known, but is profoundly more harrowing because it involves a 1930s fascist plot by wealthy businessmen to take over the United States. Yet if Russell was drawn to this material because of the more recent, terrifying threats to American democracy, neither his heart nor his head ever feel genuinely in it.

What fires up Russell in “Amsterdam” and brings out his best is everything involving love and camaraderie, particularly when Burt, Harold and Valerie were young and aglow with possibility. In the unhurried flashback that traces their friendship, Russell evades the horrors of war to instead focus on the characters’ joyfulness, the infectious pleasure that they take in one another’s company and the fast-deepening romance between Harold and Valerie, which both lights them up and appreciably warms the movie. Bathed in soft, caramel tones and at times photographed in radiant close-up, Robbie and Washington have rarely looked more beautiful or conveyed as much visceral sensuality as they do here — they’re an electric duet.

Once the action returns to 1933, alas, the movie sags despite the persistent frenetic action. Characters continue entering and exiting as the low-angled camera zips along. (The cast also includes Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock and a sharp, amusingly clenched Andrea Riseborough.) A gun is fired, jaws socked, someone screams. Throughout, Russell keeps going and moving, moving and going, but the momentum never builds the way it should, and the big reveal lands flat partly because he never seems taken with the history he’s latched onto or comfortable with its heaviness. Or perhaps it’s the contemporary parallels that make him uneasy and why, again and again, he returns to the faces and filigree that he gets just right.

Amsterdam Rated R for autopsy, murder, the usual. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Amsterdam Reviews

David O. Russell’s latest outing is a glibly entertaining caper completely undone by its self-importance.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2023

While there has been some criticism about the plot being too busy and trying to say too many things, part of Amsterdam's charm is its "everything, everywhere, all at once" vibe.

Full Review | Oct 4, 2023

Despite being based in fact, the story ends up being rather bland and the movie becomes more about being a way to spotlight the actors.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2023

It's not just the wonky pacing, but that it forever feels like none of it lands the way it's supposed to. It's like a song with a beautifully formed melody played over a rhythm section that can't keep even basic time.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2023

While Amsterdam was undoubtedly enjoyable to film for its many costars, the merriment doesn't quite translate to the screen. The plethora of side characters and celebrity cameos becomes confusing for a plot that is already too elaborate.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Really dug the friendship element & honestly if it wasn’t for Bale, Robbie, Washington & Joy I probably would have dipped out on the film as the direction/story itself was all held together by strings

David O Russell's latest - a shaggy dog mystery with a deliberate air of penny dreadfuls - could do with more straightforward narrative and fewer screwball convolutions

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 17, 2023

The down-your-throat optimism at the end of Amsterdam is certainly not the vehicle this film needed for any sort of entertaining climax. I've got plenty of other places to be preached to.

Full Review | Feb 15, 2023

Amsterdam wastes its immensely talented cast and a hefty budget on an unconvincing script and meandering storytelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 10, 2023

A disappointment of epic proportions.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

Amsterdam presents itself as a work of collaborative trust (thematically, but also formally, but also philosophically) so that discrete sections which threaten to strain credulity on their own, feel woven together with care and thoughtfulness.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2023

It’s by no means a perfect movie and has plenty of forgettable moments, but Amsterdam is certainly entertaining and that’s enough for me.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jan 4, 2023

Although the production, costume, hair and makeup design are outstanding, the material never rises to the superb level of its all star cast.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2023

I wouldn’t have missed the pro-democracy speeches that overwhelm Amsterdam in the end, had they been tacked back, but despite Russell’s strenuous efforts, you actually can’t have everything.

Full Review | Dec 24, 2022

The nearly impossible narrative is not quick witted let alone charming enough to be in the same vein as Preston Sturges or Ernst Lubitsch.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Dec 10, 2022

A kooky piece of messy Americana, but it’s enjoyable enough to make you appreciate the cast and craft.

Full Review | Dec 6, 2022

It looks beautiful and Daniel Pemberton ("Motherless Brooklyn"/"The Bad Guys") provides another great score, but it’s all set dressing on a film one never really connects with in a meaning way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 5, 2022

By some miracle, wasting your time may be the least of the director’s crimes against humanity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 30, 2022

A rather boring film that, behind the curtain of political conspiracies, mixes genres uselessly and seems to be the product of a disjointed assemblage at the service of seedy characters who only spend their time talking nonsense. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 24, 2022

An overstuffed, muddled, historical 1930s fantasy period romantic comedy-thriller that dazzles.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Nov 16, 2022

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‘amsterdam’ review: christian bale and margot robbie head starry ensemble in david o. russell’s chaotic cautionary tale.

The 1930s-set comedy thriller’s stacked cast also includes John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldaña and Taylor Swift.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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(L-R): John David Washington as Harold Woodman, Margot Robbie as Valerie Voze, and Christian Bale as Burt Berendsen in 20th Century Studios' AMSTERDAM.

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Amsterdam (2022)

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Christian Bale (Burt Berendsen) Margot Robbie (Valerie Voze) John David Washington (Harold Woodman) Alessandro Nivola (Detective Hiltz) Andrea Riseborough (Beatrice Vandenheuvel) Anya Taylor-Joy (Libby Voze) Chris Rock (Milton King) Matthias Schoenaerts (Detective Lem Getweiler) Michael Shannon (Henry Norcross) Mike Myers (Paul Canterbury)

David O. Russell

In the 1930s, three friends witness a murder, are framed for it, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history.

More about Amsterdam

David O. Russell's <i>Amsterdam</i> is turning into a massive box-office bomb

David O. Russell's Amsterdam is turning into a massive box-office bomb

Despite high initial projections for Amsterdam , the David O. Russell caper stands to lose nearly $100 million

Christian Bale was with David O. Russell on <i>Amsterdam</i> before they even had a script

Christian Bale was with David O. Russell on Amsterdam before they even had a script

Christian Bale tells The A.V. Club that he and David O. Russell worked on his Amsterdam character together for …

David O. Russell's shambolic <i>Amsterdam </i>cranks up<i> </i>the star power but still falls short

David O. Russell's shambolic Amsterdam cranks up the star power but still falls short

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington, among others, do their best to make sense out of an overly …

Christian Bale couldn’t talk to Chris Rock while filming <i>Amsterdam </i>because he’s just too darn funny

Christian Bale couldn’t talk to Chris Rock while filming Amsterdam because he’s just too darn funny

Christian Bale had to stop being friends with Chris Rock so he could get some acting done

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington are three quirky best friends in <i>Amsterdam</i> trailer

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington are three quirky best friends in Amsterdam trailer

The trio seek to clear their names of murder in David O. Russell's latest film

‘Amsterdam’ Is a Throwback, a Warning — and a Beautiful, All-Star Mess

By David Fear

Name an actor — almost any working actor you can think of — and there is a fairly good chance they are in David O. Russell ‘s Amsterdam. Christian Bale , the intense thespian who’s done his best work with the equally all-or-nothing-at-all auteur? No surprise that he’s front and center here. Ditto Russell rep-company regular Robert De Niro . Rising star John David Washington ? Yup, him too. Margot Robbie and Anya Taylor-Joy , both current candidates for “It girl” status circa 2022? Present and accounted for. How about Chris Rock , or Rami Malek , or Zoe Saldana, Michael Shannon , Mike Myers , Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Ed Begley Jr., Alessandro Nivola, and [ checks notes ] Taylor Swift ? They’re in the cast as well. This isn’t an ensemble film, it’s a SAG meeting.

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Yet this slippery work has more on its addled mind than the distant past, as it ricochets like a pinball between genres and runs its more-than-game players through their manic paces. Russell has taken an epic canvas of a narrative, set in two eras and three countries, with a dozen or so speaking parts, only to drop in a rather intimate, sincere tale of love and friendship amidst the razzle dazzle. It’s Ragtime with a gooey Jules and Jim at the center. It’s also a mystery, a comedy set to a speed somewhere between “daffy” and “screwball,” a war-is-hell drama, a sentimental la vie boheme throwback, a cautionary tale about our present and one beautiful mess of a picture. You can add a “must-see” for good measure as well. There’s nothing quite like it out right now.

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Cut to: 1918. A younger, more innocent (and dual-eyed) Berendsen has no sooner joined the effort to fight the Kaiser when he’s asked to oversee an all-Black squad of doughboys. They’ve been accused of insubordination because the brass doesn’t want them wearing American uniforms. This is where Burt meets Harold, both of whom end up convalescing in a French hospital after sustaining battlefield injuries.

Enter the nurse. This is Valerie Voze (Robbie), part-time caretaker for the maimed and mutilated and full-time eccentric. Her hobbies include smoking pipes, drinking illicit hooch and making art from the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ bodies — a repurposing of mass-destruction debris into Dadaist art. She’s not really French, either, but an American ex-pat tooling around Europe in search of adventure. Valerie and Woodman have eyes for each other, but it’s quickly established that this will be a trio: “Never again shall I pour two without a third,” our lady of the perpetual avant-garde zaniness declares. The three head to Amsterdam, where they live and laugh and love among fellow artists, misfits, outcasts. For a while, this three-person Lost Generation make a lovely garden of Eden for themselves. Then Burt decides to return home to the States and the spell is broken. By the time they’re all reunited back in New York years later, corpses and conspiracies have made the stakes of their bonding a lot higher.

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And then there’s Amsterdam itself, the city that acts as a sort of symbolic title in the same way that Casablanca does for its classic ensemble drama. It’s the paradise lost, the moment before history and “the dream” repeats themselves. It’s what Robbie calls “the good part,” when these three can be what they call “their true selves.” It’s the geographical representation of a deep, lasting, sustaining friendship. And much like Casablanca, this movie will end with a sacrifice that attempts to right a handful of wrongs on both a macro- and a micro-level. There is no shortage of movies that still traffic in shameless, manipulative uplift (see: this year’s Oscar winner ). Yet Russell, to his everlasting credit, has made a film in which having cockeyed optimism, at this moment in the world, somehow feels like a radical act. For a movie that is all over the place, it’s determination to get back to a bygone moment isn’t just wishful thinking. It suggests, in own roundabout way, that a return to the past can also signal the beginning of a fresh start.

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“Amsterdam” Is an Exemplary Work of Resistance Cinema

By Richard Brody

Christian Bale Margot Robbie and John David Washington in “Amsterdam.”

It’s tempting to say that I found David O. Russell’s new film, “ Amsterdam ,” a hoot and a half, and be done with it. But there’s much more to this exuberant movie, in substance and in style. It’s a historical fantasy that is written and acted like a comedic tall tale, but it’s all the more remarkable for its solid (albeit slender) basis in reality. It also takes its place in a recent, odd but significant subgenre of movies that has cropped up in response to the authoritarian and hate-filled deeds and rhetoric of the Trump era: resistance cinema. It would be easy to mock the very notion as a form of highly selective crowd-pleasing, were many of these movies, including “Amsterdam,” not among the most emotionally committed and aesthetically distinctive films of the times.

The international cinema of resistance has a venerable history, and is ongoing (as in Jafar Panahi ’s “ No Bears ”); in recent years, prominent American filmmakers, whether or not their work has often had a political dimension, have responded to the rise of the far right and related tenets and syndromes. I’m thinking of such films as Paul Schrader’s “ First Reformed ” and “ The Card Counter ,” Spike Lee’s “ BlacKkKlansman ,” Eliza Hittman’s “ Never Rarely Sometimes Always ,” Jim Jarmusch’s “ The Dead Don’t Die ,” Frederick Wiseman’s “ Monrovia, Indiana ,” Shatara Michelle Ford’s “ Test Pattern ,” Josh and Benny Safdie’s “ Good Time ,” Ricky D’Ambrose’s “ Notes on an Appearance ,” Olivia Wilde’s “ Don’t Worry Darling ” (really), Matt Porterfield’s “ Sollers Point ,” the late Lynn Shelton’s “ Sword of Trust ,” and James Gray’s forthcoming “ Armageddon Time .” I consider Charlie Chaplin to be the primordial figure of resistance cinema—most prominently, with “ The Great Dictator ”—and that film is the prime cinematic spirit inhabiting “Amsterdam.”

In “Amsterdam,” Russell confronts the real-life so-called Business Plot. In the early days of Franklin Roosevelt’s first Administration, a group of executives sought to leverage the anger of veterans who hadn’t received due benefits under his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, in order to install, as an adviser-cum-dictator, General Smedley Butler—who, they assumed, would do their bidding. (Instead, Butler exposed the plot, testifying to Congress about it.) In “Amsterdam,” Russell (who wrote and directed the film) rosencrantzes and guildensterns that conspiracy, to high purpose: he focusses on a fictional trio who stumble on that plot and then attempt to thwart it. Russell gives these characters a magnificent backstory in order to unfold the character traits and the strange circumstances (both ludicrous and logical) that crystallize their spirit of resistance into determination and action—that transform three insulted and injured obscurities into protagonists of history.

The deliciously intricate story begins in Manhattan, in 1933, in the form of a whirligig whodunnit. A plastic surgeon, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), who is also a grievously wounded Great War veteran, practices in Harlem with the self-appointed mission to aid similarly scarred veterans. He shares space with an attorney, Harold Woodman (John David Washington), who is his best friend and also a seriously wounded veteran, and who served under him in the Great War. Burt, an Army medic, was appointed by the fair-minded, honorable General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley, Jr.) to take over from a cruel racist as the commander of the all-Black 369th Regiment, then fighting in France. When Meekins, newly home from Europe, suddenly dies, his daughter Liz (Taylor Swift) recruits Harold to arrange for the autopsy. Working with a medical examiner named Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldaña), Burt concludes that Meekins was murdered; then another body turns up, Burt and Harold are falsely accused of that killing, and, in order to clear their names, they need someone from high society to vouch for them. That quest carries them through the upper-crust Voze family—notably, Tom (Rami Malek), an ineffectual bird-watcher with a Kennedy accent—to another general, Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), Meekins’s best friend and the only person who was privy to Meekins’s activities in Europe before his voyage home.

The character who—as seen in a series of flashbacks—joins Burt and Harold to round out the trio during wartime is Valerie (Margot Robbie), a military nurse and an artist who, in a military hospital in France, saves the two men, forges a deep friendship with both and a romance with Harold, and keeps the shrapnel from both men’s bodies to use in her art work. She brings the men to Amsterdam; there, she connects Burt, who lost an eye, to a master glass-eye craftsman named Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers), who’s also a British spy in partnership with Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon), an American one. Harold and Valerie (whose background is vague and whose identity is elusive) vow to stay in Amsterdam, since their interracial romance has no hope in the United States. In 1919, Burt returns home to New York and to his wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), the daughter of Park Avenue snobs, the Vandenheuvels, who had ordered the half-Jewish, half-Catholic Burt to war to bring home medals and thereby win the acceptance of their set. But, when Burt, upon returning to medical practice with his father-in-law, insists on treating Black veterans, the Vandenheuvels—Beatrice with them—kick him out. Then, in the early nineteen-twenties, Harold leaves Valerie in Amsterdam and returns to the U.S., graduating from Columbia Law School, setting up shop with Burt in Harlem, and fulfilling his dream of helping veterans in need. In 1933, when Harold and Burt get caught up in the Meekins case together, Valerie turns up again and joins forces with them to try to solve the murders. In the process, they discover a conspiracy of American plutocrats to install Dillenbeck as dictator, and they turn to Paul and Henry for help, to grandly dramatic effect.

Even a detailed description of the Rube Goldberg-esque plot can’t do justice to the zinging action and the manifest delight that Russell takes in bringing it to life. Leaping around in time, tipping in a trio of voice-overs, truffling the soundtrack with hyperbolic aphorisms, adding fantasy sequences, Russell realizes the tale in performances as delicately nuanced as they are fiercely expressive, and, together with the cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, conjures images that whirl and gyrate; the camera presses under the characters’ chins and watches them cock their heads insolently, glides with sly glints of discovery, and fills the screen with brusque action and finely emphasized subtleties. The movie is full of felicities that manage to be, at the same time, poignantly earnest and giddily inventive, as when Burt, heading off to perform the autopsy while bearing a bouquet for the estranged Beatrice, witnesses another killing, flees the killers and the police, and reaches a safe hiding place while still grasping the flowers; or when Burt, resetting Irma’s broken wrist, gives rise to the film’s most breathtakingly rapturous moment. The literary archness of the dialogue yields an incantatory set of street-smart poetic refrains, whether in the studied diction of Burt, the pensive manner of Harold, the incisive tone used by Valerie, or the hectic yet fiercely serious manner of Harold’s assistant and fellow-veteran, Milton (Chris Rock), whether challenging someone who “followed the wrong god home” or asserting the dangers posed to two Black men by “a dead white man in a box.”

Russell does more than fill the film with its high-wattage parade of stars, who energize the proceedings from beginning to end. He creates vivid and forceful characters—slightly heightened caricatures whose unnaturally emphatic presences befit the air of serendipity that gives history the oddball heroes it needs, and that gives them the happy ending they deserve. Shannon does comedy worthily alongside Myers, who lends his whimsy an apt gravity; Rock combines intense self-awareness in substance with unhinged impulsiveness in bearing. Matthias Schoenaerts brings tense dignity to the role of a detective whose war wounds match Burt’s but whose job brings the two men into conflict. Alessandro Nivola channels James Caan as a policeman who compensates cruelly for the drubbing that his self-image takes as a noncombatant owing to flat feet. Anya Taylor-Joy brings curdled chipperness to the role of Libby Voze, Tom’s blithely arrogant wife, and Riseborough flutteringly fluctuates almost to the vanishing point as a young woman caught between parents and husband.

The lead actors’ performances draw a wide range of moods and tones from the movie’s antic exaggerations. Washington adds a sheen of brashly confident gaiety to Harold’s sombre composure. Robbie delivers her best performance to date, incarnating Valerie with a lighthearted lilt and a distinctively dancelike element of deft physical comedy that belies the sacrifices demanded by her creative fervor, romantic passion, and drive for independence. Bale delivers a strange, recklessly great performance—the definition of which is that it’s almost bad. He glowers and barks, tilts his head with a skeptical insolence, and pops his eyes (his eye) with a hectic intensity—it’s a comedic performance by a non-comedian that centers and suffuses the film with his wildly charismatic presence.

As for De Niro, he channels the vague incongruity of his New York-ishness into a parsed, didactic manner (akin to Rupert Pupkin’s, in “ The King of Comedy ”) to suggest, with a dry, elevated, and entirely self-aware reserve, the immense burden placed on him by the conspirators, and the incommensurable distance that all that the general has seen and done in war places between him and pretty much everyone else he meets. Fittingly, this enduring hero of the modern cinema gets the crucially Chaplinesque role when his character, Dillenbeck, is chosen to give a nationally broadcast speech at a military reunion gala, a scene that proves reminiscent of the climactic one in “The Great Dictator.”

Yet the flashing and lurching energies of “Amsterdam,” with its richly imagined scenes developed deeply, even overwhelmingly, in detail, are held together by more than the convoluted plot’s witty and fanciful logic. “Amsterdam” is, above all, a movie of ideas, which serve as a magnetic core, organizing disparate pieces and tones into a firm and decisive pattern. Russell’s cinematic sensibility is galvanized and tautened by the power of these ideas—and by his principled motivation to depict them in action. Despite its comedic tone, “Amsterdam” takes seriously the torn and cut and shattered bodies of people in war, and the pain that they endure long afterward, even when they’ve recovered a measure of apparent normalcy. By way of Valerie’s art work, and the response that it gets from philistines of dubious politics, the film dramatizes the role of even frivolous-seeming and sardonically arch art in embodying the agonies of war’s victims. “Amsterdam” is a drama of a country and a world shaken to their very foundations by the incurable traumas of war.

“Amsterdam” is also centered on the dominant, absurd, and pervasive racism and discrimination of American society, and the film emphasizes its historical inspiration of actual, international Nazism. (It’s worth noting the cinematic echo here of Gordon Parks, Jr.,’s 1974 film “Three the Hard Way,” in regard to a harrowing plot point involving Nazi racist monstrosities in the U.S.) Russell overtly and insistently links white supremacy to anti-Semitism and to misogyny—to the conspiratorial, underhanded suppression of women’s bodily autonomy. He sees the arrogant avarice of American business leaders as cavalierly indifferent to democracy, wantonly selling out the country's institutions and freedoms to the interests of foreign tyrants, whose practices and policies they seek to install here. He shows the untroubled ease with which willful, corrupt, and self-interested media ideologues intentionally and uninhibitedly pollute the civic environment at large and bend the minds of the vulnerable masses, whose social burdens and political frustrations are the results of policies and leaders promoted by the selfsame media. He recognizes the contempt for art, the hostility to culture, as a fundamental marker of this nexus of hatred and oppression. Above all, he sees a country sickened by its own cruelty, feeding on itself, proving its own monstrosity by imposing on private lives and obliterating the fundamental virtue and value of romantic, sexual love. May “Amsterdam” ’s melodramatic sentimentality be forgiven; not many films of such exuberance, since the time of Chaplin, have been fuelled by such rage. ♦

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Amsterdam Review

04 Nov 2022

At one point in Amsterdam , there is a scene involving (deep breath) Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington. Remi Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola. Perhaps the single most stacked-with-talent scene in 2022, it points to one of the problems with David O. Russell ’s sprawling, intermittently enjoyable film: it is simultaneously over-stuffed and under-nourished. It proffers ambitious filmmaking, full of strong craft, great bits and big thematic swings but Amsterdam never really catches fire and fails to amount to more than the sum of its occasionally impressive parts.

Amsterdam opens with the title card: ‘A lot of this really happened’, mostly referring to a little-known dark chapter of US history — an elaborate political coup conspiracy — that emerges in the film’s second half. Before it gets to that, Russell’s script is a mash-up of different sub-genres — crime flick, Hawksian screwball comedy, two-guys-and-a-girl movie — that never finds the right tenor to unify its whackier and more sober elements. It’s at its most fun when, in a lengthy flashback, it etches the friendship between doctor Burt ( Christian Bale ), lawyer Harold ( John David Washington ) and nurse Valerie ( Margot Robbie ), evoking a freewheeling, capricious Jules Et Jim vibe.

Neither serious enough to be sharp satire, nor energetic enough to deliver exuberant farce.

This idealistic, sweet quality ultimately can’t survive in an over-complicated murder plot that blows up into something bigger. Russell wants to use it to make comments about contemporary America (clue: standing up to fascists) but it’s neither serious enough to be sharp satire, nor energetic enough to deliver exuberant farce.

The central trio are winningly played, if thinly drawn, Bale and Robbie’s characters boasting an over-abundance of quirks (him: a false eye that keeps falling out, a penchant for experimenting with meds; her: pipe-smoking, making sculpture out of shrapnel) whereas Washington is somewhat flavourless by comparison. The supporting cast, from Malek and Taylor-Joy’s social-climbers to Myers and Shannon’s bird-watching spies, register without being especially memorable. Taylor Swift gets an instantly meme-able moment. It’s left to Russell regular De Niro, playing a comrade of the murdered General, to provide an anchor for the wayward proceedings.

The Russell film it most resembles is American Hustle , sharing its flamboyance and broad scope, not to mention great costumes — take a bow J.R. Hawbaker and the legendary Albert Wolsky. From production designer Judy Becker’s recreations of ‘30s New York to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s gorgeous, fluid, sepia-tinged images, Amsterdam is a treat to look at. It is also a delight to listen to, Daniel Pemberton’s score adding lightness and much-needed urgency, mainly through woodwind action. It’s a shame, then, that such technical proficiency couldn’t align to better-judged storytelling. Amsterdam wants to celebrate love, humanity and kindness in the messy tapestry of life. It just needed more care and control in weaving the threads.

Movies | 10 02 2023

Movies | 06 07 2022

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Amsterdam review – turn of the screwball in David O Russell’s starry muddle

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington bring laughs to a exhaustingly wacky riff on a real-life fascist conspiracy in 1930s New York

T here’s usually a no more heart-sinking way of starting a movie than with the larky, slippery announcement: “Based on a true story – mostly!” or “What follows is all accurate – kinda!” It usually means the film will fall between the two stools marked “creatively interesting” and “factually informative”. However, David O Russell begins his elaborate screwball mystery Amsterdam by declaring: “A lot of this actually happened.” He means the film is a wacky riff on the little-known 1933 “White House putsch” in which a cabal of wealthy American businessmen conspired to overthrow President Franklin D Roosevelt, hoping to dupe a retired major general called Smedley Butler into leading their fascist veterans’ organisation. (Maybe the nearest British equivalent was Lord Mountbatten being approached in 1968 by a group of establishment grandees to unseat Labour prime minister Harold Wilson.)

Amsterdam imagines three innocent veterans being drawn into these creepy shenanigans. Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a disabled ex-soldier who lost an eye in the first world war; after The Big Short, this is Bale’s second “glass eye” role. Burt is a doctor in New York, supplying pain medication and prosthetic limbs to fellow veterans on a pro bono basis. Burt’s army pal Harold Woodman (John David Washington) is now a qualified lawyer, and helping him to run a morale-boosting ex-servicemen’s gala dinner. And the two men’s soulmate is the mercurial and brilliant Valerie Voze, played by Margot Robbie, who in the first world war was a volunteer nurse and dadaist artist who saved all the shrapnel she dug out of soldiers’ shattered bodies to create bizarre objet trouvé artworks.

Valerie took Burt and Harold for a glorious bohemian retreat in Amsterdam where they did nothing but carouse, but then she mysteriously vanished. And now back in New York in 1933, Burt and Harold witness the bizarre death of a prominent US general’s daughter, and find themselves in the frame for murder; they need the help of another top soldier, General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), and Valerie dramatically reappears.

There are some great supporting turns here, which periodically break the surface of this film’s soupy strangeness. Rami Malek is very funny as Valerie’s wealthy, silken-voiced brother Tom, always charming and insinuating. Mike Myers is amusing as MI6 operative Paul Canterbury, who for no good reason in one scene does Wilson, Keppel and Betty’s “sand dance” , surely the first time this has been seen in the cinema since the opening scene to Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners. Andrea Riseborough is elegant and stylish as Burt’s snobbish wife Beatrice, and Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola get laughs as two lumpen cops.

As for the leads, the best is John David Washington, who pursues a policy alien to his costars: less is more. His performance is cool, unruffled and his address to the camera is very seductively underplayed. Bale and Robbie are doing bigger and broader comedy, and often there isn’t quite the material in the script to back it up – although Bale has a good bit when Burt takes a new, state-of-the-art morphine painkiller via eyedrops, starts talking about how unreliable these things are and then suddenly interrupts himself: “Oh that’s fast!”

But there is something weirdly heavy and foggy in Amsterdam that feels like it’s working against the lightness and nimbleness needed for a caper. It’s the reality of the history, which the movie makes explicit in the closing credits: the grim fact of the US’s proto-fascism understandably means that the comedy isn’t going to be too lighthearted, although the obscurity of this story means that isn’t immediately clear. Well, there are some very good performances, and Washington has taken another step towards A-lister greatness.

Christian Bale
Margot Robbie
John David Washington
David O Russell
Period and historical films

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‘Amsterdam’ Review: Three Amigos Try to Save America in David O. Russell’s Ungainly Period Dramedy

Truth is relative as Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie stumble upon a plot to overturn democracy in this overstuffed social satire from the director of 'American Hustle.'

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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The film centers on a friendship between three Americans drawn into an elaborate political intrigue. The trio were never happier than when they lived together in Amsterdam after the Great War. Encouraged to enlist (and perchance to die) by his high-society in-laws, Dr. Burt Berendsen ( Christian Bale ) lost an eye and half his face in conflict, but gained a lifelong amigo in Harold Woodman ( John David Washington ), a Black soldier who — and this is among the film’s “this really happened” details — was obliged to fight in French uniform since American troops refused to integrate.

Valerie collects shrapnel from her patients, but instead of discarding these fragments, she keeps the twisted metal for artistic projects: teapots made of bomb parts and surrealist photo collages of the kind that Man Ray and Grete Stern produced in the 1930s. Burt’s also something of a sculptor — of the medical arts — rebuilding the faces of other disfigured veterans (while testing experimental painkillers on himself). For a brief, glorious moment in Amsterdam, the friends are spared the stresses of their lives — and wife (Andrea Riseborough), in Burt’s case — back in America, their shenanigans somehow sponsored by two ornithophile spies (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers, the latter heavily disguised and accented), who promise, “We’ll come a-calling at some point in the future.”

Alas, the trio’s carefree days of dancing the Charleston among the Dutch are numbered — and just as well, since this cutesy segment of the story feels overly indebted to Wes Anderson, and not in a good way (e.g., inventing a nonsense song around the French word that makes everyone laugh: “pamplemousse”). Most of the film takes place 15 years later, in New York (New Amsterdam?) in late 1933, as Burt and Harold agree to investigate the suspicious death of the superior officer who introduced them (Ed Begley Jr.), only to be framed for murder in the process. While the case doesn’t seem to be of terribly pressing urgency to the police (as detectives, stars Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola deliver broad character-actor performances), the pair are determined to clear their names, which brings them back in contact with Valerie.

Russell cooks up plenty of high-end kookiness (which is to say, comedic situations set in the hallways and drawing rooms of polite-society houses, like something out of a Howard Hawks or Ernst Lubitsch classic, as opposed to flat-out farce), but through it all, the bonds between these three characters are meant to be the thing that keeps us invested. Russell has miscalculated something there, however, since the 15-year separation between the friends is resolved before they even have time to miss one another in the movie, and whatever chemistry existed between Harold and Valerie’s characters never quite manifests on-screen.

Russell is right to remind Americans of this shameful moment in their past (skip this paragraph to avoid spoilers), as history books tend to downplay the amount of stateside support that Mussolini and Hitler had in the lead-up to World War II. In his novel “The Plot Against America” (adapted for HBO around the same time “Amsterdam” was filming), Philip Roth imagines an alternate reality in which Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated by a Nazi-sympathizing Charles Lindbergh. Here, Russell spotlights more dastardly plans to actually remove the president from office. Production designer Judy Becker (who does terrific work on the film’s myriad period locations) drew inspiration from 1930s rallies, like the one Marshall Curry documented in his Oscar-nominated doc short “A Night at the Garden,” right down to the George Washington portrait hanging behind the dais.

Russell’s truth-will-out, think-for-yourself political message is ultimately what makes “Amsterdam” appealing, though the film is being marketed largely on the popular appeal of its cast. That’s a risky prospect for such an expensive picture, considering that hardly any of the stars delivers the thing that fans love most about their personas — except perhaps Chris Rock, who gets to crack wise about white supremacy. It’s beautifully shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose swooning mix of Steadicam and handheld techniques lent an almost godlike grandeur to recent films by Terrence Malick and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, though that fluid style combines rather oddly with Russell’s more erratic comedic sensibilities.

The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if “Amsterdam,” like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.

Reviewed at AMC Century City, Los Angeles, Sept. 19, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 134 MIN.

Production: A 20th Century Studios release of a Regency Enterprises presentation of a New Regency, Dreamcrew Entertainment, Keep Your Head, Corazon Camera production. Producers: Arnon Milchan, Matthew Budman, Anthony Katagas, David O. Russell, Christian Bale. Executive producers: Yariv Milchan, Michael Schaefer, Sam Hanson, Drake, Adel "Future" Nur. Co-producer: Tracey Landon.
Crew: Director, writer: David O. Russell. Camera: Emmanuel Lubezki. Editor: Jay Cassidy. Music: Daniel Pemberton.
With: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Alessandro Nivola, Andrea Riseborough, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Taylor Swift, Timothy Olyphant, Zoe Saldaña, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro.

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Amsterdam Should Feel Intoxicating, But It’s Exhausting

How we deal with our brokenness is the idea not so secretly at the center of most of David O. Russell’s films. In Amsterdam , he’s conjured up perhaps his most overt treatment of the subject: It opens with images of physical wounds and scars, and as the film proceeds, we realize how spiritually broken the characters are as well. Our ostensible hero is Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), a doctor who specializes in “fixing up banged-up guys like myself” — veterans of the First World War who struggle with missing limbs and faces, “all injuries the world was happy to forget.” The year is 1933, and a new war is on the horizon, but Burt will always be defined by the last one, whose marks he carries on multiple levels: He lost his eye and part of his cheek, wears a back brace, and now is constantly on the lookout for the latest advances in mind-altering medicine to get him through the day.

Many wounds loom over Amsterdam , but the film moves with the devil-may-care verve of a comic romp. Burt and his lawyer friend Harold Woodman (John David Washington) get yanked into a bizarre mystery involving the death of a senator and beloved ex-general, which the man’s daughter (Taylor Swift) suspects to be murder. Pulled into the shenanigans is gorgeous artist Valerie (Margot Robbie), whom Burt and Harold last saw in Amsterdam many years ago: In an extended flashback, we see the blissfully hedonistic idyll the three of them lived in the years after the war when Harold and Valerie were madly in love, Valerie was making beautiful shrapnel-art, and Burt had not yet returned to New York to resume his toxic marriage to the wealthy Beatrice Vandenheuvel (Andrea Riseborough). A yearning to return to the Eden of Amsterdam animates these characters.

It’d be easy to get bogged down with the story of Amsterdam , which manages to be heavily adorned with incident and character but not particularly elaborate, despite a couple of twists at the end. At its heart, the film wants to be a hangout movie. Russell loves to fill his casts with big names — this one includes Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, and Rami Malek, among many others — not because he needs them to get the movies financed (though I’m sure it helps) but because he clearly loves to give actors space to strut. And strut they do. Bale’s commedia dell’arte antics contrast nicely with Washington’s straight-man stylings, while Robbie seems to be in a constant state of transformation, from French nurse to American bohemian to New York socialite, perhaps embodying the existential restlessness of the period between the wars. Michael Shannon and Mike Myers show up as a couple of spies. Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts show up as a couple of cops. I could happily watch entire movies about some of these side characters.

Russell’s style is one I would call aggressive empathy : He insists on reminding us that everybody lives their own life, but his films aren’t patient or generous in the ways we associate with empathy. If Jean Renoir’s famous dictum that “everyone has their reasons” was, in that director’s eyes, a gentle but melancholy truth about the world, Russell seems to regard that same reality with alternating shockwaves of wonder and horror. His movies are both indulgent celebrations of and anxious nightmares about the fact that other people exist.

Amsterdam is filled with slapstick, wordplay, proto-musical numbers, and moments of broad, actorly abandon — so much so that, despite the fact that the story often feels like it’s on a predictable path, you never know if the movie itself will just stop and go in a completely different direction. Whenever it’s operating on that edge of uncertainty, the picture works marvelously. But the freewheeling freewheeling-ness can get to you after a while. As it accumulates running time (and characters and plot points), Amsterdam starts to get exhausting when it should perhaps feel liberating or intoxicating.

And Russell has difficulty tying everything up. For all its shaggy-dog qualities — and this should come as no surprise given the setting, the characters, and the premise — Amsterdam ’s tale is leading to something profound. It has big, timely points to make about spiritual injury, the specter of war, longing for lost utopias, and the rise of fascism. By the time the picture starts to lock back into its story, however, you might realize that it has become a totally different movie. A more serious movie but not necessarily a better one. Still, at least we had Amsterdam.

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Review: David O. Russell goes to war in ‘Amsterdam,’ but this historical farce Nether comes together

Two men look at and listen to the woman between them. All are dressed in early 20th century style.

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The title of “Amsterdam,” the typically busy and discombulating new movie written and directed by David O. Russell, refers to the events of a memorable Dutch idyll in 1918, toward the end of the First World War. For two wounded American servicemen, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and a nurse, Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), overseeing their recovery, the city of Amsterdam becomes a temporary refuge and playground. The French New Wave may still be decades away, but there’s an invigorating dash of Truffaut (but really, true-friend) energy to these proceedings. For a few tender, spirited moments you might be reminded of “Jules and Jim” or perhaps Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” even when Burt’s shot-up face is wrapped in bandages or when Valerie, an aspiring Dadaist, is molding sculptures from the bloody bullets and shrapnel she’s extracted from her patients’ wounds.

Russell himself pushed the carnage of war to aesthetic extremes in 1999’s “Three Kings,” when he turned his camera into an X-ray and showed us — in squirm-inducing, viscera-rupturing detail — what a bullet can do to the human body. While it features its own lovingly detailed glimpses of torn flesh and lingering scars, “Amsterdam” seems rather less inclined to get too deep inside its characters, physically or otherwise. Like Russell’s splendid ’70s caper, “American Hustle” (2013), the movie is a roving piece of period whimsy and a madcap history lesson, a parade of concealed motives and cunning switcheroos loosely inspired — and just barely held together — by real-world events. (It also shares with that movie a few gifted Russell regulars, including production designer Judy Becker and editor Jay Cassidy.)

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But unlike “Hustle,” “Amsterdam” only fitfully locates the moment-to-moment comic verve — or the bittersweet sense of longing — that would give these characters and their farcical shenanigans the deeper human resonance it’s clearly aiming for. What the movie boasts instead is a lot of surface-level freneticism, done in a now-ritualistic Russell mode of controlled chaos that more often than not turns creakily mechanical. There’s a flashback-juggling structure, a large ensemble cast that seems to multiply by the minute and a lot of drunk and disorderly camerawork (vaguely recognizable as that of the gifted Emmanuel Lubezki) that dances its way through scene after scene of rambunctiously choreographed action.

Four men and a woman in period clothing stand around a table with piles of papers and books.

That action kicks off in New York in 1933; the interwar years are slowly rumbling to a close, and whispers of unrest can be heard beneath the bustling city noise and the notes of Daniel Pemberton’s airily charming score. Joining forces not for the first time, Burt, a doctor, and Harold, an attorney, are quietly brought in to investigate the sudden demise of an Army general, Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who commanded their regiment during World War I. Taylor Swift pops up for a suitably swift cameo as Meekins’ daughter, Liz, hanging around just long enough to voice her teary-eyed suspicions of foul play before leaving the dogged Burt and Harold to figure out what’s going on.

So begins a shaggily plotted whodunit that the movie approaches with a sometimes charming, sometimes tiresome and faintly Raymond Chandler-esque reluctance to solve. Unsurprisingly, Russell crams in as many odd jolts and detours as possible, among them an impromptu autopsy (made bearable by Zoe Saldaña as a nurse who’s stolen Burt’s heart), a few violent ambushes and one or two relaxing conversations on the subject of birdwatching. (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers pop up as charming amateur ornithologists, though as with almost everyone here, there’s a bit more to their identities than meets the eye.) Along the way, Russell slides in that crucial 1918 flashback: We see Burt, who’s part Jewish, being shipped off to war by his status-conscious wife, Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough), and her relatives, whose antisemitism is as plain as their Park Avenue address. Burt becomes a medic with a unit modeled on the famous 369th Infantry Regiment, tending mostly to Black soldiers, like Harold, shunned by their white fellow servicemen.

For all the scurrying randomness of incident in “Amsterdam,” there’s nothing accidental about the lifelong friendship that develops between Burt and Harold, both of whom bleed in service of a racist country that despises them. (Burt even loses an eye and will spend much of the story popping a glass one in and out of its socket — an overdone bit that nonetheless packs some metaphorical punch in a movie about not always trusting what you see.) The two men are sent to hospital in Paris, where they meet the captivating Valerie, and then it’s off to those blissful days of recovery and revelry in Amsterdam. It’s here that the movie briefly spreads its wings, animated by the capriciousness of the central performances — Robbie’s mercurial wit, Washington’s seductive cool, Bale’s big heart and frizzy hair — and by a freewheeling sense of la vie bohème possibility. For a few moments, it feels as if the movie really could go anywhere.

A man and two women, in period clothing, look off-camera and appear confused.

But that feeling can’t last. Burt returns to awful Beatrice in New York, the mutually smitten Harold and Valerie go their separate ways, Amsterdam becomes a distant memory and “Amsterdam” itself comes crashing to earth. Returning to 1933, Russell does try to keep spirits aloft and the narrative engine going, though more often than not it stalls out. Burt and Harold’s investigation turns up still more supporting players, including Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy as a wealthy, gabby married couple and Matthias Schoenaerts and a memorably testy Alessandra Nivola as two nosy police officers. (I’m still trying to parse Chris Rock’s narrative function, or at least figure out why the actor — reportedly so funny on the set that Bale had to avoid him to stay in character — feels so wasted here.) Amid these and other complications, our heroes will expose the roots of a sinister conspiracy, hatched by industrialists eager to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and hasten the rise of fascism across and beyond Europe.

“A lot of this really happened,” the script declares at the outset, deploying the kind of cheeky disclaimer language (similarly used in “American Hustle”) that allows a movie to pat itself on the back for its partial accuracy and its bold departures from the historical record. The story does jolt to life — and acquire a real center of moral gravity — once Robert De Niro shows up as the distinguished Gen. Gil Dillenbeck, a fictionalized stand-in for Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, who ultimately brought the so-called Business Plot to public light. Still, in Russell’s topsy-turvy cosmos, historical accuracy is but one measure of truthfulness: If liberal despair has long been his guiding thematic light (especially in his delirious 2004 farce, “I Heart Huckabees” ), then here it’s the many recent and ongoing threats to global democracy that have him none too subtly wringing his hands.

That gives “Amsterdam” a certain currency in a world still reeling from the presidency of Donald Trump and the attendant rise of far-right politicians all over the globe. But there’s a nagging half-heartedness to these bids for topicality, and something less than conviction in the movie’s semisweet encouragement of optimism in the face of mounting danger. This isn’t the first (or probably the last) Russell entertainment to pull its characters back from the brink of unfathomable chaos, or to encourage its characters and its audience to give peace, love and understanding a chance. But if the memory of Amsterdam hovers over Burt, Harold and Valerie like a beacon from happier, more innocent times, then “Amsterdam” itself is another bittersweet callback, a reminder — and, only fitfully, a reclamation — of a filmmaker’s lost vitality.

‘Amsterdam’

Rating: R, for brief violence and bloody images Running time: 2 hours, 14 minutes Playing: Starts Oct. 7 in general release

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‘Amsterdam’: True-ish shaggy-dog tale from 1933 (with echoes of 2022)

Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie headline a film that’s equal parts fact and fiction

“A lot of this actually happened” is the opening epigram of “Amsterdam,” David O. Russell’s kaleidoscopic riff on the curious case of Gen. Smedley Butler, who in 1933 became involved in what would be known as the Business Plot, wherein he was allegedly approached by a cabal of wealthy business executives to be the figurehead for an attempted coup in which they were planning to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Russell’s fantastical take on the episode, in which he mixes fact and fiction with extravagant abandon, can’t be called a success. It’s too scattershot, too much in its own manic, mannered head to qualify as a coherent, much less compelling narrative. But in its own bless-this-mess way, “Amsterdam” pays appropriate homage to the eras it invokes, both past and present. It’s so wild, so dreamlike, so utterly preposterous that it could only be a little bit true.

Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) is a physician in 1933 New York, where his practice is dedicated to easing the suffering of World War I veterans like himself. When his war buddy and best friend Harold (John David Washington) approaches him to perform a mysterious medical procedure on one of their military leaders, the two are plunged into a bizarre and increasingly convoluted scheme, one that will introduce them to a couple of enigmatic birdwatchers (Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), an eccentric millionaire and his saucer-eyed wife (Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy), and Gen. Gil Dillenbeck, a Butler analog played by Robert De Niro with a convincing combination of gravitas and bewilderment.

The shaggy-dog tale Burt and Harold find themselves in will also plunge them back to the Great War, when they met a captivating nurse named Valerie (Margot Robbie) while recuperating in a Belgian hospital. “Amsterdam” takes its title not from the New York of old, but from the European city where Burt, Harold and Valerie found personal liberation in the postwar era of exploration and artistic ferment.

Russell and his crack design team (the production design is by Judy Becker; J.R. Hawbaker and Albert Wolsky designed the costumes) bring impressive energy and detail to building a world immersed in surrealism — the only conceivable aesthetic response to the irrationality and suffering that was supposed to have ceased with the war to end all wars. There are moments, as “Amsterdam” toggles between 1918 and 1933, when it resembles “Ragtime” on psilocybin. Russell, who wrote the script, engages similar issues of race, class, social mobility and power, albeit in an imaginative space where dream logic is at constant odds with the story at hand. Characters appear without explanation; lines of dialogue are repeated for no reason; flights of fancy bump up against moments of graphic gore; coincidences, red herrings, tics and dog legs pile up with promiscuous abandon. “The dream repeats itself before it forgets itself,” one character says, before concluding: “This is the good part.”

There are some good parts in “Amsterdam,” which Russell has populated with some of the screen’s greatest faces — especially the women. In addition to Robbie and Taylor-Joy, he has enlisted Zoe Saldana to play a pathologist who serenely flirts with Burt over an open chest cavity; Andrea Riseborough plays Burt’s wife, Beatrice, a ruthless social climber with the claws to prove it.

It’s all diverting, if not ultimately sustained. Although the cast is thoroughly committed, as “Amsterdam” wends its way to its hysterically pitched climax, it sometimes feels like it’s two very different movies. Bale’s performance is particularly hard to parse: It’s no surprise that he can so completely submerge his British accent to play a streetwise naif, but the accent and characterization become distractions. Is he channeling Peter Falk? Al Pacino? John Turturro? Willem Dafoe?

Such are the distractions of “Amsterdam,” whose curlicues and circumlocutions are genuinely interesting but grow more self-conscious and indulgent with time. The movie’s saving grace is its contagious passion, and Russell’s unavoidably true thesis is that, as historical loops go, the one we’re in right now is a doozy. The demagogues are on the rise again, and it’s hard to know who can fight them off when we’re all the walking wounded.

R. At area theaters. Contains brief violence and bloody images. 127 minutes.

Flickering Myth

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Movie Review – Amsterdam (2022)

December 12, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Amsterdam , 2022.

Written and Directed by David O. Russell. Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Chris Rock, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Taylor Swift, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Mel Fair, Vaughn Page, Bonnie Hellman, Max Perlich, Jessica Drake, Ed Begley Jr., Colleen Camp, Gabé Doppelt, Casey Biggs, Dey Young, Sean Avery, Casey Graf, Rebecca Wisocky, Daniel Riordan, Steven Hack, Floyd Armstrong, Leonard A. Tucker Jr., Richie Harrington, Beth Grant, Christopher Gehrman, Leland Orser, and David Babbitt.

In the 1930s, three friends—a doctor, a nurse, and an attorney—witness a murder, become suspects themselves and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in North American history.

Writer/director David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is nowhere near as funny as it thinks it is. Touting an insanely large cast of household names, it’s also no surprise that David O. Russell is again gunning for frenzied chaos (a style he pulled off so well in Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter before crashing down with Joy ), but here, he simply never achieves that. Amsterdam thinks it’s zany and crazy (admittedly, the third act reveals a relatively unexpected and wild), but the energy on screen reeks of desperation and hardly engages.

Christian Bale is World War I veteran Burt Berendsen, practically forced into combat by his partner Beatrice’s (Andrea Riseborough) father, now working as a physician repairing soldiers’ faces and experimenting with pain medications. He also has a glass eye (something you will never forget because it’s consistently popped or punched out as a sight gag that’s only slightly amusing the first time).

Burt and his lawyer friend Harold Woodman (John David Washington) are contacted by Taylor Swift’s Liz Meekins (a glorified cameo and surprisingly decent turn from the popstar) to perform an autopsy on her father and their former superior, General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who she feels was murdered. Ignoring the advice of their other friend Milton King (a contemporary speaking Chris Rock who seems determined to obliterate the believability that this is the 1930s every second he is on screen) that this is a bad idea, they proceed.

Moments later, Burt and Harold are wrapped in a non-mystery; they witness another murder committed by Taron Milfax (Timothy Olyphant) that everyone (including two detectives played by Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts) is convinced was done by them. There is an actual mystery here, one that brings in Margot Robbie’s Valerie Voze, introduced via lengthy flashback showcasing how she nursed the injuries of Burt and Harold (a sequence that is bizarrely played for comedy), inevitably leading to a friendship packed to remain in Amsterdam looking after one another (Harold and Valerie became romantically entwined, and eventually, Burt felt he had to go back to New York to be with the Beatrice).

Back in the present day, Harold becomes reacquainted with Valerie (she deserted him after the pact ended), now seemingly suffering from nerve damage and prone to falling. Her sister Libby (Anya Taylor-Joy) and her bird-watching obsessed husband, Tom Voze (Rami Malek), give various medications. Then there are a pair of spies played by Mike Myers and Michael Shannon. At long last, our heroes want an audience with General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro), a friend of the murdered general, who might be the key to figuring out what’s going on.

Even over two hours, nothing remotely fascinating stands out about these characters other than David O. Russell has ultimately crafted a film about friendship and kindness between a crippled soldier, a nurse with vertigo, and a Black man in the 1930s, who went on to crack a conspiracy. Amsterdam is also a movie that announces “a lot of this actually happened”, and while some of the specifics are crazy, nothing about the narrative feels grounded or honest. There are few highlights here, but Alessandro Nivola as a bumbling idiot detective and Anya Taylor-Joy horny for Robert De Niro are amusing.

As a whole, Amsterdam never goes beyond slightly amusing. It’s visually unappealing with a bleak color palette at odds with the quirky nature of the storytelling, the story takes forever to arrive somewhere intriguing, and it’s filled with legitimate movie stars that have nothing to do but try to elicit chuckles with material that’s never as whipsmart or frenetic or even as loud as a typical David O. Russell film, despite that being the goal here.

After about 20 minutes of watching everyone fail, you too might wish you had a glass eye to take out, so you don’t have to watch anymore. Although it will be worth putting back in for the final 30 minutes, which click because most of the ensemble is together, and the story finds some direction with diabolical schemes to expose while landing on a worthwhile message about friendship and life.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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‘Amsterdam’ Review: David O. Russell’s Star-Studded Plea for Kindness Rings Hollow

David ehrlich.

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A star-studded new historical comedy that’s amusing at best, noxious at worst, and frantically self-insistent upon its own negligible entertainment value at all times as it strains to find the beauty in the mad tapestry of life? That’s right: David O. Russell is back. And while the volatile director’s recent work (“Joy,” “American Hustle”) has been damning enough to dampen enthusiasm for this comeback on its own — even without Russell’s various personal controversies — it doesn’t exactly help matters that his first movie in seven years is a wildly over-cranked plea to “protect kindness” that rings every bit as forced and hollow as you might expect from someone with such a pronounced reputation for killing it himself.

But David O. Russell lives for mess. It’s his ideal state and favorite subject. “ Amsterdam ,” as with all of the director’s movies, is clearly the work of someone who wanted it to be this way; someone who wanted his sepia-toned noir about one of the United States’ clumsiest political conspiracies to feel like a humorless farce, a sexless “Jules and Jim” love triangle, and also a guileless rebuttal to the latest flare-up of American fascism all at the same time.

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Such exuberant muchness has become Russell’s signature over the last two decade, as most of his 21st century films — starting and peaking with the miraculous “I Heart Huckabees” — have run themselves ragged trying to thread a measure of divine togetherness through the fraying quilt of our existence (“When you get the blanket thing you can relax because everything you could ever want or be you already have and are”). A worthy subject, to be sure, but in order to dramatize how everything is connected on a subatomic level, Russell first has to skin his films with a superficial layer of chaos. In order to hear the beauty in the breakdown, he first has to orchestrate a cacophony of white noise.

In Russell’s more “grounded” fare — namely earlier work like “Three Kings,” but also 2012’s “Silver Linings Playbook,” during which the filmmaker adopted the uptempo and unmoored 360-degree style he still employs today — the real world once gave him something of a leg to stand on. When it comes to the (even more) heightened likes of his later Jennifer Lawrence collaborations, however, Russell has been responsible for creating the same mess he wanted to clean up, and that invariably leads to a clusterfuck of bad shtick.

So it goes with “Amsterdam,” which swaps out Lawrence for the equally game Margot Robbie and surrounds her with a dozen more of today’s biggest stars but otherwise continues the director’s recent trend of trying (and failing) to pan for truth amid the whitewater rapids of his own bullshit.

“A lot of this really happened,” promises the movie’s pained smile of an opening title card (what hath Adam McKay wrought?), which proves to be a characteristically misleading introduction from a filmmaker who can no longer tell the difference between truth and artifice. It also proves to be a perverse setup for a story that starts with Christian Bale playing someone who clearly never existed. No one on Earth will come away from “Amsterdam” wondering if Dr. Burt Berendsen — a kind and kooky one-eyed WWI vet whose rumpled optimism and frizzy shock of brown hair make it seem like he wandered off of a Coen brothers set — was an actual person. Willy Wonka was a more believable human being.

Less obviously invented is Burt’s best friend, former war buddy, and forever straight man Harold Woodman, Esq. ( John David Washington ), who summons Burt to a Manhattan funeral parlor one day in 1933. It seems the magnanimous general who created Burt and Harold’s mixed-race army regiment has been murdered, and his daughter — played by Taylor Swift , who acquits herself with aplomb in a brief appearance that will survive in meme-form long after the rest of this movie has been forgotten — would like our trusted heroes to perform the autopsy.

Chris Rock is also there for some reason, inhabiting perhaps the most flagrantly “there for some reason” role in a film that features stiff competition from Michael Shannon and Mike Myers as a pair of goofy spies, Ed Begley Jr. as a corpse, ex-New York Ranger Sean Avery as a random soldier, and Matthias Schoenaerts as a hulking detective (at least Alessandro Nivola, who plays Schoenaerts’ weaselly partner, finds a wide array of funny reasons to be there every time he appears on screen).

The general’s killing will turn out to be the first domino in a cryptocratic plot to overthrow the American government and replace it with a puppet dictator controlled by a cabal of racist business tycoons — hence our history books remembering it as “The Business Plot” before the same methods were formerly rebranded as the “Republican Agenda.” But “Amsterdam” can’t fully embrace its fate as the interwar “American Hustle” until it walks us through some major backstory, and so we’re off to 1918, where Burt and Harold find themselves under the loving care of a sweetly deranged nurse named Valerie Voze (Robbie, serving up a well-adjusted version of Harley Quinn) after sustaining injuries on the frontlines.

Valerie and Harold fall in love, which works for Burt because his senseless heart belongs to the WASPy nightmare of a wife he left back home (Andrea Riseborough), and the three of them decamp to Amsterdam for an edenic slice of bohemia and the best years of their lives. Alas, it’s only a matter of time before reality intervenes and the trio is split apart, a separation made all the more unfortunate because this movie actually has a nice little kick to it during the brief stretches when its blissful triumvirate is left to swan around the dream life they share together.

These characters are destined to reunite more than a decade later when it’s revealed that Valerie — who has some backstory of her own — was the one who suggested Burt and Harold for the general’s autopsy, but little of the old magic follows them home. What scant traces of it remain aren’t enough to buoy a convoluted yet all too simple conspiracy saga that’s all business and no product.

Some mysterious proto-Nazi types, mostly represented by Timothy Olyphant’s mustached Tarim Milfax, are trying to install the very uninterested General Gil Dillenbeck (a very uninterested Robert De Niro) into the White House, and maybe sterilize America’s Black population at the same time, although that subplot gets weirdly minimized for something so sinister. Despite the bulging size of Russell’s cast — I haven’t even mentioned that Anya Taylor-Joy does a rather marvelous turn as Valerie’s aloof sister, that Rami Malek gawks through a couple of scenes as her rich husband, or that Zoe Saldaña plays Burt’s autopsy nurse crush with a hard-edged appeal that screams for a better movie — there are only a small handful of plausible suspects who could be masterminding the conspiracy, the details of which are even more undercooked here than they seem to have been in real life.

And the only thing that could foil their evil plan and prove that love will triumph over hatred in the end? An interracial throuple.

(L-R): Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington in 20th Century Studios' AMSTERDAM. Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

That “Amsterdam” manages to run for 134 minutes without slowing down — despite its wanton disarray of a plot — should be interpreted as a mild warning. Russell squeezes a lot mileage from the notion that Burt and Harold are suspects in the general’s murder, but it never feels like either of them is in the least bit of danger. Most of the film is spent on scenes that feature 10 gallons of dialogue poured into story beats the size of a thimble, an orgiastic flurry of self-amused reaction shots, and a rotating voiceover track that’s passed between the characters as if at random (drink every time Bale says that he “followed the wrong god home” and you might just be lucky enough to pass out before Mike Myers’ whole bit about cuckoo birds). At times, that strategy can make it feel as though Burt, Harold, and Vera share the same thoughts; more often, it just feels as though they share the same writer.

So far as Russell is concerned, that may be more of a feature than a bug. For him, anything is permissible in the pursuit of a certain madcap vibration — a harmonistic singularity that suggests everything is connected. His supercollider-like films strive to reveal that molecular togetherness by spinning so fast that they eventually blur into focus, and they tend to work best during the stretches when raw energy is being catalyzed into action (or vice-versa).

If “Amsterdam” ultimately arrives at some very simple conclusions about the power of love and the operatic ring cycle of history repeating, it at least manages to stay in Russell’s favorite zone for longer (and in more likable fashion) than several of his previous films. However dissonant it might be for a David O. Russell character to preach the virtues of protecting kindness, there’s an undeniable spark that bonds Burt, Harold, and Vera together — a bond that seems to grow stronger as the movie goes on because of how it weathers the nonsense around it.

As with any interwar story about the power of friendship, “Amsterdam” knows that its victories will be pyrrhic in nature, but if history repeats itself, that means our hopes for a better future can repeat themselves too. “Do me a favor,” Burt asks: “Try to be optimistic.” Of course, optimism is the easy part in a movie like this. It’s entertainment that proves elusive.

20th Century Studios will release “Amsterdam” in theaters on Friday, October 7.

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Amsterdam movie review & film summary (2022)
Amsterdam. Simultaneously overstuffed and undernourished, frantic and meandering, "Amsterdam" is one big, star-studded, hot mess of a movie. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, Zoe Saldana, Alessandro Nivola and many more major names: How can you ...
Amsterdam
Rated: 2.5/4 Oct 31, 2022 Full Review Jordan Hoffman AV Club Like a sloppy guy at a bar telling a farfetched tale Oct 19, 2022 Full Review Richard Brody New Yorker May "Amsterdam" 's ...
'Amsterdam' Review: A Madcap Mystery With Many Whirring Parts
In "Amsterdam," Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington play three American comrades who met in Europe during World War I. Merie Weismiller/20th Century Studios. By Manohla ...
Amsterdam (2022)
Amsterdam: Directed by David O. Russell. With Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Alessandro Nivola. In the 1930s, three friends witness a murder, are framed for it, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history.
Amsterdam
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2023. While Amsterdam was undoubtedly enjoyable to film for its many costars, the merriment doesn't quite translate to the screen. The plethora of side ...
'Amsterdam' Review: Christian Bale and Margot Robbie Head Starry
Movies; Movie Reviews ... September 27, 2022 7:00pm ... David O. Russell's Amsterdam is a lot of movies inelegantly squidged into one — a zany screwball comedy, a crime thriller, an earnest ...
Amsterdam (2022)
efee_puiyi 9 July 2023. The film "Amsterdam" is nicely written and directed by David O. Russell. It's the story about friendship, the relationship between an idealistic doctor, an idealistic black lawyer and a nice looking idealistic artist. Bale, Washington and Robbie is an awesome trio. Bales acting is remarkable.
Amsterdam review
Amsterdam review - don't try to keep up ... Sat 8 Oct 2022 10.00 EDT Last modified on Sat 8 Oct 2022 13.19 EDT. Share. I t all starts with a murder. Or possibly two murders ...
Review: David O. Russell's 'Amsterdam' Is An All-Star Delight
David O. Russell's Amsterdam is a surprise delight, both in terms of a filmmaker whose star-studded concoctions generally leave me cold and in terms of the kind of 'just a movie' Hollywood ...
Amsterdam (2022)
Film Movie Reviews Amsterdam — 2022. Amsterdam. 2022. 2h 14m. R. Comedy/Drama/History. Where to Watch. Buy. $19.99 ... Despite high initial projections for Amsterdam, the David O. Russell caper ...
'Amsterdam' Review: David O. Russell's All-Star Mess Is a Must-See
That decade's shadow looms large over Amsterdam, Russell's first movie in seven years. Never mind that the bulk of the action takes place between the two world wars. You can detect a strong ...
"Amsterdam" Is an Exemplary Work of Resistance Cinema
October 10, 2022. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington star in David O. Russell's exuberant and zingy "Amsterdam.". Photograph courtesy 20th Century Studios. It's ...
Amsterdam Review
Amsterdam suffers from a surfeit of story detail without the vigour to whizz you through it. It has likable leads and the craft is on point, but the result, given all the talent involved, is a ...
Amsterdam
Chicago Sun-Times. Oct 5, 2022. In the case of David O. Russell's jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy "Amsterdam," the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class. Read More.
'Amsterdam' review: Christian Bale, John David Washington and ...
"Amsterdam" certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of ambition, and the star-studded cast merely adds to that sense of grandeur. Yet writer-director David O. Russell has assembled them in the ...
Amsterdam review
Amsterdam review - turn of the screwball in David O Russell's starry muddle ... Wed 28 Sep 2022 11.39 EDT Last modified on Thu 6 Oct 2022 12.45 EDT. Share. T here's usually a no more heart ...
'Amsterdam' Review: David O. Russell's Ungainly Period Dramedy
'Amsterdam' Review: Three Amigos Try to Save America in David O. Russell's Ungainly Period Dramedy Reviewed at AMC Century City, Los Angeles, Sept. 19, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 134 ...
Amsterdam (2022 film)
Amsterdam is a 2022 period mystery comedy thriller film directed, written, and produced by David O. Russell and starring Christian Bale (who also produced), Margot Robbie, and John David Washington alongside an ensemble supporting cast including Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Taylor Swift, Matthias Schoenaerts ...
'Amsterdam' Movie Review: Intoxicating, Exhausting
movie review Oct. 7, 2022. Amsterdam Should Feel Intoxicating, But It's Exhausting. ... In Amsterdam, he's conjured up perhaps his most overt treatment of the subject: It opens with images of ...
'Amsterdam' review: David O. Russell's messy historical farce
Oct. 5, 2022 12:21 PM PT. The title of "Amsterdam," the typically busy and discombulating new movie written and directed by David O. Russell, refers to the events of a memorable Dutch idyll in ...
'Amsterdam': True-ish shaggy-dog tale from 1933 with echoes of 2022
Review by Ann Hornaday. October 4, 2022 at 2:26 p.m. EDT. 4 min. ( 2 stars) "A lot of this actually happened" is the opening epigram of "Amsterdam," David O. Russell's kaleidoscopic riff ...
Amsterdam (2022)
Amsterdam, 2022. Written and Directed by David O. Russell. Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek ...
'Amsterdam Review: David O. Russell Plea for Kindness Rings Hollow
September 27, 2022 10:00 pm. "Amsterdam". 20th Century Studios. A star-studded new historical comedy that's amusing at best, noxious at worst, and frantically self-insistent upon its own ...

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‘Amsterdam’ Review: Three Amigos Try to Save America in David O. Russell’s Ungainly Period Dramedy

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Reviewed at AMC Century City, Los Angeles, Sept. 19, 2022. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 134 MIN.

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