Netflix is now streaming one of the year’s most eagerly awaited films. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good one.

The idea behind A House of Dynamite may be thoughtful and well-meaning but the execution of it is awful.

Films about accidental nuclear bomb launches are nothing new. In 1964, there were two, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which was released in January, and Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, which was released in October. Kubrick’s satirical film, having gotten there first, was a huge hit earning four Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Director. Lumet’s serious take on the subject seemed less scary to audiences that laughed themselves silly at Kubrick’s film. It failed to receive any Oscar nominations

Kathryn Bigelow’s first film in eight years follows along the lines of Lumet’s film albeit with a few changes to bring it closer to the way things are now such as women and minorities now having important government jobs that only middle-aged or older white men had in sixty plus years ago.

In the Lumet film, the USSR launched nuclear bomb is headed for New York City. New York audiences left the theatre playing it in trepidation that was relieved when they realized the city outside the theatre was still there.

In this one, the launched nuclear bomb is headed for Chicago. We assume it gets there because the screen goes black at the end, but since the film takes place largely in Washington, D.C. and the mountains of Pennsylvania where the bunkers are, it makes no sense for the screen to go blank as though the bomb landed there as the president was talking on the phone to his wife who was on a safari in Africa. Where the accidental launch came from, no one knows but is assumed to have come from North Korea as both the Russians and the Chinese deny that it was either of them that caused it to happen.

It is supposed to take place in either contemporary Washington. D.C. or in the not-too-distant future, yet the president is molded in the style of Obama, and his cabinet is molded in the style of George Herbert Walker Bush’s cabinet. The present administration would more likely do what the fictional president wouldn’t, launch U.S. nuclear bombs to strike Russia, China, and North Korea.

The acting is all over the place. Idris Elba is excellent as the president who doesn’t show up until an hour into the film, while the next best performance is provided by Gabriel Basso as his National Security Advisor. I had no idea who Basso was, although he seemed familiar. I was both surprised and bemused to learn that he was the actor who played JD Vance in Hillbilly Elegy.

The rest of the cast is ill-used. Rebecca Ferguson, as a White House supervisor with a sick child, dominates the first part of the film but then disappears. Tracy Letts as a sarcastic General and Jared Harris as the Secretary of Defense are just annoying. No one else is in it long enough to make an impression one way or another.

Despite early expectations, I can’t imagine that this will be nominated for any Oscars, certainly not Best Picture, Director, or Screenplay.

While we await better year-end films to stream, now is a great time to catch two excellent newly streaming miniseries.

Netflix’s Boots was the last production of legendary producer Norman Lear who died at 101 in 2023.

Based on Greg Cope White’s memoir, The Pink Marine, which took place in the 1980s, the series begins in 1990 with closeted gay teenager Cope, played by former child actor Miles Heizer, and his best friend, a straight Irish Korean, played by Liam Oh, joining the marines on “the buddy system.”

Others in their platoon include twins Blake Burt and Brandon Tyler Moore, Jonathan Nieves as a homesick enlistee missing his sweetheart, Rico Paris as a secret sharpshooter, Dominic Goodwin as a diarist, Jack Cameron Kay as a sleepwalker, and Angus O’Brien as a psycho emulating Vincent D’Onofrio in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, among others.

English actor Max Parker is the series’ most valuable player as tough drill instructor with a secret of his own. Vera Farmiglia, as Cope’s flighty mother, doesn’t have much to do but makes her presence known in the film’s penultimate scene in which she reveals yet another secret, one that is known only to herself.

Production values of this eight-episode series are first-rate.

HBO Max’s Task is another excellent miniseries from Brad Ingelsby, the creator of 2021’s Mare of Easttown.

Like his earlier series, Task is set in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and other Pennsylvania locations.

The story involves a case that is assigned to career FBI agent Mark Ruffalo at the request of his retiring supervisor (Martha Plimpton). He is given three assistants that were selected for him at random, played by Fabian Frankel, Thuso Mbedo. and Alison Oliver.

The agents are investigating the killings of a drug smuggling husband and wife and two other people, and the kidnapping of the couple’s six-year-old son played by Ben Lewis Doherty.

One of the killings was of an accomplice of one of the garbageman, played by Tom Pelfrey, who was robbing the house in revenge of the killing of his brother by the motorcycle gang that the husband and wife were part of. He tells the boy who wakes up after the killings have taken place unbeknownst to him that his parents asked him to watch him while his parents take care of a sick relative. He brings him home to his niece (Emilia Jones), telling her that the boy’s father was someone her father and he worked with years ago.

Ruffalo also has family problems revolving around the murder of his wife by his adopted son and his troubled relationship with the boy’s sister, Rufflao’s adopted daughter, Silvia Dionicio.

Production values of this seven-episode are also first-rate.

Happy viewing.