amsterdam movie review 2022

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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.

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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.

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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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Nikki glaser seriously loves taylor swift: "i'm maybe a swiftie before i'm a comedian", another teen in custody over foiled plot targeting now-canceled taylor swift shows in vienna.

Every new movie from Russell now stirs up allegations of his abusive behavior on- and off-set for relitigation on Film Twitter. But that hasn’t hurt his ability to draw top talent. The phalanx of stars will be the main attraction with this long-gestating Fox project, going out through Disney, even if the cautionary note about history repeating itself doesn’t lack for contemporary relevance.

While Russell’s screenplay introduces them in a choppy flashback structure that starts in New York in 1933 before rewinding 15 years, a trio of fast friends forms the story’s core. They are Burt Berendsen ( Christian Bale ), a doctor experimenting outside the medical establishment with new pain treatments, particularly for wounded war veterans; his attorney chum Harold Woodman ( John David Washington ); and wealthy artist Valerie Voze ( Margot Robbie ).

They met in France in 1918, while serving in World War I. Burt was urged to enlist by the blue-blood family of his since-estranged wife Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough). Her snobbish parents (Casey Biggs, Dey Young) felt that becoming a war hero might paper over his half Jewish, half Catholic working-class background and make him a better fit for the family’s Park Avenue medical practice.

Their friendship was at its sweetest in Amsterdam, where Valerie introduced them to Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers) and Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon), intelligence officers for the British and American governments, respectively, as well as ornithological enthusiasts thrown out of the international bird-watchers society for stealing eggs from the nests of near-extinct species. Canterbury also manufactures glass eyes, allowing him to provide a replacement for the eye Burt lost in combat.

All this might seem a fussy overload of background detail, and indeed, the movie often feels like it’s piling on eccentricities in a bid to out-quirk Wes Anderson. The bond uniting Burt and Harold and Valerie is platonic, though tinged by hesitant romance between the latter two. But Russell’s screenplay is too manic to establish the three-way union forged during the Amsterdam idyll as the film’s true heart, despite its title.

The story becomes even busier with the 1933 plot, which bolts out of the gate when well-heeled mystery woman Liz Meekins ( Taylor Swift ) contacts Burt and Harold to ask for their help. She’s suspicious about the death of her father, the beloved former Army general Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who oversaw the 369th and who died under murky circumstances during a recent return passage by ship from Europe. The general was scheduled to be guest speaker at an upcoming New York veterans’ reunion gala.

In case the character gallery isn’t already crowded enough for you, there’s also Valerie’s philanthropist brother Tom ( Rami Malek ) and his wife Libby ( Anya Taylor-Joy ). It won’t even have registered to most viewers that Valerie drifted out of Harold and Burt’s orbit after the war until they turn up at the Voze mansion while investigating Meekins’ death and find her heavily medicated for a supposed nervous disorder.

A related crime that occurs early on puts Burt and Harold on the radar of fellow WWI vet Detective Lem Getweiler (Matthias Schoenaerts) and his dimwit flat-footed partner Det. Hiltz (Alessandro Nivola).

I confess I found all this messy and exhausting until Burt and Harold’s investigation leads them to Meekins’ army buddy General Gil Dillenbeck (De Niro), living a quiet life in the leafy suburbs with his droll, doting wife (Beth Grant). Inspired by Armed Forces legend Major General Smedley Butler, who at the time of his death in 1940 was the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, Dillenbeck provides a welcome anchor to the story, while De Niro’s stern authority in the role helps whip the wandering tone into line.

That American conspiracy plot is rooted in history, tied to the rise of Fascism in Italy and Germany; it’s a fascinating story, withstanding Russell’s efforts to kill it with over-embellishment. The writer-director claims the film’s genesis dates back before the recent resurgence of the White Supremacist movement, the swirl of QAnon lunacy and far-right attempts to undermine the democratic integrity of the American government. But the parallels with our current reality are unmistakable, while the acknowledgment of shameful footnotes such as forced sterilization clinics touches on the evil of racial “cleansing.”

Although Amsterdam maintains a stubbornly hopeful belief that goodness will prevail, the film is also realistic about the resilience of hate in our political culture and the fact that the deep-pocketed instigators of jackboot menace are seldom punished. It makes for a stirring final act, even if the sobering message doesn’t always sync up with Russell’s chaotically cartoonish approach — a mercurial divide mirrored in Daniel Pemberton’s score, which veers between high intrigue and whimsy.

But this is primarily a character-driven movie, even if that field has so many people jostling for space that the material might have been better suited to limited-series treatment. Some of the performances don’t have much scope to stretch beyond caricature, but among the secondary characters that make an impression are Malek’s Tom Voze, an oily balance of charm and creepiness; Taylor-Joy’s similarly two-faced Libby, a climber who gets amusingly giddy around De Niro’s general; Saldaña, wise and grounded as Irma, casually discussing the finer points of love over a corpse; and Riseborough, a coddled Daddy’s girl still struggling to reconcile her affections with familial expectations.

As for the central trio, Washington exudes an easy charisma that hasn’t always been apparent in his previous roles, while Robbie melds old-fashioned movie-star glamor with modern intelligence, her bohemian spirit making her credible as a rebellious heiress, an idiosyncratic artist and a woman whose heart operates by its own rules. Valerie believes in love and art and kindness, making her the movie’s unofficial mascot.

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Review: David O. Russell’s ‘Amsterdam’ Is An All-Star Delight

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Amsterdam IMAX poster

Amsterdam (2022)

New Regency/rated R/134 minutes/$80 million

Written and directed by David O. Russell

Starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya-Taylor Joy, Zoe Saldana, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Andrea Riseborough, Taylor Swift, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alessandro Nivola, Rami Malek and Robert De Niro

Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki

Edited by Jay Cassidy

Music by Daniel Pemberton

Opening theatrically courtesy of Walt Disney DIS on October 7

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 popcorn flick that used to be the industry’s bread and butter. It is, commercial hopes and awards season potential be damned, an $80 million dramedy filled with game movie stars (Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, etc.) relishing the chance to tear into a big movie about important past = prologue subject matter that isn’t a franchise flick or stuffy year-end melodrama. It is light on its feet as it loosely retells a critical but mostly forgotten chapter of American history. It’s too long, and the third act becomes painfully redundant, but it mostly excels as a top-flight studio programmer.

Opening theatrically this Thursday evening, 20th Century Studios’ Amsterdam takes off with the momentum of a speeding bullet, plunging us into the lives of Dr. Burt Berendsen (Bale) and Harold Woodman (Washington). Both are World War I vets; the good doctor lost an eye in combat while his lifelong pal had to fight in a French uniform since the American forces remained unintegrated. Right now, Woodman is a lawyer while Berendsen fixes the disfigured faces of fellow veterans (while high on experimental painkillers), and an opportunity for a high-paying gig comes in the form of an autopsy request from the daughter (Taylor Swift) of a deceased U.S. senator. Things take a turn, our pals find themselves on the run, and the film dives back into the past to bring us up to speed.

(L-R): John David Washington as Harold, Christian Bale as Burt, and JMargot Robbie as Valerie in 20th Century Studios' AMSTERDAM. Photo by Merie Weismiller. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

The film never really regains the super-charged momentum of those first twenty minutes, even if it’s clear that O. Russell would rather take his time with these characters and this world. The prologue perhaps sets false impressions about how the rest of the film will unfold. This isn’t a thrill-a-minute mystery but a lazy river movie (think, offhand, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ). The pleasures are rooted in strong production values, a terrific ensemble cast (including a career-best Margot Robbie performance as a quirky, sympathetic wartime nurse who becomes a lifelong friend) delivering some top-shelf work. The characters remain the focus even as the slow-building plot evolves from simple whodunnit to global conspiracy. Not unlike American Hustle , Amsterdam concerns a few relative nobodies who find themselves becoming crucial figures in American history, which is partially the point.

Robbie pops in when the film flashes back to wartime, as Valorie Voze treats both wounded warriors and helps them hightail it to Amsterdam for a period of post-war nirvana. Valerie and Harold take a liking to each other, which makes sense since Robbie and Washington are both charismatic and drop-dead gorgeous performers. At the same time, Burt yearns for the approval of his wife (Andrea Riseborough) and her wealthy family. The film initially coasts on its character-specific pleasures. The plot kicks back in when the duo gets mixed up in a present-tense (early 1930s) murder. If you don’t know the history, you don’t need any more. The slow-building peril eventually concerns Robert De Niro as an esteemed Major General and various quirky characters played by Zoe Saldana, Chris Rock, Rami Malek, Anya-Taylor Joy, Michael Shannon and Mike Myers.

(L-R): John David Washington as Harold, Margot Robbie as Valerie, Rami Malek as Tom, and Anya Taylor-Joy as Libby in 20th Century Studios' AMSTERDAM. Photo by Merie Weismiller Wallace; SMPSP. © 2022 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Amsterdam is a rollicking good time with good company amid Judy Decker’s scrumptious period piece production design. It’s a reminder of how big a Hollywood movie can look and feel when it has a big budget that isn’t mostly taken up with fx-driven spectacle, even if its budget would have made it commercially perilous in 2012, let alone 2022. Emmanuel Lubezki lends prestige and gravitas to the comic farce, while the film excels above all as an acting treat. It’s a blast watching some of today’s best and brightest flourish under one of the last directors who can still get this kind of movie made for this kind of budget in Hollywood. The film is unquestionably important without drowning in its present-tense relevance, excelling as an old-school, adult-skewing entertainment. Warts and all, I kind of loved it.

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Amsterdam Reviews

This film misses the mark so often, but at least the leads salvage as much as they can, along with some other elements that keep it from being among the worst films ever made.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 29, 2024

I have to wonder how a film full of great stars and such a compelling story (on paper) could result in such an uninspiring mess, but that’s what happens when a filmmaker prioritizes star power over writing.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 25, 2024

A moralizing version of [a] great political thriller ... I suspect that sounds like an ill-advised way to spend an evening.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2024

Amsterdam is noise and nothing more.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 3, 2024

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

‘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

Chief Film Critic

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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 Review

A mystery that fizzles..

Amsterdam premieres exclusively in theaters Oct. 7.

There’s a very good movie simmering inside Amsterdam that might have flourished if writer/director David O. Russell had the discipline to keep a tight rein on the overly ambitious scale of his script. A period piece/dramedy/mystery/thriller/romance/satire, Amsterdam reminded me of listening to a 6-year-old trying to tell you a story that just rambles off into a ditch because of their unfettered hyper indulgence with convoluted asides. What starts out as a relatively compact and clever tale of two WWI veterans who get framed for murder devolves into a hodgepodge of connected tangents that includes everything from a triangular soulmate relationship to the surreptitious rise of facism in the United States between WWI and WWII.

Burt (Christian Bale) narrates the overall story, and the context of his life as a WWI veteran who lost his eye in battle. Nowadays, he either works tirelessly or sees his best friend Harold Woodman (John David Washington), a lawyer in an all-Black firm. Russell takes us on a lengthy flashback to show us how the two met in France, 1918, when they were assigned to the same platoon. Riddled with shrapnel and major wounds, they’re patched up by Valerie Brandenburg (Margot Robbie), an American expat volunteer nurse in France, and the trio become inseparable, relocating to Amsterdam. Their idyllic existence ends, however, when Burt goes back home to his apathetic wife, Beatrice, (Andrea Riseborough). Valerie and Harold realize their romantic relationship can’t survive in America, Val vanishes, and Harold follows Burt to New York to get his law degree.

In 1933, Harold and Burt are summoned in secret by Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift), the daughter of their former non-racist commander, General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), to perform an autopsy on his recently deceased body, as she fears foul play. Burt performs the procedure with the help of mortician’s assistant Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldana) and just as they go to reveal the results, Liz is brutally run over by a car driven by a scarred man (Timothy Olyphant), who then convinces the crowd that Harold and Burt pushed her. They go on the run and all hell breaks loose.

That’s a lot to process but there’s at least five other subplots not even mentioned. If Russell kept the story entirely focused on the trio of Valerie, Burt, and Howard, the movie would have been much lighter on its feet because of the rapport and comedic performances of Robbie, Bale, and Washington. They’re great together, and their halcyon remembrances of Amsterdam as their happiest and purest days of love and friendship are the most affecting of the film. They sizzle whenever they share the screen, as Bale’s manic energy, Washington’s dry wit, and Robbie’s wide-eyed idealism work in perfect synergy.

Who's your favorite actor in Amsterdam's star-studded cast?

And while they’re supported by some interesting performances by the likes of Saldana, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, and Chris Rock, most of the cast are operating within an impenetrable sliding scale of their personalities being “way too big” or “way too quirky.” There’s scenery chewing galore, especially as the machinations of the overarching plot reach their climax and there’s no shortage of scenes featuring arch fascists, corporatists, or moralists banging literal and figurative podiums. By the last 30 minutes, what should have been a lark-filled mystery unveiling instead becomes a pretty insufferable, verbose, on-the-nose conclusion that draws parallels to what happened then with today’s political discourse. How the movie went from a charming war friends pastiche to an ending that has Robert De Niro’s General character reading a speech next to actual footage of his real-life counterpart in history doing the same is exactly what’s wrong with Amsterdam. Russell just veers indiscriminately towards whatever he’s trying to say and hammers it home without any of the grace present in the first reel.

Strongest performances aside, Amsterdam is also an unequivocally beautiful film to look at. It’s like a Coen brothers feature procreated with a Wes Anderson movie and out popped Amsterdam’s aesthetics. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, production designer Judy Becker, and the costume and hair and makeup teams have recreated the time and places with incredible texture and gorgeous color palettes. Robbie and Anya Taylor-Joy are luminous. The men look dapper even if most are sporting some kind of post-war prosthetic scar or deformity. But in the end, none of the wrapping can save the film from the self-important nosedive it takes, which sadly sucks the life out of all of the early material that had such promise.

Amsterdam starts out strong but gets weighed down by David O. Russell’s heavy-handed script that devolves from an involving mystery into a preachy and overblown allegory about facism. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington have fantastic chemistry but they get buried under the weight of a script that suffocates the humanity of their story and veers off into a ridiculously complicated plot that feels like it goes on forever and never regains its heart.

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‘Amsterdam’: Review

By Tim Grierson, Senior US Critic 2022-09-28T02:00:00+01:00

Christian Bale and Margot Robbie head an A-list cast in David O. Russell’s overstuffed period murder mystery

Source: Walt Disney Studios

‘Amsterdam’

Dir/scr: David O. Russell. US. 2022. 134mins

David O. Russell’s films burst at the seams, his characters barely able to contain their big dreams and even bigger personalities. But such unbridled energy requires a careful execution, lest the proceedings become exhausting rather than exuberant; a distinction Amsterdam fails to recognise. Although stuffed with ambition and the occasionally arresting moment, this 1930s mystery flaunts a freewheeling spirit that far outpaces its convoluted story and dramatically thin protagonists. The picture couldn’t look better thanks to its ace period detail and Emmanuel Lubezki’s enrapturing photography, but the writer-director’s usual emotional maximalism is both cranked up too high and not nearly affecting enough. 

What once felt effortless in Russell’s orchestrated mayhem here seems strained

Opening on October 7 in multiple territories including the UK and US (following IMAX preview screenings in the US on September 27), Russell’s first feature since 2015’s Joy boasts an array of award-winning stars including Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek and Robert De Niro. In its flamboyance and sprawling scope, Amsterdam resembles multiple-Oscar-nominee American Hustle , a sizeable hit ($251 million worldwide) which, similarly, was loosely based on actual events. The possibility of Russell’s latest duplicating that success seems unlikely, however, with reviews likely less than glowing.

In 1933 New York, doctor Burt (Bale) and lawyer Harold (Washington) are longtime best friends who met in France while fighting in the same regiment during World War I. But when their aged commanding officer Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.) is found dead — and the autopsy suggests he was murdered — Burt and Harold determine to get to the bottom of it. Their investigation will lead to them reuniting with Valerie (Robbie), a nurse who patched them up in the Great War, fell in love with Harold and then disappeared.

Touching on everything from fascism to racism, Amsterdam looks to the past to tell a story about present-day woes, plunging our three heroes into a tale full of intrigue, romance and dark comedy. (Because of Burt’s severe battlefield injuries he now requires a glass eye, which tends to fall out at the most inopportune times.) But Russell drapes his film’s sober concerns in stylish looks, accentuated by J.R. Hawbaker and Albert Wolsky’s glamorous costumes and Judy Becker’s rich production design. This is just one way that Amsterdam is drunk on its own showmanship, confidently shifting between time periods, sporting voiceover from two different characters, and every once in a while slowing down the feverish forward momentum to focus on Harold and Valerie’s blossoming attraction. (Lubezki’s floating camera is especially useful for the love story, lending a little fairytale magic.)

Unfortunately, Amsterdam ’s boisterous panache can only take Russell and his spirited actors so far. The bond between Burt and Harold always feels superficial, and despite Robbie’s ultra-chic portrayal of this kindly nurse who’s also an artist suffering from a touch of vertigo, she can’t overcome a character loaded down with quirks. In fact, many in the massive ensemble seem to have been encouraged to give slightly exaggerated, self-consciously “old-timey” performances. Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy play an eccentric married couple with an unexpected connection to Valerie, while Andrea Riseborough is frustratingly broad as Burt’s snooty, upperclass wife. With the exception of a nicely restrained De Niro, portraying a somber general who emerges as the film’s moral compass, the supporting cast is “colourful” without being particularly memorable.

That said, Amsterdam can sometimes be breezy fun, the story’s unpredictability and the main characters’ openhearted desire to find their place in the world — a familiar trait in Russell protagonists — intermittently compelling. And although Bale often goes to extremes when working with the director, donning outrageous wigs while depicting foolhardy souls, he locates in Burt a man who was physically (and psychically) shattered by the war, yet refuses to let go of his optimism about people. There’s a winning sweetness and vulnerability to the role that Amsterdam ’s overly busy and increasingly complicated plotting can’t quite accommodate for. Instead, Burt and his friends will go down a conspiracy-laden rabbit hole while investigating Meekins’ killing that results in a heavy-handed — albeit, apparently fact-based — revelation that’s not especially satisfying.

As in American Hustle , the writer-director wants to marry a rollicking narrative to a thoughtful commentary about America, painting an unflattering portrait of a nation that too easily forgets those who fought in its wars while buying into a myth of its unrivalled greatness. Many of the people Burt, Harold and Valerie encounter are cynical or corrupt but, in typical Russell fashion, his main characters have retained their idealistic streak. Amsterdam ’s joyous, indulgent cheekiness is meant to celebrate that playful defiance, turning a potentially tense whodunit into a giddy, sweeping romp. But what once felt effortless in Russell’s orchestrated mayhem here seems strained, a lark that refuses to take flight.

Production companies: New Regency, DreamCrew Entertainment, Keep Your Head, Corazon Camera   

Worldwide distribution: Disney

Producers: Arnon Milchan, Matthew Budman, Anthony Katagas, David O. Russell, Christian Bale          

Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki

Production design: Judy Becker

Editing: Jay Cassidy

Music: Daniel Pemberton

Main cast: 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 Saldana, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro

• United States
• Walt Disney

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“Amsterdam” Is an Exemplary Work of Resistance Cinema

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: 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.

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 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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David O Russell’s Marmite-y, messily-plotted tale of friendship and conspiracy is all outsized performances and good vibes

Time Out says

American Hustle director David O Russell’s breezy period caper is not, by any traditional metric, A Great Movie. The plot is bananas, despite being loosely based on a real-life fascist conspiracy in 1930s America, the ending is a dud and the outsized performances won’t be for everyone. And I kinda liked it. Because what Amsterdam lacks in tight storytelling, it more than makes up for in exuberant, happy-go-lucky spirit. It’s the kind of whole-hearted celebration of goofy camaraderie and friendship of which there are all too few on our cinema screens. And for all its flaws, it leaves you feeling better about the world.   That baggy plot involves three old Great War friends caught up a byzantine scheme to instal a Nazi-sympathising government in Washington. It begins with a postmortem and takes in Great War veterans’ leagues, a couple of ornithologically fixated spies (Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), more murders, two dimbulb cops (Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts) and Rami Malek’s slippery one-percenter. It’s, well, a lot. Amsterdam ’s well-stocked ensemble inhabits its lushly constructed and lit Jazz Age world ( Gravity ’s Emmanuel Lubezki is cinematographer) with gusto. Christian Bale delivers a joyously leftfield performance as a caring, glass-eyed Jewish doctor struggling to win the approval of the snobbish Park Avenue family of his wife (Andrea Riseborough). To say he goes ‘full Columbo’ is very much meant as a compliment. 

What   Amsterdam   lacks in tight storytelling, it more than makes up for in exuberant, happy-go-lucky spirit

Alongside Margot Robbie’s sparky nurse/artist and John David Washington’s level-headed lawyer, he’s the heart of the movie. Diving back to 1918, the threesome are a tight-knit posse of war veterans – her, a nurse; the other two, wounded soldiers – who seek a bohemian post-war life in Amsterdam. Fast forward a decade or so, and they’re reunited in New York and wanted for the murder of a general’s daughter. They’ve been stitched up, but by who?  Cramming Amsterdam ’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim. In cinemas worldwide now .

Cast and crew

• Director: David O Russell
• Screenwriter: David O Russell
• Taylor Swift
• Christian Bale
• John David Washington
• Margot Robbie
• Matthias Schoenaerts
• Michael Shannon
• Andrea Riseborough
• Zoë Saldana
• Robert De Niro
• Anya Taylor-Joy
• Alessandro Nivola

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Directed by David O. Russell

Let the love, murder and conspiracy begin.

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 American history.

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 Mel Fair Vaughn Page Bonnie Hellman Max Perlich Ed Begley Jr. Jessica Drake Colleen Camp Gabé Doppelt Lauren Shaw Brandon Davis Casey Biggs Dey Young Sean Avery Gigi Bermingham Show All… André Tardieu Casey Graf Rebecca Wisocky Daniel Riordan Steven Hack Floyd Armstrong Leonard A. Tucker Jr. Baxter Humby Richie Harrington John Pirkis Shedell Kindsey Vaughn Beth Grant Christopher Gehrman Shiree Nelson Tom Irwin Leland Orser David Babbitt Mike Azevedo Martin Harris Christopher Kager Donovan Hurst Jarrett Johnson Kawan DeBose Deon Sams Richard Harrington Homer Aguilar Dalila Ali Rajah Chase Arrington Vincent M. Biscione Andrew Constantini Raphael Corkhill Timothy Donovan Susan Gray Adolf Hitler Mathew Trent Hunnicutt James Hunter Samari Ijezie Valeria Malikova Luke Matheis Benito Mussolini Eloho Josephine Okujeni Alef Orixa Stefan Sharpe Adam G. Simon Kalina Vanska Max David Weinberg Mark Winn

Director Director

David O. Russell

Producers Producers

Matthew Budman David O. Russell Arnon Milchan Anthony Katagas Christian Bale Tracey Landon Doug Torres Eliana Adise Sarena Cohen

Writer Writer

Casting casting.

Mary Vernieu Lindsay Graham Ahanonu Patty Rhinehart

Editor Editor

Jay Cassidy

Cinematography Cinematography

Emmanuel Lubezki

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Doug Torres Christina Fong

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Yariv Milchan Michael Schaefer Sam Hanson Drake Adel 'Future' Nur

Lighting Lighting

Michael Bauman Dana Arnold Henry Cantor Mike Gerzevitz Michael Lyon Thomas McCarty Gerardo Rocha Eric Tolzmann

Camera Operators Camera Operators

P. Scott Sakamoto Erwan van Buuren

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Django de Groot

Production Design Production Design

Judy Becker

Art Direction Art Direction

Alexander Wei Danielle Osborne Alexander Linde

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Patricia Cuccia Erin Fite Aaron Arnold Monica Martin Bell Chantal Birdsong Raul Contreras Nicholas Higgins Walter W. Hoye Thomas D. Krausz Melanie S. Chretin Jane Madden David Moreau Travis Nunnally Michael Peritz Justin Andrew Robinson Alana Shea Zack Shisslak Antonio Sola Rick Staves Samuel J. Tell Glenn Williams

Special Effects Special Effects

Dean Hathaway

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Allen Maris Tennille Alcindor Joyce Au Patrice Avery Scott Balkcom Prakriti Banerjee Tennille Chaffin Eric D. Christensen Samuel Côté Jack Dorst Brian Ali Harding Spencer Howson Marc Hutchings David Isyomin Jiwoong Kim Sam Kolber Christopher Lance Felix Leung Cesar Macedo Ricky Paul Marwein Steven Messing Argha Pal Colin Patty Sebastien Racine Kathleen Schenck Riccardo Serraiocco Mandy Sorenson Doug Spilatro Barde Sravan Matthew Unwin Mark Van Horne Olaf Wendt Shawn Paul Wolvin Michael Yu Joanna Falcon Valdes

Title Design Title Design

Richie Adams

Stunts Stunts

Frank Torres Brian Duffy Brian Machleit Horace Knight Jr. Lauren Shaw Kelly Richardson Tom McComas Keenen Bray Carlton Fluker Brent Jones Clint Jones Denney Pierce Vlad Rimburg Adam G. Simon Brian Simpson Jose L. Vasquez Eddie Yansick Adam G. Simon Alex Terzieff

Choreography Choreography

Composer composer.

Daniel Pemberton

Songs Songs

Drake Givēon Mariana Bandhold Luc Kleiner Jasper Randall

Sound Sound

Per Hallberg José Antonio García Beau Borders Zack Goldsborough Andy Koyama Craig Ng Daniel Pagan Will Riley Ann Scibelli D. Chris Smith Matt Thorne Andy Maxwell

Costume Design Costume Design

J.R. Hawbaker Albert Wolsky Aude Bronson-Howard

Makeup Makeup

Misa Aikawa Richard Alonzo Bianca Appice Mandy Artusato Jennifer Aspinall Jason Collins Lisa Deveaux Rachael Downing Jacqueline Fernandez Nana Fischer Ed French Chris Gallaher Joel Harlow Janice Kavanagh Akiko Matsumoto Kenny Myers Vera Steimberg Sweet P. Vaughn Carla White Louie Zakarian

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Andrew Bell Alyson Black-Barrie Laura Caponera Ginger Damon Tamar Izakelian Adruitha Lee Kate Loftis Lori McCoy-Bell Kerry Mendenhall Jessica Mills Anthony Miner Carol Mitchell Iman Newborn Josée Normand Jerry Popolis Cassie Russek Yvette Shelton Kekepania Vasquez-Tamali'i

DreamCrew Keep Your Head Productions Corazon Hayagriva New Regency Productions Regency Enterprises

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

French English

Releases by Date

18 sep 2022, 21 sep 2022, 27 sep 2022, theatrical limited, 06 oct 2022, 07 oct 2022, 13 oct 2022, 14 oct 2022, 27 oct 2022, 28 oct 2022, 01 nov 2022, 03 nov 2022, 04 nov 2022, 11 nov 2022, 23 nov 2022, 06 dec 2022, 01 jan 2023, 04 jan 2023, 05 dec 2022, 12 dec 2022, 12 jan 2023, 25 jan 2023, 10 dec 2022, releases by country.

• Theatrical MA 15+
• Digital MA 15+ Disney+
• Physical MA 15+
• Theatrical 16
• Theatrical 15
• Theatrical TP
• Theatrical 12
• Physical 12
• Theatrical K15
• Theatrical IIB
• Digital 16 Disney+
• Theatrical 15A
• Theatrical T
• Theatrical G

Netherlands

New zealand.

• Theatrical M/12
• Premiere 18
• Theatrical M18
• Theatrical 輔12
• Premiere London, England
• Physical 15 Blu-ray & DVD
• Premiere R New York City, New York
• Theatrical limited R The IMAX Live Experience
• Theatrical R
• Digital R HBO Max
• Physical R 4K Ultra HD / Blu-ray / DVD
• TV R HBO / HBO Latino

134 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by coralie🥨 ½ 17

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

I’m sorry, Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Cause she’s dead.

Review by Ella Kemp ★½

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Review by Matt Singer ★★½

The biggest mystery in David O. Russell’s Amsterdam — far bigger than the one surrounding the dead body at the film’s center — is how did a movie with so many stellar elements turn out so mediocre? This movie has an absurd number of A-list stars, a.promising premise, a timely message, maybe our greatest living cinematographer, and a director who has made some excellent movies in the past. And yet even with all those outstanding components, something feels off about the end result. Sometimes you can get all the ingredients in the recipe right and still bake a bland cake. That’s Amsterdam : Looks fantastic, totally devoid of flavor.

Full review at ScreenCrush .

Review by ☆ sophie ☆ ★½ 27

this would have been way better if it was directed by Wes Anderson... my goodness.

I think my rating is generous considering how boring and generic this film felt. Christian Bale and Margot Robbie try their hardest to keep this alive but the film fails at almost everything else. I will admit I was intrigued throughout the first 40 minutes of the film as it set up an interesting premise but it literally goes nowhere and just feels like a mess of events. The story feels so convoluted and it takes too much time to establish the kind of story it wants to tell without a cohesive tone. Performances and score (by Daniel Pemberton which was actually pretty solid) aside, this was a messy, tedious, and unmemorable film that feels like it's trying too hard to be something it's not. Easily a skip.

Review by Jay ★½ 14

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Review by Adam Hubscher ★ 10

i would say this is a new low for david o. russell but uhh he did sexually assault his niece sooooooo

Review by George Carmi ★★ 12

Bland and shallow. Characters I couldn’t care less about and Robert DeNiro phoning it in for a paycheck. What an absolute waste of a stellar cast. 

Christian Bale was so good he made everyone around him look like first year performing arts students.

Review by esther ½ 11

has the distinction of being the worst-edited mainstream release i have ever seen in my life. every line has a buffer of about 2 full seconds before the next person starts talking. conversations will just be a shot of a person saying a whole line, then a cut to the other person who says their whole line. no cross-talk or dialogue pulled over to the next image. just "here's the take of john david washington. now put in the take of margot robbie." etc etc for over two goddamn hours. jaw-dropping that a film this clumsily constructed released to thousands of theaters in this form. i mean jesus. and even with another pass this is still a stupid, unfunny, maudlin movie about anti-bigotry and togetherness made by a child molester. david o. russell go to hell!

Review by the film drunk ★½ 7

Equivalent to sleepwalking for two hours

Review by max ivanov ★★★★ 4

taylor swift died in the name of antifa🙏🙏

Review by Dakota Joaquin ★½ 29

Biggest waste of talent since Charlie Cox in She-Hulk

Review by Emma 🔆 ★★ 3

Just stand in front of your mirror and say Amsterdam over and over again for 2 hours and you’ll get the same effect

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

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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.

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.

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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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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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.

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