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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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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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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

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

• David O. Russell
• Christian Bale
• Margot Robbie
• John David Washington
• 520 User reviews
• 198 Critic reviews
• 48 Metascore
• 2 wins & 12 nominations total

Top cast 76

• Burt Berendsen

• Valerie Voze

• Harold Woodman

• Detective Hiltz

• Beatrice Vandenheuvel

• Milton King

• Detective Lem Getweiler

• Henry Norcross

• Paul Canterbury

• Liz Meekins

• Taron Milfax

• Irma St. Clair
• (as Zoe Saldaña)

• General Gil Dillenbeck

• Patient Wayne

• Patient Victor
• (as Vaughn W. Page)

• Shirley Pratt
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Christian Bale stopped talking to Chris Rock on set. He claimed that he was very funny, which made it hard for him to act.
• Goofs Mike Myers' character is captioned as being MI6. Although the British Secret Service Bureau was created in 1909, it was not known as MI6 until World War II.

Burt Berendsen : Each one of us is given a tapestry, our own opera. This person and this person. Thinking about it... love is not enough. You got to fight to protect kindness. You get attached to people and things. And they might just break your heart... but that's being alive.

• Crazy credits Before ending credits, video of US Marine Corps Major Gen. Smedley Butler, the man on whom the film based the character of Gen. Dillenbeck, is shown side by side with video of Butler's speech.
• Connections Featured in OWV Updates: OWV Cinema Poster Update (19/12/2023) (2023)
• Soundtracks Precious Memories Traditional Performed by Taylor Swift , Christian Bale and John David Washington

User reviews 520

• Feb 6, 2023
• How long is Amsterdam? Powered by Alexa
• October 7, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Instagram
• Official site
• Los Angeles, California, USA
• 20th Century Studios
• Canterbury Classic
• Forest Hill Entertainment
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $80,000,000 (estimated)
• $14,947,969
• Oct 9, 2022
• $31,245,810

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 14 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track

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Breaking news, how to stream the democratic national convention online, ‘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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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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“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: A great film is fighting to get out

David o russell’s first film since ‘joy’ is stylish and full of charming performances, but feels longer than a three-day mini-break, article bookmarked.

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Louise Thomas

Dir: David O Russell. Starring: Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie, Robert de Niro, Rami Malek. Cert 15, 134 minutes

“A lot of this really happened” goes the title card for David O Russell ’s starry, stylish, caper-ish Amsterdam . Emphasis on “a lot”. In its relentless, pinballing plot, there’s a fascist coup, an unsolved murder, an entire world war, shady figures aplenty, many cunning plans, and… a love story. It runs to just over two hours, but I felt like I’d been watching it for three days. Which, coincidentally, is the same duration as my most recent – and far less eventful – trip to actual Amsterdam.

This is Russell’s first film since the intriguing mob boss biopic Joy in 2015. In those seven years, he seems to have had a lot of ideas and put them all of them into one film. Largely set in New York in the 1930s, his script hinges on a curious true story, in which a cabal of businessmen attempted to overthrow Franklin D Roosevelt and replace him with a popular war veteran who they could puppeteer for their own malevolent ends. This, though, ends up feeling like the Any Other Business section of a film you could describe as a comedy. Or a thriller. Or a mystery. Or a historical drama. It is, as I say, A Lot.

In fact, it functions best as a buddy movie. Christian Bale , John David Washington and Margot Robbie form our plucky trio. Bale is the zany doctor Burt Berendsen who “left my eye in France”. He likes coming up with experimental medicines and his hair gets more unkempt as the film gets wilder. Washington, largely the straight man, is the smart, sensitive lawyer Harold Woodman, who faces a lot of racism with quiet dignity. And Robbie, as nurse Valerie, smokes a pipe to let us know she’s ballsy. They meet and form a friendship pact during the First World War, in which Burt and Harold are blown up and stitched back together by Valerie, who makes arty sculptures from the shrapnel she removes from their bodies. When the conflict ends, they go to Amsterdam, where they emerge as a kind of Bloomsbury Group but with better-moisturised skin. We see them tangled up together on the floor, having heady nights out dancing, making art, supporting battle-torn veterans and wearing silly hats. The contrast is bluntly drawn: Amsterdam is a haven of free love, while America is a nest of prejudice and corruption. Unfortunate, then, they should end up dispersed and back in nasty old America, where Burt and Harold are falsely accused of murder.

The music is scampery. The vibe: hijinks. Sometimes it’s as though Wes Anderson were running a speakeasy, with the cast to match. Top-tier actors come and go at such a rate that it starts to feel a bit obnoxious. Look, it’s Chris Rock! Michael Shannon! Zoe Saldana! Anya Taylor-Joy! Mike Myers! Alessandro Nivola! Rami Malek! Robert de Niro! Taylor Swift is in a car crash within the first 10 minutes, which is to say she comes out of it a lot better than she did in Cats . After a while, these beautifully lit appearances make the film feel stilted, like when you’re playing a computer game and a new character pops up with some expositional dialogue to send you on a mission.

But the central performances are charming, and stretches of the film are enjoyable. Everything looks stylish and wonderful, and everyone has nice hair. Seriously, Rami Malek, what conditioner are you using? The thing is, there is a great film in here fighting to get out, but it’s drowned out by manic plotting, self-indulgence, and a thickly laid-on, twee message about love and art. Things start to unravel about halfway through as the plot gets denser and the point becomes foggier. Even the characters start to tell each other that they don’t know what’s going on. Who killed Taylor Swift’s dad? Who is running a set of inhumane sterilisation clinics? Who are the “Committee of Five”? Is someone drugging Valerie? Will Christian Bale’s wife ever let him move back in? In a handful of scenes, you can feel the creaky levering of the plot. It’s bizarre that so unwieldy a film should also feel so tightly manipulated.

One of Amsterdam ’s most intriguing elements is its sheer number of slightly broken men; so many of them are scarred and stitched together, bearing the wounds of the war on their bodies or behind their eyes. The film hints at some sophisticated ideas about the weaponisation of veterans and the complicated thread between masculinity, service and patriotism. There’s an unspoken understanding between those who fought, and shame directed at those who didn’t (Nivola’s detective character is teased about the “flat feet” that excused him). But the film skims past them in its pursuit of so many other things. It wants to address racism, intolerance, conspiracy theories, class, and plenty more besides. Eventually, it rolls over to give us its saccharine message about “art and love – that’s what makes the life worth living”. It’s hard not to raise an eyebrow, given Russell is allegedly a director who doesn’t treat people with a whole lot of love when he makes art. The main problem, though, is that this is a richly overstuffed concoction, and not many of us are inspired to creativity or kindness when we’re full. We tend to just need a lie-down.

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

By David Fear

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

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

There’s more — dear lord, a lot more — as Russell takes us down an American history wormhole of fifth columnists, political chicanery and the rancid rich. An opening disclaimer informs us that “a lot of this actually happened,” and it does not take a college professor to measure the distance between the past threats to the democratic ideals we hold near and dear and what our current future may bring in light of the past few years. (Homegrown Nazis — now more than ever!) You couldn’t be blamed for thinking the filmmaker might be mounting a call to arms cloaked in period duds, especially when the voiceover dips into the didactic during a third-act showdown between the clearly drawn good guys and the corrupt. (“What could be more American than a dictatorship built by American business?”) The commentary nudging is actually the least effective aspect of Amsterdam, not because it isn’t pertinent or that Russell doesn’t share the same concerns many of us do, so much as the fact that his heart clearly lies elsewhere.

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The generosity extends to the cast at large. Some have issues with Washington’s somewhat recessive take on Goodman, legal eagle and lover of Robbie’s aristocratic kook. But when seen in tandem with what Bale is doing, it fits the bigger picture better — he’s the ballast that allows Bale to boing off him and bounce around the sets. Robbie understands that her third party is one part daffy-dame screwball archetype and one part romantic ideal, yet doesn’t let herself be confined by either role. The supporting cast either gets to play very straight (De Niro’s patriotic military man, Swift’s grieving young woman), very broad (Riseborough’s elitist wife, Olyphant’s racist thug) or take part in wonderfully oddball double acts (Shannon and Myers intelligence-agency handlers, Nivola and Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts’ dim-witted cops; Malek and Taylor-Joy’s unscrupulous One-percenters). It would be unkind to note that not all performers are equal here. It would also be accurate.

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

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‘Amsterdam’ 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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amsterdam Should Feel Intoxicating, But It’s Exhausting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Amsterdam Review: An Overcooked, But Entertaining Mystery

Starring christian bale, john david washington and margot robbie..

It will take individual members of the moviegoing audience only a few minutes to decide whether or not David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a film that is “for them.” A manic tone is established from the outset as we are introduced to Christian Bale ’s Burt Berendsen, a Hunter S. Thompson-esque doctor and World War I veteran with a glass eye who operates a shady medical practice helping out fellow veterans in 1933 New York City. Voiceover from Burt quickly ushers us through his life and work before catapulting the character to a meeting with his best friend, John David Washington ’s Harold Woodman, a fellow veteran and attorney who proceeds to roll out a dead man in a box (Ed Begley Jr.) and introduce the corpse’s grieving daughter ( Taylor Swift ), who is certain that her father was murdered.

Quippy zaniness is the keystone of the madcap adventure, and that voice is relentless even as the film veers towards some of the most consequential subject matter in modern history. If it’s not your thing, you’ll check out immediately, but those who get onboard will find an entertaining, albeit overcooked mystery that is enhanced with what feels in the moment like a seemingly endless ensemble of talented actors who enter the picture with each new plot development.

The aforementioned dead man in a box is identified as General Bill Meekins, who not only has a close history with Burt and Harold (technically he was the one who introduced them), but was supposed to be the main speaker at a benefit that the two men are coordinating. They believe Meekins’ daughter’s claims, which then almost immediately results in more murder… and then, indicative of the movie’s weirdness, everything goes into flashback mode. We first see how Burt first met Harold during World War I in France 1918, but then we learn how the duo met Valerie Voze ( Margot Robbie ), an eccentric nurse who patches them up and saves their lives after they are nearly killed on the battlefield.

Amsterdam's manic style is matched well with an engaging mystery.

Amsterdam sports a lot of “stranger than fiction” energy (it opens with a non-committal based-on-a-true story title card reading “A lot of this really happened”), and it more than occasionally feels like it’s trying to do too much – such as with Valerie’s avant-garde artistic sensibilities making sculpture from shrapnel, and the trio coming up with a “nonsense song” comprised of random French phrases. It takes quirkiness into the red, but the film works because it’s all tied to an engaging and propulsive mystery.

Once the movie bounces back from the flashback – with Burt, Harold and Valerie’s lives becoming intertwined while they live together in the titular city after World War I – Amsterdam establishes proper stakes and keeps the narrative moving with Burt and Harold finding clues that get them closer to discovering the truth of what happened to General Meekins. It never gets particularly complex, but it also never gets stupid, and each progression in the plot keeps you wondering about what’s coming next.

Part of the fun of Amsterdam is wondering what famous face will show up next.

Said curiosity is both driven by the desire to know the answers to the movie’s biggest questions, as well as David O. Russell’s special brand of stunt casting. If I could make one particular recommendation going into Amsterdam , it would be that you should avoid looking at the film’s full cast list (and I’m actually going to stop naming names in this review beyond those I have already mentioned). Practically every line is delivered by actors who are headlining movies released throughout the year – and none of them are shortchanged. Each has a memorable part to play and a standout personality to go with it.

Of course, anchoring the whole thing is the trio headlining the adventure. Given that Christian Bale, John David Washington and Margot Robbie have proven themselves as three of the most consummate performers working today, their success should inspire little surprise, but that makes it no less wonderful. Chemistry in the triumvirate is essential to the story that David O. Russell is telling, and theirs is effortless and palpable. Between the three, Bale is given the most to work with and delivers one of his best comedic performances – rounding out his David O. Russell trilogy after making The Fighter and American Hustle – but they are all given memorable lines and moments from the writer/director’s script.

Their individual characters’ eccentricities and choices in their performances mesh impressively well together, and the movie clicks into high gear when they are all together – first in the World War I flashback, and then in 1933 when Burt and Harold are inadvertently reunited with Valerie while trying to solve the murder mystery.

Amsterdam walks a narrow tightrope line of being too much, and there are moments where knees bend and arms flail for balance, but it does stay upright and put on a show in the process. It has a distinct voice, an entertaining story to tell and a well-used phenomenal cast, which amounts to a fun cinematic experience.

Eric Eisenberg is the Assistant Managing Editor at CinemaBlend. After graduating Boston University and earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism, he took a part-time job as a staff writer for CinemaBlend, and after six months was offered the opportunity to move to Los Angeles and take on a newly created West Coast Editor position. Over a decade later, he's continuing to advance his interests and expertise. In addition to conducting filmmaker interviews and contributing to the news and feature content of the site, Eric also oversees the Movie Reviews section, writes the the weekend box office report (published Sundays), and is the site's resident Stephen King expert. He has two King-related columns.

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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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Common Sense Media Review

Busy but interesting period dramedy has gore, swearing.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Amsterdam is a 1930s-set dramedy in which two veterans of World War I (Christian Bale and John David Washington) must clear their names of a murder charge with the help of an old friend (Margot Robbie) while also protecting their country against evil forces. The complex plot can…

Why Age 15+?

Extremely gory wounds, missing eye. Removing shrapnel from bloody wounds. Woman

Infrequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "son of a bitch," "bastard," "ass," "hell," "d

A doctor experiments on himself with new painkillers; he sometimes passes out, c

Kissing. Romantic couple.

Any Positive Content?

Clear themes of friendship, love, and trust apparent in the three main character

The three main characters are a White man, a White woman, and a Black man. There

The main characters sometimes attempt to help others. Characters are generally a

Violence & Scariness

Extremely gory wounds, missing eye. Removing shrapnel from bloody wounds. Woman shoved in front of car, run over, body smashed underneath car. Guns and shooting. Characters shot, bloody wounds. Man punched, knocked out cold (glass eye pops out of his head). Painfully resetting dislocated arm. Autopsy scene, with organs shown. Arguing.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "son of a bitch," "bastard," "ass," "hell," "damn," "oh my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A doctor experiments on himself with new painkillers; he sometimes passes out, comically. Later, he's said to have become briefly addicted to these medicines. Injections. Characters take special eyedrops said to numb pain. Social drinking. Pipe smoking. A character with vertigo who's walking unevenly is accused of being drunk.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Clear themes of friendship, love, and trust apparent in the three main characters' relationship. Other messages include idea that anything goes in the search for truth, especially when someone has been wrongly accused. Champions democracy over fascism.

Diverse Representations

The three main characters are a White man, a White woman, and a Black man. There's an interracial romance. Racism and antisemitism are depicted as part of the era the movie is set in, but these ideologies are frowned upon. Supporting cast includes several characters of color.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Positive Role Models

The main characters sometimes attempt to help others. Characters are generally accepting of others across lines of color, religion, and gender.

Parents need to know that Amsterdam is a 1930s-set dramedy in which two veterans of World War I ( Christian Bale and John David Washington ) must clear their names of a murder charge with the help of an old friend ( Margot Robbie ) while also protecting their country against evil forces. The complex plot can sometimes be hard to follow, but it's hard to dismiss, and the theme of friendship stands out. Expect moments of extreme gore involving wounded soldiers in the hospital. A woman is also brutally run over by a car, characters are shot (lots of blood), characters are punched, etc. Language includes infrequent uses of "f--k," "s--t," "son of a bitch," and more. Characters kiss, there's social drinking and smoking, and a woman is accused of being drunk (she's just dizzy). A character experiments with painkillers and is said to have become briefly addicted. Injections are shown, and characters take pain-killing eyedrops. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Amazing show

Very good movie........go see it., what's the story.

In AMSTERDAM, it's the 1930s in New York, and Burt Berendsen ( Christian Bale ) is a doctor working to ease wounded war veterans' pain. His best friend, Harold Woodman ( John David Washington ), is a lawyer. Together, they're hired by Liz Meekins ( Taylor Swift ) to perform a secret autopsy on General Bill Meekins, Burt and Harold's former commanding officer, to determine whether he was actually murdered. Shortly after, Liz is shoved in front of a moving car and run over in the street. Burt and Harold are blamed. Flashing back to 1918, during the war, young Burt and Harold are badly injured and sent to the hospital, where they're tended by nurse Valerie ( Margot Robbie ). The three form a strong friendship, and Harold and Valerie fall in love. After the war, they spend a beautiful period living as a trio in Amsterdam. But flashing forward again to the '30s, Burt and Harold must find a way to clear their names, which involves getting another general, Gil Dillenbeck ( Robert De Niro ), to speak at the veterans' reunion, thereby exposing the real killers. The characters' past also finds a way of catching up to them, lending a helping hand.

Is It Any Good?

Wildly ambitious and thoroughly complex, this sprawling David O. Russell period piece has a thick, gummy quality as if it were made in a vacuum, yet it's too relevant to entirely dismiss. The airless quality of Amsterdam -- perhaps a result of the combination of the great Emmanuel Lubezki's lush, glossy cinematography and Russell's weird sense of humor -- gives it an odd dreamy effect. It's sometimes a little too easy for your brain to wander away. Describing the plot is a challenge: Even after going on at some length, you might somehow skip over characters played by such heavyweights as Chris Rock , Anya Taylor-Joy , Rami Malek , Zoe Saldana , Matthias Schoenaerts , Michael Shannon , Mike Myers , and more.

Bale's outsized performance, frequently recalling Al Pacino 's scenery-chewing "Big Boy Caprice" in Dick Tracy , is another factor that keeps the movie from feeling grounded; it's like a crazy cartoon in which earthly logic does not apply. (Robbie joins him in that category during the movie's second half, when her character stumbles and wobbles about thanks to a case of vertigo.) Yet while Amsterdam is exceedingly busy, it's not necessarily messy; Russell attacks it with an admirable confidence. And since its 1930s-era political themes appear to still have modern relevance, perhaps it's a movie that will live on through multiple viewings and further context.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Amsterdam 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How are drinking, smoking, and drug use depicted? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? Why is that important?

Is it hard to believe that some Americans supported fascism during the 1930s? How is that theme relevant today?

What do you think of Valerie's artwork made from shrapnel extracted from wounded soldiers? Is it offensive, like some characters say? Is it good for art to shock or provoke? Why, or why not?

How do the movie's setting and era affect the characters' circumstances and situations? How have things changed since then?

Movie Details

• In theaters : October 7, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : December 6, 2022
• Cast : Christian Bale , Margot Robbie , John David Washington
• Director : David O. Russell
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : 20th Century Fox
• Genre : Comedy
• Topics : Friendship
• Run time : 134 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : brief violence and bloody images
• Last updated : April 4, 2024

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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 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

Live Coverage

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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Amsterdam Goes For Wokeness Over Substance

David O. Russell's latest film is giving me flashbacks of that video of A-list celebrities singing “Imagine” to us over Zoom.

Amsterdam, David O. Russell's first film in over seven years, begins with a title card that explains what people have come to be familiar with in true-story films, telling us, "a lot of this really happened." What the audience learns after, however, is that not only did most of what you just saw arguably never occur, but the big scandal itself may have never even taken place at all. You don’t get the answer to one of America’s best-kept political secrets at Amsterdam 's end . You mostly just get tricked into learning what this crime caper has covertly been leading toward this entire time.

The story begins with Dr. Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), a half-Jewish, half-Christian Manhattanite who treats veterans and has a wonky glass eye from his own tour of service in World War I. He's clearly a guy who never could have existed in real life—or if he did, he couldn't have had anything to do with this story. For all the nonsense that ensues in Amsterdam , Bale is the film's one shining beacon of hope. He's fully committed to his character, as opposed to some of his castmates, and his slapstick comedic timing is one of Amsterdam 's only saving graces. Like a reluctant noir detective, he's constantly jostled around and thrown to the ground, occasionally having to paw around for his lost eye like Velma's glasses in Scooby-Doo .

War buddy Harold Woodman (John David Washington) calls and informs him that their former army general, Senator Bill Meekins (a corpse-like Ed Begley Jr.) has been murdered. The Senator's daughter, Elizabeth (Taylor Swift), contacts Burt to perform a secret autopsy. Yes, the mega-pop star is here for two scenes—one of which will surely be memed out of existence. After another murder takes place, the gang becomes suspects in a larger political scandal. A long, impossible-to-solve-yourself plot occurs over the course of the film, wherein every new character you meet is an instantly recognizable celebrity. (Cue: Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Remi Malek, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, and Timothy Olyphant). Eventually, all roads lead to retired General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro). He's a decorated veteran based on real-life figure Major General Smedley Butler, who spoke about late payments from the Great Depression during what is known as the 1932 Bonus Army march on Washington. It's the first time in Amsterdam that I was certain we got to something that actually took place in American history.

It may have taken forever to get here after galavanting in an Amsterdam war hospital and a wealthy businessman's estate, but this is when the film finally gets to why David O. Russell seemingly made the damn thing. You see, a bunch of old-timey business tycoons allegedly planned to take over the government and replace then-ill President Franklin D. Roosevelt with a puppet dictator. They want to pay the General a large sum of money to give a big speech at Doctor Burt's annual veteran's event in support of their fascist cause, but ol' De Niro just can't do it. Instead, he gives a rousing speech about the need to uphold truth, democracy, and freedom. Surprise! The ending of the film is nothing more than that video of A-list celebrities singing “Imagine” to us over Zoom .

Clearly, David O. Russell is another creative who saw Trump become the President, lost his mind, and then gathered as many celebrities as he could to defend one of the most agreeable stances in the history of the world: that hate is bad and kindness is good. It's the kind of lukewarm, on-the-nose take that elicited audible groans throughout the theater. Amsterdam wasn't an interesting murder mystery with a rewarding payoff. It was just the closest thing in American history that David O. Russell could find that mimicked the January 6 insurrection. "You don't get here without things starting a long time ago," Bale's Dr. Burt says.

Known as the 1934 "Business Plot," Major Gen. Smedley Butler really did give an address to a special House committee regarding his belief that a small cabal of wealthy businessmen was plotting a political conspiracy to install a dictator. He said that they were backed by a private army of nearly 500,000 veterans and that he was asked to lead it. The only problem? It seemed that no one was really interested in that happening. After General Butler gave his testimony, every party allegedly involved called the plot a complete fantasy. Nothing ever happened, the special House committee couldn't find any evidence of a planned coup, and an independent investigation by The New York Times concluded just as much as well. In a 1934 article titled " Plot Without Plotters ," Times journalists mocked that " No military officer of the U. S. since the late, tempestuous George Custer has succeeded in publicly floundering in so much hot water as Smedley Darlington Butler." Ouch!

But the "what-if" of the General's allegations describes what many believe could have also been the "what-if" of the U.S. Capitol attack, even though neither event came even close to accomplishing its goal. If audiences are going to Amsterdam to look for artistic takes on the current state of the world, "we need more love and kindness" is quite a layman’s response—especially from some of the world's most recognizable celebrities. As filmmaker Paul Schrader said at a recent New York Film Festival Q&A , audiences are simply just not as excited to hear movies work through the problems of our time as they might have been during the anti-war movement or social revolutions of the '60s and '70s.

Why? Maybe because those problems have still not been solved some 60 years later. Most people no longer go to the movies for “takes,” but to escape reality entirely. Hell, most people no longer even really go to the movies. There’s a reason why the leader of the Avengers—a superhero literally named Captain America—fought a big purple monster in space instead of giving oratories on why we should protect American freedom at all costs. You could argue that kindness is seemingly the message this world still needs, sure. But Christian Bale's character going into self-induced ecstasy because his two best friends are in an interracial relationship does not help the bare-bones wokeness similar films fail to make even just a little more nuanced. Even so, 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.

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Amsterdam (United States, 2022)

With its whiplash-inducing tonal inconsistencies and sloppily assembled narrative, Amsterdam often feels like a pastiche of (take your pick) Monty Python, The Coen Brothers, or Wes Anderson grafted onto a crime caper/espionage thriller with a strong allegorical message about fascism. This is more the freewheeling David O. Russell from American Hustle , which also spun its wheels early before settling down, than the disciplined filmmaker who made Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter . It takes well over an hour before Amsterdam decides what it wants to be and, by that time, viewers may be exasperated by the film’s quirkiness and exhausted by its meandering, unfocused storyline.

Considering that talent involved, anything less than a home run would have to be considered a disappointment. One of the downsides of having so many well-known actors vying for screen time is that none of them gets a chance to shine (not unlike in 2021’s Don’t Look Up ). From a narrative perspective, the story (an opening caption informs us that “A lot of this really happened”), which fictionalizes a Depression-era conspiracy to replace FDR with a respected military man, is not uninteresting but it takes Russell too long to wade through the preliminaries. The movie doesn’t start building momentum until Robert De Niro shows up, and that’s more than an hour into the proceedings.

Russell’s attempts at screwball comedy are inexpert; he’s no Preston Sturges. One of the problems is that the lead trio – physician Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington), and shut-in Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie) – are thinly drawn. They never become real and the romantic attachment between Harold and Valerie is stronger in Russell’s imagination than on the screen. By using a non-linear structure to establish the characters and their circumstances, Russell is more apt to confuse viewers than add multi-dimensionality to the characters. The first half is a muddle.

Burt and Harold are approached by Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift), the daughter of their former beloved commanding officer, General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), to investigate the circumstances surrounding her father’s passing. Contrary to the official cause of death, Liz believes he was murdered. It doesn’t take much to convince Burt and Harold that she may be right but a series of bad breaks and coincidences have Burt and Harold on the run from the law trying to clear their names. This once again brings them into contact with Valerie along with her brother, Tom (Rami Malek), and Tom’s wife, Libby (Anya Taylor-Joy). Tom wants to help and has powerful connections but is unwilling to stick out his neck…unless Burt and Harold can convince the revered General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro) to speak out in their defense. Against Tom’s wishes, Valerie accompanies the men when they leave.

Christian Bale’s performance is delightfully loopy. Burt, with his glass eye and penchant for slapstick, is something out of a Mel Brooks movie. Bale is matched beat-for-beat by Margot Robbie, whose bona fides for farce go back to her eye-opening turn in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street . That leaves John David Washington as the straight man, the Bud Abbott to Bale’s Lou Costello – it’s a role that fits like a glove. The supporting ensemble is crammed with recognizable names. In addition to Rami Malek, Taylor Swift, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Robert De Niro, Russell (despite a checkered reputation) was able to attract Andrea Riseborough (as Burt’s wife), Alessandro Nivola and Matthias Schoenaets (as two detectives), Michael Shannon and Mike Myers (as bird-watching secret agents), Zoe Saldana (as Burt’s love interest – sparks fly during an autopsy), and Chris Rock. Of those, Saldana is underused and there’s a little too much Myers.

There’s no lack of ambition in what Russell attempts with Amsterdam but his goals outstrip his ability to achieve them. A lot of scenes and moments, taken in isolation, are effective, but the juxtaposition of so many conflicting elements creates an unwelcome tension between comedy, drama, and suspense that the filmmakers are unable to manage. The lack of chemistry among the leads doesn’t help the scattershot storytelling. In short, Amsterdam is a mix of good and bad – possibly the least imposing entry on Russell’s strong filmography but by no means unwatchable. It just requires some fortitude to wade through the first hour.

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