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Death unites us all. And societies are shaped by not just the dread of that inevitable outcome but the common manners in which we push those existential thoughts aside. Consumerism, conspiracy theories, and collective trauma collide in Noah Baumbach's daring adaptation of a novel that may have been published in the mid-'80s but undeniably speaks to the issues that continue to dominate our culture in the 2020s. A story of a family unmoored from their already fragile existence by an airborne toxic event has relevance to the COVID era that author Don DeLillo couldn't have imagined specifically. Yet, the source material here is designed to speak to a larger sense of trauma and fear—elements that will never go away as long as that pesky Grim Reaper remains in our lives. Baumbach's adaptation of "White Noise" unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches. Life is full of surprises, right?

"White Noise" opens with a professor named Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) speaking of the comfort of car crashes on film. Like every choice in this script, it's not an accident. Siskind speaks of the simplicity of the car crash, noting how it cuts through character and plotting to something that's easily understood and relatable. It foreshadows the mid-section of a film that will play essentially like a disaster movie, asking viewers to imagine what they would do if stuck in the same situation. And it's a set-up for another fascinating aspect of "White Noise"—a commentary on crowd catharsis. We are at peace when we see others doing the same thing we are doing, whether it's watching a car crash in a movie, attending an Elvis concert, or buying things we don't need at an A&P grocery store.

Someone who keenly understands groupthink is Professor Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), one of the world experts on Hitler Studies, even though he's embarrassed that he doesn't speak German. The first act—and the film is divided into three parts on-screen—could be called a satire of academia as Gladney, Siskind, and their colleague use big words to help get a grip on big problems. Jack and his wife Babbette ( Greta Gerwig ) have a blended family that includes the anxiety-prone Denise ( Raffey Cassidy ), problem-solving Heinrich ( Sam Nivola ), and two more children. Babbette has forgotten things lately, and Denise notices a new prescription bottle for a drug called Dylar. This is an everyday American family—going through the motions of life as they try to push away the issues that have dogged philosophers for eons, like the meaning of it all and how to stop thinking about when it ends. In one of the best early scenes, a comment about how happy they are leads Babbette and Jack into a conversation about who should die first. 

While death is a concern in the first act of "White Noise," it becomes more tactile in the second act, titled "The Airborne Toxic Event." A train crash at the edge of town sends chemicals flying into the sky, and everyone in the Gladney family except Jack panics. As he tries to defuse the situation, Denise becomes convinced that she's sick already, and Henrich obsessively listens to news reports. Before long, they're on the road in a mass evacuation, and one of Baumbach's most impressive technical achievements unfolds, capturing a family on the run from the unknown.

Without spoiling the final act completely, it re-centers the Gladneys back at home, but with death a much more present reality in Jack's mind. Unfortunately, as the intensity rises, "White Noise" loses some of its impact, especially in a few talky scenes near the end that betray the tone of the first half. Yes, the film always deals with "serious" subjects, but it gets rocky when they take center stage, and the tone struggles to merge satire and marital drama. DeLillo's book was notoriously called "unfilmable" for decades, and it feels like this last act is where that's most apparent.

Thankfully, Baumbach has two of his most reliable collaborators to keep it from going off the rails. Driver is, once again, excellent here, crafting a performance that is often very funny without relying on broad character beats. There's a version of this character that's pitched to eleven—the awkward academic forced into trying to keep his family alive despite his inferior skill set—but Driver gives a performance that's often very subtle even as everything around him is going broad. Gerwig is a little oddly mannered early in the film, but that makes sense for a character who becomes somewhat unmoored before the air around her becomes toxic.

To unpack this epic of existential dread, Baumbach has assembled a team that deserves mention. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (" Vox Lux ") finds the right balance between realism and parody in his camera work, giving much of the film an exaggerated look amplified by Jess Gonchor's ace production design. The A&P here, with its bright colors and shelves of identical items, is not quite reality, but it's close enough to make its point, and the chaotic sequences of panic in the mid-section have the energy of a CGI blockbuster. Finally, Danny Elfman's score is one of the best of the year, connecting the three tonally different sections.

What does it all mean? Why do we take pills, buy junk, and watch car crashes to escape our fears? The phenomenal A&P dance sequence that ends "White Noise" lands a key theme in a fascinating way—we may all just be buying colorful stuff we don't need to distract ourselves from reality, but let's at least try to have fun while we're doing it.

In limited theatrical release now. On Netflix on December 30 th .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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White Noise (2022)

Rated R for brief violence and language.

135 minutes

Adam Driver as Jack Gladney

Greta Gerwig as Babbette

Raffey Cassidy as Denise

Sam Nivola as Heinrich

May Nivola as Steffie

Don Cheadle as Murray Siskind

Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards

André 3000 as Elliot Lasher

Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell

• Noah Baumbach

Writer (based on the book by)

• Don DeLillo

Cinematographer

• Lol Crawley
• Matthew Hannam
• Danny Elfman

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‘White Noise’ Review: Noah Baumbach Turns Don DeLillo’s 1985 Novel Into a Domestic Dystopian Period Piece Top-Heavy With Big Themes

In this prophetic/topical/overly-spelled-out fable, Adam Driver, as an entitled professor, and Greta Gerwig, as his haunted pill-popping wife, lead a college-town clan on a collision course with disaster.

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In the early scenes, one recognizes, and responds with jittery pleasure, to the Baumbach touch. “White Noise” is set in a cozy leafy college town, which has grown up around a small liberal-arts school called The-College-on-the-Hill, and that makes the movie an ideal vehicle for the kind of high-spirited disputatious chatter that Baumbach is a wizard at. The central character, Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ), teaches at the college, where he has pioneered an entire discipline devoted to Hitler Studies — which sounds like a Woody Allen joke, except that the film, like Jack, takes it all quite seriously. Jack isn’t just teaching about Hitler; he’s the excavator of the dictator’s soul, a rhapsodist of fascism.

Jack’s wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), has hair that looks like an ’80s perm (though in fact it’s natural) as well as an attitude that’s spiky enough to balance his exultant narcissism, and she pops mysterious pharmaceutical pills on the sly. They’ve each been married three times before, and between them they’ve got a reasonably well-adjusted brood of broken-home children: the sharp teenager Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and her sweet younger sister Steffie (May Nivola), who are Babette’s daughters, the chip-off-the-old-block brilliant talker Heinrich (Sam Nivola), who is Jack’s son, and a young son who is both of theirs. They’re like the Brady Bunch with a touch of the Sopranos, and Baumbach, for a while, keeps the family dialogue humming.

He also introduces us to Jack’s academic colleagues, who are treated as gently cracked without being mocked, notably Murray (Don Cheadle), who is some sort of American Studies professor with a profound take on the cheesiest dimensions of American society. He thinks that supermarkets are a deep form of nirvana, and the film opens with his lecture, illustrated by a dazzling montage of film clips, on the meaning of the car crash in Hollywood cinema, which he views as a pure expression of joy (and genius). In a way, this sets the tone for all that follows. It lets us know that “White Noise” is going to be, on some level, about violence and catastrophe, and that it’s going to regard those things with a funny and ironic sidelong eye.

The first clue that we’re watching more than just an observational comedy about a nutty professor and his fractured family comes when a man driving a truck full of toxic chemicals crashes into a train, and the accident produces a massive black chemical cloud that hovers in the distance, edging inexorably toward the town. Will it move in and poison everyone? As Jack and his family pile into their Chevy station wagon, evacuating in a miles-long traffic pile-up as portentous as the one in Godard’s “Weekend,” the film, just like that, becomes a metaphorical disaster movie about fear, conspiracy, and the toxicity of consumer products.

Those pills Babette pops turns out to be harbingers of the new world. They’re not uppers — they are, rather, mood stabilizers meant to quell her fear of death. Jack and Babette are both obsessed with death (their idea of screwball chatter is discussing which of the two of them is going to die first), and when Jack, during that toxic-cloud escape, steps out of the car for two minutes to fill the gas tank, he learns he may have gotten a lethal dose of chemicals. Or given how nuts the doctors in this film sound, is that diagnosis just another conspiracy?

These are heavy questions, and “White Noise,” on the page, achieved total heaviosity. It was a novel of ideas. But that’s a tricky thing to translate to the big screen. As a movie, “White Noise” announces its themes loudly and proudly, but the trouble is that it announces them more than it makes you feel them. Gerwig has one of the best scenes — a tearfully extended, ripped-from the-gut monologue in which she confesses her adultery to Jack, though her transgression isn’t about any desire to stray so much as her compulsion to get those pills by any means necessary. By the time Jack heads out with a tiny gun to confront the man Babette slept with, “White Noise” has found its heart of darkness but lost its pulse. We no longer buy what we’re seeing, even as we’re told, explicitly, what it all means. The film ties itself into knots to explicate the bad news. How telling, then, that it’s so much more effective when it’s willing to be upbeat, notably in a triumphantly daffy closing-credits dance sequence that takes place in the brightly lit aisles of the A&P. Set to the joyful thumping groove of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD Soundsystem, the place really does seem like ironic nirvana. That’s a quality “White Noise” could have used more of.  

Reviewed at Dolby 88, Aug. 19, 2022. Running time: 136 mins.

• Production: A Netflix release of an NBGG Pictures, Heyday Films production, in association with A24. Producers: Noah Baumbach, David Heyman, Uri Singer. Executive producers: Brian Bell, Leslie Converse.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Noah Baumbach. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman.
• With: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Niviola, Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin, Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott, Lars Eidinger, Francis Jue, Barbara Sukowa.

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Noah Baumbach's 'White Noise' adaptation is brave, even if not entirely successful

John Powers

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise. Wilson Webb/Netflix hide caption

Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy appear in Noah Baumbach's White Noise.

These are frustrating days for ambitious American filmmakers. Critics and older filmgoers bemoan that our screens offer little more than blockbuster franchises and cheap horror pictures. Yet when directors try to make something different and daring, they usually get thumped if they don't completely succeed.

Take the new Netflix film White Noise , the latest film from Noah Baumbach, best known for movies like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story . The movie is adapted from Don DeLillo 's 1985 novel, a cool, dazzling book shot through with so many shifting ironies that virtually every reviewer has described it as unfilmable.

Well, Baumbach has filmed it, and though I can't call his adaptation a triumph, a lot of the reviews strike me as being ungenerous to a brave attempt. White Noise is bursting with fun things to watch. And though the story takes place in the 1980s, it tackles present day preoccupations: human-caused disaster, media saturation, drug addiction and consumerism.

Director Noah Baumbach tackles misinformation in 'White Noise,' wryly

A deglamorized Adam Driver stars as Jack Gladney, a professor in the popular department of Hitler Studies, a program he invented not because he admires der Führer but because Hitler is a strong brand in the intellectual marketplace.

Jack lives in a cozy college town, along with his slightly dippy fourth wife, Babette — played by Greta Gerwig with big, bouncy curls — and their kids from assorted marriages. Whether the Gladneys are all having breakfast or driving in their station wagon, their scenes crackle with the sometimes inane, sometimes pointed texture of family crosstalk.

Their story unfolds in three very different chapters, all tinged with satire. The first part lays out the Gladney's life. In the second, disaster-film chapter, a calamitous train wreck menaces their town with a so-called "airborne toxic event," whose foreboding black cloud forces them to flee to a camp for evacuees. Once that gets sorted out, the noirish third chapter tells the story of Babette's use of a mysterious drug called Dylar and the violence it engenders.

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Gerwig, baumbach poke at post-college pangs.

While this may make White Noise sound dauntingly dark, its default tone is actually jaunty, if ironically so. Baumbach creates scenes that recall popular TV shows like The Simpsons and Stranger Things , and in Don Cheadle 's character, a professor named Murray, you get an upbeat version of a Greek chorus who sounds happy as a clam no matter what he's discussing. In a great scene set in a classroom, Murray talks about the death of Elvis Presley , and, as in an academic battle of the bands, Jack tries to top him with the fall of Hitler.

Although Baumbach has a real gift for domestic realism, he's always been drawn to the audacity of the French New Wave. He loves its formal iconoclasm and juxtaposition of tones, from the lyrical to the intellectual to the silly. He attempts such a tonal collage here, and I regret to say, that his White Noise doesn't hold together as well as DeLillo's.

In fact, watching White Noise reminds me a bit of watching the work of the New Wave's greatest genius, Jean-Luc Godard , who was, as it happens, a huge influence on DeLillo. Godard's movies always tended to shuffle brilliant scenes with sections that leave you weak with boredom. You get the same unevenness here, but Baumbach is less intimidating than Godard or DeLillo, neither of whom ever worried about making the audience happy. Baumbach keeps White Noise on the lighter, less political side of the ledger, as in the joyous supermarket finale that's miles from DeLillo's trademark sense of paranoia and dread.

Laced with good jokes, the movie brims with terrific moments, be it Murray's magnificent riff on Hollywood car crashes — which he sees as an expression of American optimism — or the sly sequence at the evacuee camp that seems to come from a missing movie by Baumbach's friend and collaborator, Wes Anderson .

Early on, Jack and Babette have a talk in which each admits that they hope they die before the other. It's partly funny, partly not. And it underscores White Noise 's obsession with death, the fear of dying, and especially the countless ways we fend off that fear — by turning catastrophes into media spectacles, by reducing the genocidal Hitler to a kind of pop icon, by smoothing ourselves out with dodgy drugs and by pretending that the disasters we see on TV could never hit us. And, if all else fails, the movie assures us, we can always go shopping.

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‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel is a campus comedy, a domestic drama and an allegory of contemporary American life.

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By A.O. Scott

Late in “White Noise,” after the ecological disaster known as the “airborne toxic event,” on the heels of a professional triumph, and in the throes of marital woe, Jack and Babette engage in a discussion of religion with an acerbic German nun. Instead of piety, she offers a pragmatic, borderline cynical view of how faith operates. If she and her colleagues “did not pretend to believe these things,” she says — referring to “old beliefs” in stuff like heaven and hell — “the world would collapse.”

The nun, played by the formidable Barbara Sukowa, has been carefully airlifted from the pages of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel into Noah Baumbach’s new film. So have Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who head up a rambunctious blended family in a Midwestern college town. Jack, known in academia by the decorative initials J.A.K., is the founder of the college’s department of Hitler Studies. Babette teaches life skills to the elderly and infirm.

Back to Sister Hermann Marie: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else in the world takes seriously,” she says. This may or may not be true of nuns, but it can often feel glumly applicable to writers and filmmakers, especially those who try to chart an independent course. Somebody has to care about art and literature. With respect to DeLillo, Baumbach is very much a believer. His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book. Very little has been added, and what’s been taken out will be missed only by fanatics. (A warning and maybe a spoiler for DeLillo-heads: The most photographed barn in America is nowhere to be seen.)

The challenges inherent in the project are bravely faced and honorably met. The novel straddles domestic realism and speculative satire. It’s a campus comedy stapled to a family drama and tied up with a ribbon of allegory. Its contemporary topics — no less relevant now than in the ’80s — include intellectual fashion, pharmacological folly, environmental destruction and rampant consumerism. These collide with eternal themes: envy, love, the fear of death.

Baumbach’s reverence for the material is evident from the trompe l’oeil opening sequence — footage of car crashes from old movies, accompanying a lecture by a professor of popular culture — through the end credits, which turn DeLillo’s vision of supermarket heaven into a bouncy LCD Soundsystem music video. Driver, paunchy and swaybacked, is the very model of a modern middle-aged professor, his intellectual curiosity muffled by a certain complacency. He’s a happy man whose vocation is horror.

In the campus lunchroom, he sits in on bull sessions with colleagues, inhaling gusts of competitive explanation. The movie’s dialogue, compulsively true to DeLillo, bristles with explanations and random facts. Except for the toddler, the kids in the Gladney household — Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and his daughter, Steffie (May Nivola); Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) — bounce around the kitchen like human Google results pages, asking out-of-left-field questions and citing semi-relevant data. Jack and his pal Murray (Don Cheadle), the car-crash scholar looking to expand his academic portfolio, are more inclined to hermeneutics. In one of Baumbach’s bravura set pieces, they improvise a classroom duet for an audience of rapt undergraduates, comparing and contrasting mother-love and the death drive in Hitler and Elvis.

What they have to say sounds pretty dubious — Murray and Jack broadcast the kind of mock-profundity more common among students than faculty — and the question is to what extent that’s deliberate. “White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest.

The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability. The wounds and salves of family life, in particular the abrasions of matrimony, are Baumbach’s specialty. Jack and Babette’s particular marriage story, which comes into focus in the final third of the movie and is tied up with a noirish pharmaceutical subplot, is the heart of “White Noise” — rawer and sweeter than the surrounding material. Driver and Gerwig give warmth and texture to characters who were, in DeLillo’s pages, a little abstract. Their function was largely to organize the novel’s ideas.

The status of those ideas is the biggest problem with Baumbach’s film. He is perhaps too dutiful in transcribing DeLillo’s vision of contemporary life, a landscape of material comfort and intellectual dread, dominated by brand names, untrustworthy information and the looming threat of destruction.

Random insights, like Murray’s observation that the family is the origin of misinformation, are preserved as if they were museum pieces in a carefully curated historical exhibit. Making “White Noise” a period film — the uncannily precise ’80s environment is the work of Jess Gonchor, the production designer, and Ann Roth, who did the costumes — inevitably blunts its impact. Things that might have made readers squirm in the 1980s are shrouded in nostalgia in 2022. It’s hard to feel existential terror when you’re ogling the A.&P. supermarket, the landline phones, the printed classified ads and the boat-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons.

Within this world, you can see premonitions of our own, most notably in an evacuation shelter where anxious people create in effect an IRL prototype of Twitter, gathering around unverified experts (including Jack’s son, Heinrich) and parroting their wisdom. Baumbach, working on a larger scale than he has before, pulls off a few fine cinematic coups, one of them involving that station wagon fording a swollen stream.

But there is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. “White Noise” is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.

White Noise Rated R. The fear of death. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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‘White Noise’: Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig’s American Nightmare

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

What exactly is Noah Baumbach up to in White Noise ? The movie, which received a very limited theatrical release ahead of premiering December 30 on Netflix , is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s canonical postmodern novel from 1985. It’s been an intriguing prospect since it was announced because the celebrated writer/director would, at face value, seem to be a mismatch for the material. Baumbach’s milieu has tended to belong less to the eerily affected, consumerist crisis-world of DeLillo’s book than to the world of people who’d feel an obligation to have read that book. White Noise makes more sense as a book you can expect to see on Baumbach characters’ shelves.

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Like Marriage Story , White Noise stars Adam Driver . He plays Professor Jack Gladney, a scholar of Nazi Studies who cannot speak German. (He’s working on it.) He is, among other things, a man with Hitler on the mind, sharing with that monster a penchant for public performance, for taking his audience to church, in his own way. The robe, the Dr. Strangelove glasses: he’s as much an actor as a scholar. He’s also a family man. His wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), is a bubbly woman with a bubbly name, crinkle-curled half to death, with enough smarts to keep up with Jack and enough of a handle on reality to seem comparatively normal. Babette has been having memory problems. The Gladneys’ too-clever quartet of kids have noticed Babette sneaking off to take a mysterious drug named Dylar (evoking the synthetic material Mylar) that may either be the solution or the cause of those problems — it’s hard to say. They make for a funny little family unit, the Gladneys, living well in a professor’s house, in a college town, volleying back and forth through concerns both hyper-rational and completely normal, living lives flooded with brand-name products that Baumbach’s 35mm anamorphic frames take care to arrange, notice and announce as loudly and often as possible.

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Baumbach wiggles his way into that tension by rendering White Noise into a mashup of popular American Eighties styles, both high and low: the popcorny ensemble adventure, the sitcom, the Reagan-era adult prestige drama. He’s faithful enough to the shape and feel of those styles for us to notice not only when he moves between them, but for us to recognize that we, too, are a step removed from reality. We aren’t watching a simple, nostalgic tribute to the Eighties. We’re watching a movie that’s just off-center enough, just willing enough to announce itself as an approximation, that the era feels like a distant but easily consumed media memory. Even the disastrous toxic cloud that confronts this family feels referential. It’s sort of beautiful: astonishingly gloomy, a roiling gray mess with pink-purple shocks of lightning stuttering through it. We’re watching a movie called White Noise . But that cloud is straight out of Ghostbusters . 

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Baumbach overreaches in White Noise . The movie is unsuccessful because its various energies eventually begin to feel mismeasured. Even a captivating monologue-confession by Gerwig, which anchors the dreary latter half of the movie, can’t quite push the project out of its sudden snooziness, a long spell where the kinetic sense of talk gets purposefully tamped down. There are ideas in the movie’s most spectacular failures, nevertheless. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. But the movie is always doing something — even if it isn’t always onto something. 

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White Noise

Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of h... Read all Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world.

• Noah Baumbach
• Don DeLillo
• Adam Driver
• Greta Gerwig
• Don Cheadle
• 466 User reviews
• 205 Critic reviews
• 66 Metascore
• 3 wins & 24 nominations

• College on the Hill
• (as Wickham Bermingham)

• (as Matthew Williams)

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• Trivia This is Noah Baumbach 's first time writing and directing a book-to-screen adaptation, and only his second adaptation after co-writing the screenplay for Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) .
• Goofs In the opening scene, many vehicles featured in Murray's crash sequence reel are from the 1990s and 2000s, whereas White Noise takes place in the 1980s.

Jack : But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope.

• Crazy credits There is a scene at the end where the characters dance in a supermarket. As the credits start to roll, this sequence is played partially in reverse as the music continues to play normally.
• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: This Movie Saved My Life (and the one's that almost ruined it): Best and Worst of 2022 (2023)
• Soundtracks Lincoln Portrait Written by Aaron Copland

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• loganschainker
• Dec 30, 2022
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• December 30, 2022 (United States)
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• Wellington, Ohio, USA (Storefronts are built out and set up for July filming)
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• $145,000,000 (estimated)

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• Runtime 2 hours 16 minutes

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Review: ‘White Noise’ puts a loud, brash and enjoyable spin on a Don DeLillo classic

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“White Noise,” Noah Baumbach’s jittery and inventive adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, begins with what you might call a love letter to cinema. We’ve had a lot of those recently , but this one — a college lecture on car crashes in American movies — is appreciably sharper, funnier and more specific than most. As his students watch a montage of fiery vehicular explosions, professor Murray Jay Siskind (a wonderful Don Cheadle) implores them to look past the violence and see the spirit of optimism and enterprise pulsing underneath: “There’s a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges,” he marvels. “The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery, head-on.”

Baumbach, a specialist in complicated human passions, appears to have taken the professor’s enthusiasm to heart. Before long, he’ll stage his own elemental pileup: An oil tanker truck T-bones a freight train, sending its chemical cargo flying every which way and igniting a conflagration that belches deadly black smoke into the sky. There’s nothing optimistic about what happens next, but the moment of collision is executed with undeniable gusto; Baumbach does, for a moment, seem like the proverbial kid playing with a big honkin’ train set. Here and elsewhere in “White Noise,” he happily applies himself to the upgrading of tools and skills, and to the meeting of the formidable, some would say foolhardy, challenge before him.

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DeLillo’s novel — bursting with theories both prescient and otherwise about consumerism, addiction, environmental decay, (mis)information overload and the universal if also uniquely American fear of death — has long been deemed unfilmable, as novels of ideas are reflexively assumed to be. In this case, there’s not only the danger of mishandling the author’s satirical targets or the icy precision of his latex-glove sentences, but also the risk of approximating them too closely, of locking them away in a remote, often fondly nostalgized ’80s moment and draining them of their corrosive, unsettling power.

Baumbach does not quite surmount this obstacle; an eerie climax and one pretty good jump scare aside, the terror here belongs more to the characters and their era than it does to us and ours. But his affection for the novel produces its own warm, countervailing energy. Excessive reverence has killed many a well-meaning adaptation, but this “White Noise,” at once wildly mercurial and fastidiously controlled, somehow winds up triumphing over its own death. It’s too full of life — and also too funny, unruly, mischievous and disarmingly sweet — to really do otherwise.

Here, in the domestically contented but existentially paranoid flesh, are Jack Gladney (Adam Driver, paunchy) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig, curly), raising four kids, three from past marriages, in a college town whose heart is its campus and whose soul is its supermarket. Lol Crawley’s grainy-textured widescreen images (shot on 35-millimeter anamorphic film) steer us through the messy living spaces and immaculate grocery aisles of a postmodern “Brady Bunch,” where boxes of Tide and cans of Coca-Cola gleam out at us with an almost otherworldly sheen. (Jess Gonchor’s production design nails the ’80s vibe and branding perfectly.)

We also spend some time with Jack’s professor colleagues (they include a curt Jodie Turner-Smith and a delightful André Benjamin) as they hold intellectual court, never more mesmerizingly than when Jack and Murray deliver a dual lecture comparing and contrasting the early lives of Hitler and Elvis. Jack is one of the country’s leading professors of Hitler studies, which makes his limited grasp of German his most embarrassing secret, at least initially. (Here it may be worth noting the presence of at least two marvelous German actors, Lars Eidinger and the veteran Barbara Sukowa, both perfectly cast in crucial roles.)

Babette, who teaches posture classes for the elderly, is hiding her own deep, dark secret, namely the pills she keeps popping when she thinks no one’s looking. But except for their adorable toddler, Wilder (played by Dean and Henry Moore), their kids notice everything and delight in challenging parental authority, especially Babette’s stubborn, concerned daughter Denise (a terrific Raffey Cassidy) and Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), a fount of pessimistic data who’s the first one to notice that deadly black cloud headed their way.

Until that point, “White Noise” has found a pleasurable sweet spot between the Baumbachian and the DeLillo-esque. Much of the tetchy, disorienting domestic banter, with its volleys of data and non-sequitur factoids, comes straight from the novel, even as the disorienting screwball rhythms (the editing is by Matthew Hannam) and the overlapping lines of dialogue hark back to the director’s earlier comedies like “The Meyerowitz Stories” and “Mistress America.” But once its famous “airborne toxic event” is set in motion and the entire town is forced to evacuate, the movie, like Danny Elfman’s wondrously nimble score, kicks into overdrive. Soon Jack, Babette and the kids are on the run in their station wagon, with death looming in the rearview mirror and some vintage Spielberg riffs on the road ahead.

The pitch-perfect mimicry of ’80s action-thriller clichés — just count how many garbage cans get knocked over by cars screeching in reverse — is something only a contemporary retooling of a retro story could have pulled off. That knowing playfulness is part of the movie’s charm; so is the spectacle of Baumbach, a master of intimate, small-scaled comedy, embracing the conventions of the big-budget apocalyptic thriller, complete with lethal lightning storms, an unexpected river cruise and endless, chaotic traffic jams.

But Baumbach doesn’t stop there. He may faithfully adhere to the novel’s three-act structure (the rhythm of its many short, self-contained chapters proves more elusive), but his shrewdest and most suitably postmodern gesture is to offer up a highly elastic palimpsest of allusions, genres and styles. Primarily a domestic-romantic drama and a satire of academia before it becomes a full-blown disaster epic, “White Noise” also morphs, in its climactic stretch, into a seedy motel-room noir, a Monty Python sketch and, supremely, an LCD Soundsystem dance musical. (Don’t skip the closing credits.)

This stylistic verve can sometimes feel liberating, an inspired rejoinder to the clinical perfection of DeLillo’s prose. And sometimes it can feel like too much, to the point of becoming absorbed and lost within the story’s white-noise barrage: the marketing slogans, the academic bull sessions, the pointless government directives when all hell breaks loose. Maybe that’s the point. For DeLillo purists and scholars, surely the movie’s least forgiving audience, Baumbach’s attempts at narrative compression will seem especially glaring. He has streamlined the book’s cast — gone is Babette’s gun-supplying dad — and trimmed or removed some of its choicest aphorisms. In trying to both preserve and open up a much-canonized text, he sometimes falls into an all-too-familiar adaptive compromise.

Some of Jack’s mordant first-person insights on the page have been reassigned to other characters on the screen, a shift for which Driver’s performance compensates to no small degree. He’s entirely believable as the outwardly impressive but inwardly insecure academic, desperate to maintain a sunny outlook even under fast-darkening skies. Jack may be the most ridiculous of the glaringly imperfect spouses Driver has played recently (in “Annette” and “Marriage Story”), and also the most redeemable. Gerwig is no less movingly misguided as Babette, who — like her husband, but through more extreme measures — tries to sublimate fears, both rational and irrational, of impending doom.

“We are fragile characters surrounded by hostile facts,” Babette notes, tweaking without materially changing a sentiment from the novel. The absurdity of these characters is inseparable from their pathos, and the director’s obvious affection for them, and for his two lead actors, makes them more affecting still. The warmth of feeling that suffuses the movie’s final moments may not be the most faithful salute to DeLillo, but it is very much the point of this “White Noise.”

‘White Noise’

In English and German with English subtitles Rated: R, for brief violence and language Running time: 2 hours, 16 minutes Playing: Landmark’s Nuart Theatre, West Los Angeles, and Bay Theater, Pacific Palisades; starts streaming Dec. 30 on Netflix

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‘white noise’ review: adam driver and noah baumbach take a bold stab but don delillo’s novel still seems unfilmable.

Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle also star in Netflix's Venice opener, an absurdist apocalyptic vision of one family grappling with the specter of disaster and death in a world spinning off its axis.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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That perception doesn’t change a lot with this valiant Netflix adaptation. It feels like the streaming service was so high on the deserved critical acclaim for Baumbach’s Marriage Story that they gave him carte blanche and a mountain of cash to make his passion project, a property that had defeated more than one filmmaker in development hell before him.

This is Baumbach’s third feature for Netflix, and its greatest strength recalls the first of those, The Meyerowitz Stories — the affectionate observation of a rambunctious family who tend to talk all at once, often at cross-purposes.

Here it’s the blended family of Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) and his wife Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), each of them on their fourth marriage and raising the children of previous unions — Jack’s analytically inclined teenage son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and sensitive younger daughter Steffie (May Nivola); and Babette’s hard-nosed 11-year-old Denise (Raffey Cassidy), vigilantly monitoring her mother’s neurotic behavior; as well as the 6-year-old son they had together, Wilder (played by twins Henry and Dean Moore).

A gaggle of caustically opinionated professors — including characters played by Jodie Turner-Smith, André L. Benjamin and New York theater director Sam Gold — provides texture. The most substantially fleshed out of them is Murray Sisskind (a wonderful intellectual caricature from Don Cheadle ), who teaches a course in pop-cultural iconography that, right off the bat, will make you want to enroll.

Murray opens the film with a class on the car crash in Hollywood movies, rhapsodizing about the “secular optimism and self-celebration” delivered in big-screen auto collisions, each one more spectacular than the last. He enthuses over footage of mangled metal and flaming wreckage, admiring a carefree, lighthearted quality that foreign movies could never approach. One of the standout set-pieces of this enjoyable early section is an impromptu joint lecture in which Jack lends his campus rock-star mystique to Murray’s class as they parallel the lives of two mythic figures, Hitler and Elvis Presley, respectively.  

At home, Jack and Babette both fret about being the first to die, left to face the abyss alone. Death is a hot topic in the ramshackle house, with the kids rushing to the TV to watch news coverage of a plane crash.

So far so good. It’s when Baumbach’s script shifts from wry situational observation into more concrete plot incident that the material starts showing its age and the literary roots become more cumbersome.

There are fun touches, like science geek Heinrich gaining social confidence as he regales the crowd of evacuees at a camp with his detailed insights. But the film overall becomes steadily less involving — and more grating in its quirks — as it explores both the ecological and emotional fallout of the chemical spill.

The focus starts to seem pulled in too many directions, including the proliferation of conspiracy theories; the family’s concern over secretive Babette’s memory lapses due to an experimental anxiety drug called Dylar; the role of a shadow figure known as Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger); and Murray planting the idea in Jack’s head that perhaps he can overcome his own fear of death by taking someone else’s life.

The power of violence and terror to reunite families in troubled times still seems a ripe notion for satire, as does the American dependence on pharmaceuticals for comfort and the long reach of eco-messes in our lives. But the movie’s manic machinations become less, not more, connected to any tangible contemporary reality, making it play like a period piece trapped in amber. Even rollicking sequences like Jack and brood speeding away from danger in the family station wagon, temporarily set adrift on a river, don’t build much comic momentum.

As the pilot for all this mayhem, Driver certainly commits; he makes amusing use of his outsize physical presence by swooping around the College-on-the-Hill campus wearing his academic gown like a vampire’s cape.

Gerwig, sporting a mop of tight curls that Murray describes as “important hair,” fades away much like her character, who spends stretches of the movie staring out a window in sweats, lost in numbed anxiety. The kids remain more captivating, with Sam and May Nivola (the children of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer) making lively impressions, while Cassidy is an appealingly bossy presence, in many ways the most responsible figure in the house.

“We are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts,” says Murray late in the action, articulating a thesis about learning to shut out that world, however temporarily, that coheres only intermittently in the film. More apropos is Jack’s comment near the start: “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can.” Only in the closing supermarket dance explosion does that exhortation become truly infectious. Despite the movie’s inconsistency, at least it sends you out on a high.

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White Noise review: Noah Baumbach wrestles with a brilliant, impossible novel

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig go deep into a 1980s fever dream in the director's intriguing but uneven adaptation.

Postmodernism is a hell of a drug. In the opening chapter of Don Delillo's classic 1985 novel White Noise , a college professor named Jack Gladney relays the ordinary details of his world: a wife, four children, the daily campus grind. He speaks of station wagons and airport Marriotts, corduroyed coworkers and trips to the grocery store. And yet nearly every line wriggles with surreal comedy, panicky and elastic and preposterously alive. For several decades, various Hollywood luminaries tried and failed to take it on; Noah Baumbach is the first to succeed, and his adaptation, which had its North American premiere last night at the New York Film Festival before it lands on Netflix this December, feels like a film made with deep respect and affection for its source material. But it also seems, in nearly every scene, like he's dancing about architecture, trying to wrest something from the strange magic of those pages that refuses to be translated to the screen.

It helps that he has two of his favorite collaborators to help carry the load: Adam Driver , whom he's now worked with five times, is the garrulous, Buddha-bellied Jack, and Greta Gerwig , another regular coconspirator and also Baumbach's partner in life, is Jack's wife Babette, a suburban goddess in a blonde spiral perm. It's the fourth marriage for them both and soft middle-age is settling in, though they're still almost unfailingly hot for each other in and out of the bedroom. There are also three children from previous unions — imperious teen Denise (Raffey Cassidy), along with Heinrich and Steffie (real siblings Sam and May Nivola) — and one small product of their own, a beaming cherub named Wilder. Life in the Gladney house carries on in a state of messy domestic bliss, tempered with the usual petty irritations and complaints, until the day a highly flammable tankard collides with a train outside of town, and a noxious black plume appears on the horizon.

Soon the plume has been upgraded to something officials are calling an Airborne Toxic Event, though semantics don't really explain what that means for all the distraught humans on the ground. Ordered to evacuate, they set out for temporary shelter, one more freaked-out family in a tangle of standstill traffic and hazmat tents. But what are the little white pills that Babette keeps surreptitiously popping, insisting it's just air or cherry LifeSavers when she's pressed? If you're familiar with the book, you may have some recall of what follows, though Noise is hardly linear in any traditional sense of plot or pacing.

Baumbach lays out numerous setpieces — at the college where Jack teaches Hitler Studies; in the stacked, gleaming aisles of the local A&P; even an unscheduled car ride down a river — with high auteur style, steeped in the shiny consumerism and thrumming low-grade paranoia of peak-'80s America. He draws great, zesty performances from his supporting cast, including Don Cheadle as a garrulous fellow professor, and the German actress Barbara Sukowa as an ornery apostate nun. (Nobody casts extras like him, too; they have faces ). Driver brings something both salty and haunted to Jack, and Gerwig feels like a beating heart, alive to every sunburst and storm cloud of her emotional weather.

But they all have to reckon with dialogue whose satirical fizz and deadpan rhythms don't often translate to anything resembling real life, and a book whose brilliance stubbornly resists any other medium but itself. Compared to the tender groundedness of Baumbach's finest films, like The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story , the scampering leaps and feints of his script here come off as deliberately arch, even artificial. The movie's final scene, though, without spoiling too much, is also easily its best: a bravura grocery-store dance sequence anachronistically soundtracked by the Brooklyn art-pop band LCD Soundsystem that recalls everything from Jacques Demy's French New Wave classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg to the 2003 Japanese marvel The Blind Swordsman . It's nothing like the ending of the novel, and maybe that's why it's so good: a moment of pure unfettered inspiration, joyful in its own noise. Grade: B–

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The Mind-Boggling Grandeur of White Noise

The film is sharply funny, eerily timely, and loaded with movie stars. So why is this blockbuster-size event falling flat?

Only now, in this moment in Hollywood, would an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s award-winning novel White Noise by the indie darling Noah Baumbach be funded like a blockbuster. After all, the film isn’t going to make any real money—even though it’s been playing in a few theaters for more than a month, it had its wide release yesterday on Netflix. But for years, the streamer has financed many a master filmmaker’s risky passion project. Hence the giant scale of Baumbach’s vision: DeLillo’s droll satire of ’80s existential ennui has the expansiveness of a twinkly Spielbergian adventure.

Baumbach has made two of the best movies of his career for Netflix, and the cast he’s assembled here—including Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle—is top-notch. Given all of this, plus the fact that his source material is a near-canonical piece of literature, one might figure White Noise for an awards juggernaut, or at least a solid contender. Instead, White Noise debuted at this year’s fancy film festivals to mostly tepid reviews . It’s arriving online rather quietly, as an end-of-year oddity rather than an instant magnum opus.

White Noise is without a doubt a carefully made movie that tries gamely to give flesh to the unsettling spirit of DeLillo’s work, which many have deemed “ unadaptable ” over the years. I think that label is a little overstated, and Baumbach apparently does, too, because he’s imposed a fairly clear three-act structure and given the film a soaring score by Danny Elfman that crosses eerie synths with Aaron Copland–esque grandeur. The adaptation takes the tale of a 1980s family dealing with the aftermath of a local chemical accident and gives it the vibe of a classic Amblin movie. Of course, that dissonance is part of the novel’s parody, too, and maybe why White Noise feels so confounding—though not unrewarding—to watch.

Read: ‘That’s just like White Noise .’

DeLillo’s story takes stock of the hyper-capitalism of mid-’80s America. It deconstructs the bucolic lives of the successful academic Jack Gladney (played by Driver in the film) and his wife, Babette (Gerwig). Unable to enjoy the suburban splendor around them, they fixate on their fears of death and vain attempts at self-improvement. Baumbach does his best to infuse his film with mundane dread, but for the viewer, existential horror can be easily confused with a lack of energy.

Still, White Noise ’s first act is filled with the kind of snappy, overlapping dialogue Baumbach excels at. Jack fends off the sarcastic children in his blended family, works to learn German to lend legitimacy to his post as a professor of “Hitler studies,” and assists his fellow academic Murray Siskind (Cheadle), who’s attempting to launch a similar department centered on Elvis Presley. In one virtuoso sequence, Jack and Murray deliver simultaneous Hitler and Elvis lectures to the same rapt audience, trading back and forth on two very different 20th-century personality cults. Baumbach’s visual fluidity, and his camera’s awed dance around the lecture hall, is a joy to behold, given that he’s tended to work on a smaller scale.

That sequence crosscuts with a train accident that releases a deadly cloud of chemicals into the atmosphere—the catastrophic “airborne toxic event” that makes all of Jack and Babette’s fears of mortality suddenly feel much more urgent. Here, the film comes alive beyond its knowing satire; Baumbach wisely makes the ensuing terror a massive, nearly hour-long set piece—by far his loftiest thrill ride yet. The Gladney family watches the news with mounting concern, and then eventually hits the road along with everyone else in town. After getting caught in a miserably long traffic jam, they proceed to a quarantine center, where every directive from the government is as baffling as it is hopelessly mismanaged. It’s funny and surprisingly unnerving stuff.

The film also manages to feel contemporary without ever dropping the throwback aesthetic. Baumbach knows he’s making this movie for an audience that has suffered its own airborne toxic event, and he brings out little panicked details that ring uncomfortably true. Jack’s initial efforts to downplay the size of the disaster, both to reassure his children and himself, are heartbreakingly relatable. Though much of the ensuing drama pokes fun at Jack’s absurd efforts to be the family’s protective alpha male, Driver is terrific at conveying the joke without entirely losing his character to it.

White Noise ’s final act, in which the Gladneys try to return to their normal lives, is the toughest knot to untangle. For its challenging conclusion, the book intentionally goes inward, delving further into Jack and Babette’s insecurities. Baumbach, however, can’t switch from the film’s exaggerated tone to something more personal. The last showdown is loaded with sentiment but still painfully arch, which is probably why the film should be remembered simply as a curiosity—a fascinating adaptation that cannot overcome the scathing ridicule built into its source material. In this potentially waning age of prestige projects underwritten by Netflix, I certainly understand why Baumbach leapt to the challenge of making White Noise . Unfortunately, a graceful ending eluded him.

White Noise Review

02 Dec 2022

White Noise (2022)

Across three decades and around a dozen directorial efforts, we have come to know what A Noah Baumbach Film is. We might expect some lo-fi Millennial Manhattanite angst ( Frances Ha ,  Mistress America ); perhaps a Sundance-friendly approach to middle-age male malaise ( Greenberg ,  While We’re Young ); or a deeply honest probing of relationships and family ( Marriage Story ,  The Meyerowitz Stories ).  White Noise , the filmmaker’s latest, has all of the above laced into it, full of his usual panache and intellectual rigour, but it feels deeply unusual for what we think of as A Noah Baumbach Film: this is an apocalyptic sci-fi spectacular, offering action set-pieces, dead bodies racking up, a sweeping Hollywood score from Danny Elfman — and a jarringly wacky post-credits dance sequence. It is an odd beast.

Adapted by Baumbach quite faithfully from the novel by Don DeLillo, it finds new meaning in the author’s ponderings on mortality and Cold War paranoia, given our current global anxieties — but it adopts a heightened take on the book’s ’80s setting, allowing for big hair and pastel, retro fashions. The film’s opening establishes its curious, arch sense of humour: Adam Driver is the rock-star professor of ‘Hitler Studies’ at the fictional ‘College-On-The-Hill’, quietly embarrassed at not yet being able to speak German. Together with Babette ( Greta Gerwig , a delight to see in front of the camera again after six years away), the couple raise a gently chaotic family of high-achieving children from across each other’s marriages. There are also oddball bit-parts from the likes of Don Cheadle , Jodie Turner-Smith and André Benjamin as fellow professors.

You’ll need to hold on tight, when the film morphs from a quirky family drama into doom-mongering dystopia.

It takes a little getting used to. Baumbach is no stranger to mannered speaking but the dialogue here feels like a particularly specific stylistic choice — deliberately unnaturalistic line-readings that could have come from a Yorgos Lanthimos film. Add some flashes of Wes Anderson (a former Baumbach collaborator) in its absurdities and flights of fancy, and it may require some calibration to its freaky frequency.

You’ll need to hold on tight, too, when the film morphs from a quirky family drama into doom-mongering dystopia. While it’s hard not to read a pandemic allegory into it — lines like, “I want to know how scared I should be!” feel plucked from the spring of 2020 — Baumbach seems keen to summon an overarching fear of mortality in all forms. Both Jack and Babette speak constantly of death, and openly hope that the other will die first.

Does it all cohere? Almost. Even if they sometimes feel catapulted in from another film, the action sequences are actually very well shot, and if you can get your head around the tone, it can be slyly funny. It’s really only in the third act, with a murder-conspiracy subplot, that the film starts to feel a bit too sprawling and messy. But it at least leaves things on a high, with that dance sequence, set to an LCD Soundsystem banger — satire you can groove to.

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White Noise review – Don DeLillo adaptation is a blackly comic blast

DeLillo’s novel of campus larks and eco dread has long been ogled by Hollywood. Now it gets an elegant, droll treatment from Noah Baumbach, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig

N oah Baumbach’s terrifically stylish movie, adapted by him from the 1985 novel by Don DeLillo, is a deadpan comedy of catastrophisation, a meditation on western prosperity and its discontents, its anxieties, its intellectual satiety. It’s a sensuous apocalyptic reverie founded on the assumption that nothing can really go wrong – or can it? Could it be that our preoccupations with ecological disaster are not played out in the service of rational pre-emptive measures, but irrational occult fears, supernatural inoculations against death?

DeLillo’s garrulous and witty novel of ideas has been hungered after by film-makers for nearly 40 years (Emma Cline even wrote a short story called White Noise in 2020 about Harvey Weinstein hoping to reclaim respectability by making a DeLillo movie.) Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

His film amplifies not merely the book’s richness as a period piece which speaks of the trendy zeitgeistiness of postmodernism on the American campus, but how prescient it is about the fears of the present day. The horror of the American suburban heartland in the face of the poisonous chemical cloud floating overhead - the “airborne toxic event” – feels like an address to Covid and the lockdown, and making uneasy, normalising accommodations with this pandemic.

And it is about an obsession with the growing ubiquity of information and interpretation, the availability of data that show one thing and apparently equally valid data that show the opposite. This is the white noise of ersatz fact: the fizz of bad television reception in which conspiracy and fake news takes root: a particulate formless blur. When I first read the novel I thought of the thing we used to as kids: place your face very close to the TV screen while a programme was on to see nothing but the tiny pixels.

Adam Driver plays a midwestern academic in the liberal arts called Jack Gladney, middle-aged and given what I thought was a fake pot belly but in one scene in his doctor’s treatment room he has his shirt off, revealing a paunch. Greta Gerwig plays Babette, his amiable distracted wife – both divorcees, they preside over a lively household of annoyingly precocious children and stepchildren.

Jack is America’s leading light in the world of the strangely preposterous discipline of Hitler Studies (Gladney speaks no German) an ahistorical technique of deconstructing the iconography of Hitler without being overwhelmed by or even necessarily aware of the tragic and horrendous context. Among its other premonitions, the story foresees the “end of history” briefly and modishly celebrated in the west with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Jack’s colleague Murray Siskind (drolly played by Don Cheadle) is hoping to do for Elvis what Jack has done with Hitler and a big set piece has the two men delivering an ingenious (and flippant and insouciantly provocative) analysis of Elvis and Hitler at the same time. Slavoj Žižek has nothing on these guys.

Jack and Babette are content in an uneasy way, dramatised by time-honoured movie visits to the dreamy, affectless giant supermarket which is incidentally the site of a gloriously choreographed closing credit sequence. But Jack has worries. Babette has symptoms of what appear to be early onset dementia: she also seems to be addicted to a mysterious drug called Dylar, empty bottles of which appear in the trash. Without Google, Jack and his children have no choice but to ask academic colleagues and comb medical textbooks to find out what on earth “Dylar” is and what its dangers are. (In a similarly pre-YouTube state, the kids are obsessed with plane crash footage on the TV news, waiting impatiently for it to be shown.)

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And then the great crash happens – an environmental disaster caused by a Jack Daniel’s-swigging truck driver transporting oceans of gasoline crashing into a train transporting volatile toxic waste. (We have already seen Murray giving an amusing lecture on how the car crash in American cinema is an essentially light-hearted genre.) The resulting poison cloud causes them to leave their homes, an exodus involving a wonderfully surreal scene in which the station wagon drifts down a swollen river.

This bizarre freak occurrence that nonetheless exposes Jack to airborne toxins, which he discovers from maddeningly unreliable sources may well kill him in a couple of decades. True or not, this claim has been a way for Jack to realise he is going to die. And Babette too is afraid of her own death. Death is the film’s stratum of seriousness beneath the campus crisis and marital comedy – death is the one inescapable real thing among all the rumour and surmise: the film shows the characters simultaneously afraid of death but holding to it as the single guarantee of certainty in their lives.

Jack and Babette’s bizarre lives – a knight’s-move away from reality – are too strange to be sympathised with, for all the Spielbergian family chatter in the kitchen. But they are there to be to marvelled at. It is such a fascinating, invigorating spectacle.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
• Noah Baumbach
• Don DeLillo
• Adam Driver
• Venice film festival
• Greta Gerwig
• Venice film festival 2022

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White noise, common sense media reviewers.

Ambitious but uneven drama has guns, crashes, more.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply,

Characters mostly just blunder through their days,

Main characters are a heteronormative White family

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex

Infrequent dialogue includes uses of "f--k," "s--t

Many brands shown throughout, especially in superm

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some…

Positive Messages

Touches on many themes, although none very deeply, including climate change, consumerism, quality of education, drug use/dependence, and mortality.

Positive Role Models

Characters mostly just blunder through their days, making mistakes, making unwise choices, occasionally making it through.

Diverse Representations

Main characters are a heteronormative White family. Some professors at the main character's college are Black, including a Black woman chemist. At least two Black characters, while certainly secondary, have personality and agency.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and shooting. Characters are shot, with blood spurts and bloody wounds. Bleeding victim dragged on carpet and loaded into car. Huge crash: Delivery truck smashes into train. Car chase, with pedestrians struck. Various car crashes. More images of car crashes from various films/shows. Creepy dream sequences include a scary figure, characters smothered in bedsheets, plucking flesh from face, etc. Scary, creeping, toxic cloud. Characters pushing and shoving. A drop of raw meat spatters on a person's face at a butcher counter.

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

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Dialogue describing an affair. Kissing. Strong sex-related dialogue. Pornographic novels shown. Sex workers shown. Crude drawing of naked woman, very briefly seen in trash.

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

Infrequent dialogue includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "piss," "crotch," "dumb."

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

Products & Purchases

Many brands shown throughout, especially in supermarket scenes (some specifically from the 1980s): Coca-Cola, Pepsi, KFC, Velveeta, Glass Plus, Pringles, Carefree gum, Sunny Delight, Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Sprite, Jack Daniels, Shell gas station, Yoo-hoo, Brillo pads, Doritos, Ritz crackers, etc. Radio ad for Eggo waffles.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Truck driver who appears drunk crashes truck while reaching for bottle of Jack Daniels. Character appears to be addicted to fictitious pill "Dylar." Frequent cigarette smoking.

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

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that White Noise is a drama adapted from Don DeLillo's 1985 acclaimed (and deemed "unfilmable") novel. It tackles many serious themes -- including climate change, consumerism, drug use, and more -- and is presented in a highly artificial style. Violence includes guns and shooting, some blood, and lots of vehicle crashes. There's also creepy, dream-like imagery and a threatening toxic cloud. Characters exchange sex-related dialogue, and there's kissing and a collection of pornographic novels. Infrequent language includes a few uses of "f--k," "s--t," and "piss." Characters smoke cigarettes, one appears to have a dependency on a fictitious pill, and a truck driver seems drunk, reaching for a bottle of Jack Daniels while driving. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

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What's the Story?

In WHITE NOISE, it's the 1980s, and Jack Gladney ( Adam Driver ) is a professor of Hitler studies, while his wife, Babette ( Greta Gerwig ), leads exercise classes for seniors. They're both on their fourth marriages and have amassed several children between them. Their lives are chaotic but happy, especially when they visit their town's massive, shiny new supermarket. Then, after a delivery truck crashes into a train and releases an "airborne toxic event," the family must evacuate, leading to a series of hectic adventures, as well as Jack's possible exposure to the deadly stuff. Returning home, Jack tries to get to the bottom of Babette's sporadic memory loss, which may be linked to the mysterious pills she's been taking on the sly.

Is It Any Good?

A far cry from Noah Baumbach 's usual talky character pieces, this adaptation of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel is big, ambitious, bizarre, wildly uneven, sporadically funny, and weirdly worth seeing. Those familiar with the book (which was long considered "unfilmable") may have a leg up on others, especially since White Noise features long stretches of blocky chunks of artificial-sounding dialogue that careen up against one another, creating a cacophonous soundscape. But it also starts with a lecture by Murray Siskind ( Don Cheadle ) about the beauty of car crashes that's flat-out hilarious. (In one scene, the movie pays film-nerd homage to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week End , with its famous tracking shot full of stalled, ruined traffic.)

White Noise bounces back and forth between dialogue-heavy scenes -- including a verbose back-and-forth lecture comparing Hitler to Elvis -- and FX-laden sequences like a huge train wreck and a car chase scene. It seems to want to say a great deal, from the futility of the education system to the ridiculousness of consumerism and our overreliance on medication, but nothing hits very hard; nothing hits home. And Baumbach tries like crazy to be a "visual" director here, with poetic camera moves and pinwheeling shots around a room. But every so often, some odd combination of things feels just right, whether it be a sublime exchange between characters or a satisfying cut between shots. However, nothing is as totally wonderful as the end credits sequence: a musical number in a supermarket, with pastel colors popping and Andre 3000 from OutKast shimmying with a box of cookies. That alone is worth seeing twice.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about White Noise 's depiction of smoking and drug use . Are they glamorized? What are the consequences? Why is that important?

What role does violence play in the story?

What does the movie have to say about consumerism ? What do you think the filmmakers intended by showing so many brand-name products on-screen?

How does the movie address climate change? Could the toxic event have been prevented? Did the characters learn from it?

How does the movie differ from the novel, if you've read it? How is it similar? How is this story from the 1980s still relevant today?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 25, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : December 30, 2022
• Cast : Adam Driver , Greta Gerwig , Don Cheadle
• Director : Noah Baumbach
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Netflix
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : brief violence and language
• Last updated : March 9, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming

White Noise

• Comedy , Horror , Satire

Content Caution

In Theaters

• Adam Driver as Prof. Jack Gladney; Greta Gerwig as Babette Gladney; Raffey Cassidy as Denise; André Benjamin as Elliot Lasher; Jodie Turner-Smith as Winnie Richards; Don Cheadle as Prof. Murray Siskind; Lars Eidinger as Arlo Shell; Sam Nivola as Heinrich; May Nivola as Steffie

Home Release Date

• December 30, 2022
• Noah Baumbach

Distributor

Movie review.

Ah, life is good. A shame we all have to leave it eventually.

So feels Jack Gladney, whose own life seems in tip-top shape.

He’s a well-respected professor at College on the Hill, a dynamic liberal arts school that draws some of the best, richest, kids that Ohio has to offer in 1984. Why, his Hitler Studies program is among the school’s most popular. No one knows more about the notorious German Fuhrer than good ol’ Jack.

Life at home might be even better. His fourth wife, Babette, seems like a real keeper. And their house full of kids (a mishmash of offspring from previous marriages) keeps things perpetually interesting.

But all is not as well as it seems. Denise, Babette’s teen daughter, has noticed that Mom has turned disturbingly forgetful. She takes showers even when her hair’s still wet from the last one. She sometimes forgets the names of the kids.

Denise suspects that it might be a side effect of the drug Babette is taking on the sly: not Babette’s blood-pressure pills, or the stress pills, or the energy pills, mind you, the pills that pretty much everyone takes. No, this pill, Dylar , is different. And even though Denise’s favorite book is a thick tome on medication, she hasn’t found a single mention of Dylar anywhere in it. “And it has four indexes,” she tells Jack.

When Denise tells Jack about her suspicions, Jack admits that this secret drug use is … concerning. But everyone has their little secrets, he reasons. He’ll talk with her about it. Eventually.

But soon—quite soon—he, Babette and the whole Gladney family will have far more pressing matters to deal with. Somewhere, out on a nearby road, a truck filled with flammable liquid is barreling toward a train filled with toxic chemicals.

Life is indeed good for the Gladneys. They’ve been on cruising speed for a while. But their family—indeed, the whole community—is about to hit some serious turbulence.

[ Note: Spoilers are contained in the sections below .]

Positive Elements

White Noise is an absurdist, satirical comedy—not the sort of film where positives and negatives can be filtered through the same funnel as they would be in, say, a superhero flick. The movie’s own excesses and ridiculous turns are designed to point to society’s own absurdities. Its intention is to turn our eyes inward, at ourselves and at our culture, and help us see (through comedy) where we might just be acting a little silly. And on that level, it scores some points. But if you’re looking for a hero to pull someone out of a burning building or something, this ain’t that sort of flick.

That said, Jack and Babette do truly love and care about each other. They care about their four collective kids, too. Jack risks life and limb, for instance, to rescue his young daughter’s favorite stuffed bunny from a human stampede. And Babette tries to stop/rescue Jack when he makes a really terrible decision.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Jack and Babette likely save a man’s life, rushing him to the hospital after he’s been shot. Admittedly, they were to blame for the shooting, but still. It’s nice they tried to make up for their mistakes.

Spiritual Elements

Denise tells her dad that the Dylar isn’t the only secret that Babette’s been keeping: She has a whole bunch of books on the occult that she’s hidden in the attic. Later, in an emergency shelter, Babette reads a story from the Weekly World News (a wildly sensationalist supermarket tabloid that was at its zenith in the 1980s). The story is about an institution that has used “hypnosis to induce hundreds of people to recall their previous life experiences as pyramid builders, exchange students and extraterrestrials.” We hear several mentions of UFOs and aliens elsewhere. Jack tells a class that Hitler’s mother died in front of a Christmas tree.

A man speculates that déjà vu is truly a premonition of the future: “Maybe when we die our first thought will be, ‘I know this feeling. I’ve been here before,’” says Murray Siskind, Jack’s friend and fellow professor. We see what appear to be some spectral visitations or premonitions. Babette admits to seeing a “holy Sikh man” in a neighboring city, and we see a devil-like looking face on a totem pole.

Near the end of the movie, Babette, Jack and another man rush to a hospital-like care facility located in a church. (The building is adorned outside with a neon cross, and the sanctuary inside is filled with hospital beds and nuns running hither and dither.) A painting of a Pope hanging out with John F. Kennedy in heaven hangs on a wall, and Babette asks if that reflects the current concept of heaven for the Catholic church. The nun is incensed: It’s beneath her to talk about heaven or angels or what she would characterize as any other religious tchotchke.

“Do you want to know what I believe?” she asks. “Or what I pretend to believe?”

She argues that it’s important to keep up a façade of belief, because if belief were to vanish entirely, the human race would also ultimately vanish. “If we didn’t pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse. … Hell is when no one believes.” She then exhorts that in these changing times, people should learn to believe in one another.

Sexual Content

We see Jack and Babette engaged in foreplay of sorts. Jack plucks an erotic novel from the bottom of one of their drawers and prepares to read. Babette insists that it not include phrases such as a man “entering” a woman. “We’re not lobbies or elevators,” she says. (This thread of conversation returns later in the movie.) Later, the two lounge, fully clothed, in bed and talk about which one would be more bereft if the other died before hand.

This is the fourth marriage for both Jack and Babette. Murray, Jack’s professorial friend, may have a bit of a crush on Babette, talking about her amazing hair and allowing his gaze to rest longer on her than it perhaps strictly should.

A man is seen in an open shirt and boxers; in one scene, those boxers are partly pulled down, and we see a glimpse of pubic hair (though the context makes the image far from titillating). Jack also is shown in a doctor’s office with an open shirt. We hear some discussion about whether a crowd of people will turn “orgiastic” and sexually promiscuous. (One apparently does; we see a shirtless man halfway in a tent trying to put his tie on.) Newspaper ads feature women in bikinis.

[ Spoiler Warning ] We learn that, in order to get her mysterious drug, Babette has been sleeping with a man representing himself as a pharmaceutical exec. (The affair went on for several months, apparently, with Babette wearing a ski mask to the rendezvous point and during sex to hide her shame and to keep her from kissing the guy.) We see glimpses of the beginnings those interludes (or Jack’s imaginings of such interludes) in the reflection of old TV screens: Everyone’s clothed, though, and nothing more is shown than Babette slowly crawling across a bed.

Violent Content

At the outset of the film, we see Murray leading a college lecture on the art of cinematic car crashes. He argues that such crashes are actually a manifestation of a “wonderful, brimming spirit of innocence and fun.” For several minutes, we see a litany of these movie crashes—most of which involve some sort of flipping or falling or exploding.

“Look past the violence, I say!” Murray exhorts his students. And while this exhortation is meant to be taken as a joke by the people watching this film, White Noise plays on the fascination we have for violence and how it can often serve as a diversion for our own deepest fears.

A truck collides with a train, derailing most of the latter and surely killing, at the very least, the truck driver. The whole mess of truck-and-train cars explodes, sending a cloud of allegedly poisonous gas into the air. When people are told to evacuate, the panic results in more carnage. A car careens into a vehicle-clogged road, flips in the air and lands on several autos: Bloodied victims sit or lie beside the wreckage, with one person stretching out her bloodied hand to retrieve a phone.

People are jostled and knocked down during a stampede, and Jack has to comically dodge loads of vehicles and motorcycles racing without direction through that same stampede. (One man is not so lucky: He’s hit by a car and smashes against the windshield, though the low-speed collision doesn’t appear to have been fatal.)

The cloud of poisonous gas is said to cause a multitude of symptoms (which officials change and amend regularly), but most think that it’s definitely bad for you. When someone reports that he was exposed to the gas for two-and-a-half minutes, he’s told that it’s definitely serious. How serious? “We’ll know more in 15 years,” the “expert” tells the victim. The stuff stays toxic for 30 years, so if the victim’s still alive in half that time, they’ll be able to tell him more authoritatively what it’s doing to him.

That same expert is wearing an armband indicating that he’s taking part in a simulation—and that he and his fellow emergency workers are using this very real event as “practice” for an upcoming simulation. When asked how it’s going, the expert laments that the bodies aren’t quite laid out as they would be in an actual simulation, but “you have to make allowances for the fact that everything you see tonight is real.”

On a news program, we see a plane crash into the ground several times. (When Jack suggests that his children turn their attention to something else, they angrily tell him no.) Later, Jack and his professorial friends talk about the universal appeal of crash footage. We hear that a professor dies in a surfing accident.

We hear lots of talk about death and its nature. Someone seems to lose a bit of skin on her cheek.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Someone shoots another character else twice in the gut, then puts the gun in the hand of the victim, whom the shooter presumes is dead. He’s not: He pulls the trigger and shoots the shooter and a woman standing behind him (via ricochet). We see blood as a part of all three wounds.

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word, three s-words and a variety of other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “crap” and “p-ss.” God’s name is misused once.

Drug and Alcohol Content

We see someone smoke a cigarette and someone else light up a small cigarillo. We learn that Babette used to smoke.

There’s some suggestion that Babette and pert near everyone else is taking plenty of prescription medication to solve various woes, but the most important drug we hear about is Dylar. It’s purpose is unknown throughout most of the movie, but it’s clear that Babette is taking it and she is lying about it.

Later, we see a man who claims to eat the pills “like candy,” but given the state of his person and his motel room, it doesn’t seem like it’s done him any favors.

Other Negative Elements

We’re told many of the symptoms that the toxic black cloud supposedly causes. At one point it’s said to cause vomiting before the experts on the radio take it back. When Denise runs out of dining room to throw up, her brother, Heinrich, mocks her for experiencing “outdated symptoms.”

Someone apparently defecates in front of another guy. (He sits on the toilet and reaches for some toilet paper, though we don’t really see or hear anything else.) Professors talk wistfully about their experiences urinating in sinks. One claims that he’s urinated in sinks “across North America.” Another asks if anyone’s experienced the thrill of a partner peeling off their sunburned skin. One says yes—adding that the partner was topless and it was one of the two or three greatest experiences he’s ever had.

Characters lie and mislead. We hear that Californians, having invented the concept of lifestyle , deserve whatever they have coming to them. We’re told that “family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” and indeed many lies or false comforts are told in Jack and Babette’s family.

Most of the characters in White Noise —and, of course, the movie itself—are preoccupied with death. Someone wonders whether death is itself simply a horrible, ongoing silence. We can infer that the movie’s title is really about all the metaphorical whistling we do in the dark.

Crowds are said to distract us from death, because at least there we won’t die alone. Supermarkets are filled with colorful diversions—things we can buy and eat that might make us feel less existential dread for a time. The movie suggests that faith itself is a diversion—something that will allow us to believe that death isn’t the end instead of the gaping abyss of nothingness that the movie imagines it to be.

White Noise is based on Don DeLillo’s much-praised, much-studied novel of the same name—a book so inscrutable that even the film’s publicity reminds us that it was thought to be “unfilmable.” Director Noah Baumbach dealt with the book’s prickly nature by keeping (in the makers’ estimation) the most important insight from DeLillo’s work: “its depiction of modern life as a series of newfangled distractions and defenses against the eternal, primitive fear of death,” according to a publicity essay by Dennis Lim.

For Christians—at least for those who truly believe, and don’t just to pretend to believe, as the movie’s nuns bluntly put it—that leaves White Noise with little appeal. Whatever existential dread we may sometimes feel is leavened by the knowledge that we do not die, but through Christ have eternal life. “O death, where is your victory?” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:55. “O death, where is your sting?”

Death stings the unbelievers in White Noise, and the movie’s content might sting its viewers. Admittedly, the film’s issues don’t seem to warrant the R-rating, but those issues are still significant enough. We hear some foul language, including the f-word. We see violence and blood. Sex is a big part of the plot.

But perhaps White Noise’ s biggest issue is a more subtle one—the backhanded compliment it pays to faith. Belief is important , it says. Even if there’s nothing really to believe in , it adds. 

And as such, I believe this film warrants all sorts of caution. White Noise is just more noise (as it itself might even admit)—sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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White Noise Reviews

White Noise asks viewers to accept Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) as cold, hard fact, and then proceeds to spin a fantasy yarn that flubs its own narrative constraints.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 15, 2023

A lazy, muddled snooze that happily tenders pure fantasy to those with an endless curiosity about the hereafter.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Sep 21, 2020

Sadly, there are a hundred possible scenarios that might have made more sense than the gobbledygook plot White Noise ends up presenting...

Full Review | Feb 28, 2020

Koel Purie has a nice blithe presence. Unfortunately, White Noise does not prove to be an adequate stage for her.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 8, 2019

Dumb would-be thriller -- save your money.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 29, 2010

This is one big missed opportunity.

Full Review | Apr 29, 2009

A messy cheesecake of supernatural horror without scaring the pants off its audience, nor making any real sense.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2008

Something evil this way comes without much nerve-jangling fanfare (most of the screams came from the soundtrack rather than the audience) or conviction (portal schmortal).

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 7, 2008

Is the movie scary? Only if this is your first scary movie.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jul 23, 2007

The paranormal phenomenon surely has its millions of converts, but White Noise is so silly, it just may turn many into non-believers.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2007

Though I'm well disposed toward elliptical spook stories that depend on the audience's imagination for their jolts and effects, it takes art as well as craft to put them across, and Geoffrey Sax's direction of a Niall Johnson script has neither.

Full Review | Feb 28, 2007

White noise is intended to help you fall asleep. White Noise would never let you do that, though. It's far too interested in a cacophony of cheap scares.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2007

Some of its filmic devices seem a little hokey for a movie that is apparently trying to persuade us that EVP is a real phenomenon.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 17, 2006

White Noise is little more than an old-fashioned ghost story with a newfangled twist.

Full Review | Oct 6, 2006

The only problem is that there's just not that much of a reason to sit up and check out what all of the noise is about.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2006

The soundtrack and crackling static, contorting into mysterious moans, create a chilling mood, but the characters are so thin.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

A dopey, totally disposable grade B thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

...quickly devolves into ludicrous plotting and cheap shock effects.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/10 | Aug 4, 2005

White Noise is a lifeless affair that strives to take our money while aggravating and annoying us, a niche already filled by the Rainforest Café.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 28, 2005

An effective ad campaign for a colossal mess.

Full Review | Original Score: D- | Jun 16, 2005

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Jamie bacon & pradeep khadka starring in himalayas-set sci-fi ‘eklo’ from british-nepalese filmmaker pradeep shahi, breaking news.

‘Megalopolis’: What The Critics Are Saying

By Andreas Wiseman

Andreas Wiseman

Executive Editor, International & Strategy

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After months of speculation, the critical book has finally been opened on Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis . The early word? Predominantly positive, with some very high highs and inevitably a few low lows.

Below, we run through some of the first reactions.

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He continued: “Halfway through, there’s a  very  audacious gimmick that tears down the fourth wall in ways younger filmmakers can only dream of. Coppola breaks many of the cardinal rules of filmmaking in the film’s 138 minutes but it upholds the most important one: it is never, ever boring, and it will inspire just as many artists as the audiences it will alienate.”

RELATED: ‘Megalopolis’ Debuts At Cannes With 7-Minute Standing Ovation

In a positive notice, Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri dissected the film’s “absolute madness” and called it the “craziest movie I have ever seen”: “There is nothing in  Megalopolis  that feels like something out of a “normal” movie. It has its own logic and cadence and vernacular. The characters speak in archaic phrases and words, mixing shards of Shakespeare, Ovid, and at one point straight-up Latin. Some characters speak in rhyme, others just in high-minded prose that feels like maybe it should be in verse.”

Indiewire’s David Ehrlich said on X: “The silliness is a feature, not a bug! a garish, epic, & utterly singular $120 million self-portrait that’s also a fable about the fall of ancient Rome & a plea to save our civilization (and its cinema) from itself. big fan.”

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Rolling Stone ‘s David Fear called the film “truly epic”: “So long as there are people who love movies that are actually about things, and think about the past 6,000 years of human civilization, there is an audience for this.”

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David Jenkins of Little White Lies was also in the pro camp, posting to X: “Desole haters… Megalopolis rules.”

The UK’s Daily Telegraph gave the movie four stars, saying, “Coppola’s latest is like Succession crossed with Batman Forever and a lava lamp…Aubrey Plaza is fantastic in this full-body sensory bath movie which follows a struggle for power among the elites of New Rome.”

Not everyone was as glowing. The Guardian gave the film only two stars, saying: “Coppola’s passion project is megabloated and megaboring.”

RELATED: Aubrey Plaza Says Francis Coppola “Doesn’t Need My Defense”, Reveals The “Collaboration And Experimentation” Of ‘Megalopolis’

Vanity Fair ‘s Richard Lawson echoed that theme, with the brand noting in its headline: “Francis Ford Coppola’s  Megalopolis  Is a Passion Project Gone Horribly Wrong”, before continuing, “Maybe some cinephiles will see value in the  Godfather  director’s long-gestating epic. Many more, though, will be left scratching their heads.”

Tim Grierson of Screen Daily went further, saying on X: “It pains me to say that Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis is a disaster.”

RELATED: ‘Megalopolis’ Imax Global Release Will Be Limited; Release Date Contingent On U.S. Distribution But Late September Eyed For IMAX In 20 US Cities; Coppola Live Event Planned – Cannes

The official logline for the film reads: “ Megalopolis  is a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined Modern America. The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a genius artist who seeks to leap into a utopian, idealistic future, and his opposition, Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests, and partisan warfare. Torn between them is socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel), the mayor’s daughter, whose love for Cesar has divided her loyalties, forcing her to discover what she truly believes humanity deserves.”

As we revealed earlier this week , the movie recently scored distribution deals in key European territories. Speculation is rife about what will happen to the film in the U.S. Interestingly, the international deals are for theatrical rights only and TV and VOD rights have been held back by Coppola’s team, potentially paving the way for a global streamer-type deal down the line. 

After tonight, what’s clear is the movie has a number of prominent critical supporters, perhaps more so than anticipated. Could Coppola make history by becoming the first director ever to win three Palme d’Ors? That doesn’t seem such a remote possibility right now.

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This Is CineMMA, ‘Bruised’: Does Halle Berry deliver the best MMA fight scene ever?

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Halle Berry kicks ass!

On the latest episode of This is CineMMA, the MMA Fighting movie review crew walk the long road back to redemption with the 2020 drama Bruised , written, directed, and starring Berry. The Academy Award-winning actress plays Jackie Justice, a one-time UFC star who gets a second chance to kickstart her cage-fighting career when she gets the offer to fight an Invicta FC champion, played by Valentina Shevchenko . But will Justice’s traumatic past derail her ambitions?

In our second crack at reviewing a female-led MMA drama ( shout-out to Fight Valley !), Alexander K. Lee, Jed Meshew, and E. Casey Leydon pay respect to Berry and Shevchenko’s incredible work, while also pointing out what the film gets right and what it gets wrong about the world of fighting.

Is Berry vs. Shevchenko one of the best fight scenes ever? How much trauma can one character take? And what did they do with Invicta FC boss Shannon Knapp in this movie?

Mend your wounds and spend some time with us for the answers to these questions and more.

New episodes of the This is CineMMA show come out weekly and are available to watch on YouTube , and in podcast form on Apple Podcasts , Google Podcasts , Spotify , Stitcher , or wherever else you find your favorite podcasts. This week’s episode can be heard below.

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Columbia president gets no-confidence vote after calling in police.

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TOPSHOT - NYPD officers face protesters after detaining demonstrators and clearing an encampment set ... [+] up by pro-Palestinian students and protesters on the campus of New York University (NYU) to protest the Israel-Hamas war, in New York on April 22, 2024. Universities have become the focus of intense cultural debate in the United States since the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel's overwhelming military response to it. (Photo by Alex Kent / AFP) (Photo by ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty Images)

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was called to testify in Congress about the ongoing campus protests over the war in Gaza. The former presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, resigned following their testimony to Congress. In response to a question from Elise Stefanik, they declined to say directly that calls for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ codes of conduct, instead giving a nuanced response to the question. President Shafik was determined not to suffer the same fate. She released a nearly 1400-word press release to the Wall Street Journal prior to her appearance entitled “What I Plan to Tell Congress Tomorrow”.

She was going to be firm, resolute and definitive. She promised that one visiting professor “will never work at Columbia again,” threatened to remove another from a leadership position, and described normally undisclosed disciplinary action. “I promise you,” she stated’ “ from the messages I’m hearing from students, they are getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences,”

House Speaker Michael Johnson then appeared on the Columbia campus. In front of a mass of microphones as he faced the Columbia Quad, he exhorted Shafik to take action. “I am here today, joining my colleagues and calling on President Shafik to resign if she cannot immediately bring order to this chaos,” he stated. Robert Kraft, a Columbia alumnus and owner of the New England Patriots, stated to CNN Business that “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff, and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.”

It is said within the higher education community that when the Ivy League sneezes, the rest of the college world gets a cold. When Dartmouth, Yale and Brown started requiring admissions testing again, it gave the green light to other colleges to follow their lead. The day after her testimony, the college put out an announcement stating that “the encampment raises serious safety concerns, disrupts campus life, and has created a tense and at times hostile environment for many members of our community. It is essential that we move forward with a plan to dismantle it.” A few hours later, Shafik called in the police to clear the demonstration.

“Calling in police enforcement on nonviolent demonstrations of young students on campus is an escalatory, reckless, and dangerous act,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “It represents a heinous failure of leadership that puts people’s lives at risk. I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The Columbia faculty later concurred with their no-confidence resolution.

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“Columbia’s move to send in police so quickly after these demonstrations began chills student expression, marks a significant departure from past practice, and raises questions about the university’s disparate treatment of students based on their views.” agreed the NYCLU.

Over the coming weeks, police were called in to clear encampments at over 50 colleges , per a New York Times interactive. Those included Penn, MIT, the University of Arizona, and UCLA. Others took a different approach. At Brown, Northwestern a a few other campuses, encampments were removed or allowed to remain after negotiations were successful with the administrations.

The University of Denver allowed the encampment to continue, but ensured that only the colleges’ students were participating. “Our goal is to verify, through checking IDs, that the individuals within the encampment are DU students, as is required by the University,” the school announced in a statement . “We reminded the students of their responsibility to follow policy for the safety and well-being of all students participating in the encampment and across the University.” At Michigan State, the college president visited the encampment and stated the students could stay as long applied for a permit, which they did.

The No Confidence statement passed by 65% of the faculty who voted, noted that Shafik calling the police to clear the protestors was an unnecessary escalation of tensions:

“President Shafik also violated the fundamental obligations of shared governance when she ignored the opinions of the faculty and students on the Senate Executive Committee who unanimously rejected her request to summon armed New York City police onto our campus. President Shafik falsely claimed that the students who were arrested for protesting on April 18 posed a ‘clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the University,’ when in fact they ‘were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say in a peaceful manner,’ according to the NYP Chief of Patrol John Chell. Her actions have endangered these students’ welfare, and her draconian and disproportionate punishments have endangered their futures.”

Sometimes being a tough leader is knowing when to NOT take an action. It is a lesson Shafik may learn by losing her job.

*The Columbia University President’s Office was contacted for a response and no response has been received yet.

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