![]() ![]() That restraint shows in the lead performance from Caleb Landry Jones, who won the 2021 Cannes Best Actor prize for his multilayered representation of Bryant’s awkwardness and anger. This portrait of Australian mass shooter Martin Bryant never uses his name, instead calling its main character “Nitram” and “the lone gunman.” But every major story beat in Nitram is pulled from reporting about Bryant’s life, and narrativized here with sparsity and starkness. What turns men toward brutality is a question with endless explanations, and Nitram, Kurzel’s latest (which opened in theaters on March 30 and is now available for streaming on AMC+), might be the purest, most unsettling embodiment of his curiosity yet. ![]() ![]() Kurzel’s films are, with the exclusion of Assassin’s Creed, visually gorgeous and emotionally discontent explorations of the myth of masculinity and how it becomes a slow-spreading poison. Violence is its own form of language, and filmmaker Justin Kurzel has been speaking, interrogating, and analyzing it for the past decade: in his 2011 breakout Snowtown, through the otherworldly beauty of his 2015 Macbeth adaptation, and with 2019’s toxic-masculinity-subverting True History of the Kelly Gang.
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