Jake Kring-Schreifels

Even with a dense backdrop and textured surroundings, Union County sits on the shoulders of Cody, and the movie succeeds largely because of Poulter’s still, shy performance as a young man quietly reckoning with life on the ropes.

It’s inspiring to watch. Isseks provided the tools and the idea, but the students took the cause to new heights, a symptom of their strong feelings about the governmental negligence occurring in their backyards.

The younger Day-Lewis has crafted something haunting and exquisite, a slow-burning, two-handed meditation about grief, regret, and the kind of absence that irreparably fractures a family. Mostly, though, it supplies the elder Day-Lewis a chance to flex his dormant muscles, most prominently with a couple of monologues—one humorous and scatological in nature, the other reflective, darker, and more vulnerable—that sneak up on you in overwhelming ways.

Greengrass doesn’t have you squirming in your seat because he’s manufacturing drama but because he knows when to cut, when to slow down, when to fire on all cylinders. This sounds like a science, but it’s actually an art.

In a satire like this, the laughs start heavy, but Early’s best trick is ending this journey in an earnest, emotionally authentic place. He’s not playing a punchline so much as a humorous, painful truth.

Murphy keeps Steve on the tracks. Among his great gifts is an ability to convey feelings while internally processing information.

It runs pretty thin pretty quickly, a monotonous circle of arguing, indecision, concerned looks, and anxiety that stalls out the whimsy and momentum and all unique aesthetic possibilities of Freyne’s under-explored setting.

Quiet and heartbreaking, if not slightly conventional, Omaha unfolds like a slow-burning mystery.

As the movie’s romantic arc unfolds, everything just feels a little too goofy and distracted, considering the earnest monologue that Fayruz gives near the end that questions why so many young men and women are dying for causes they don’t understand.

Sweeney––who, in addition to acting and directing, wrote the script––has no trouble with lubrication, layering genres atop each other in a way that’s plausible and cohesive. He’s got an acute feel for how to deploy humor and grief into the same space, especially as more backstory unwinds and the movie’s heightened stakes infiltrate the perception of his characters.